Owners of Apple Mac devices simply aren't buying new hardware as quickly as they used to. 

Number crunchers at Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) said in a report that, as of March 2024, 68 percent of Mac owners had a device older than two years. Four years ago that number was just 59 percent.

"The trend toward holding devices for a longer time is slow and steady," CIRP's Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz wrote in the report. 

The pair attributed the slowdown in Mac purchases to many of the same reasons the smartphone market has seen a dip in new device purchases of late: Upgrades have become incremental and unexciting, hardware is lasting longer and compute power upgrades don't matter to most people. 

"As computer users rely more on streaming and web-based apps and programs, the traditional motivation for computer upgrades has waned," Levin and Lowitz said. "For most personal computer owners, their current computer has adequate storage and fast enough processing speed."

And let's not forget that ever-larger price tags haven't helped in the handset market, and probably aren't helping the PC and Mac sector, either.

AI Macbooks to the rescue? 

The PC market has been on a decline for several years now - pretty much since the COVID-19 pandemic caused a one-time spike in sales due to so many people shifting to work from home. 

That's not to say the market isn't recovering, with PC sales recently recording three consecutive quarters of growth after that years-long slump. The reason for the recovery, aside from the fact that all the computers bought during the pandemic are more than four years old at this point, is being laid at the feet of the AI and its entrance into the PC market - at least according to PC makers. 

So, with the AI PC era beginning, will Apple users similarly upgrade their devices? CIRP isn't so sure that'll be the case. 

When asked whether Mac owners who make heavy use of their machine's hardware - such as video editors or some developers - may buck the lengthening upgrade cycle trend, Levin told The Register that CIRP doesn't have granular enough data to determine if such users are upgrading earlier. 

"Those intense users would be a small percentage of the Apple user base, so analyzing their upgrade pattern would be tricky," Levin told us in an emailed statement.

As for whether Apple's own "Apple Intelligence" AI integrations set to appear in the next few generations will similarly shrink the upgrade cycle for Apple in the ways PC manufacturers have predicted, that's not clear either. 

"Although it's way too early for us to have consumer survey data, we can't see how it would shorten upgrade cycles any more or less than other software developments did," Levin predicted, reiterating "Mac users that need more powerful processors to handle AI would upgrade sooner, but these represent a relatively small percentage of overall Mac users." 

Even those users might not buoy Mac sales, says Canalys analyst Kieren Jessop, because the newest Macs are already equipped with chips that'll support AI workloads. 

"Canalys defines an AI PC as a laptop, desktop, or workstation that has what is generically called an NPU [Neural Processing Unit]," Jessop told us in an emailed statement. "This includes every Apple Silicon Mac as it has the Apple Neural Engine." 

Apple stopped selling Macs that don't have Apple Silicon in them in 2023, when it ended production of Intel-powered Mac Pros. So in other words, even those interested in making use of Apple's upcoming AI integrations probably won't need to upgrade, and Apple knows this, Jessop said. 

"Apple is already adapting to longer upgrade cycles. The growth of their Services business in the last several years shows this as they capitalize on a large installed base, and is now over one-fifth of the company's total revenue," Jessop noted. 

Mac sales as a percentage of Apple's revenue, on the other hand, have steadily declined since 2000, when the machines accounted for 86.2 percent of Apple's revenue. 

Last year Macs accounted for just 7.7 percent of Apple's revenue, according to Statista. Whether Apple will continue devoting resources to improving that portion of its business, especially if AI-capable Macs are already in large circulation, is anyone's guess. We asked Apple, but haven't heard back. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/11/mac_upgrade_not_happening/