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There were several fascinating numbers that came from Apple’s most recent earnings call.
For starters, $123.9bn in revenue from just one quarter’s worth of business is utterly bonkers. But it isn’t the number that piqued my interest.
I was far more interested in the Mac sales figure for the final quarter of 2021, which clocked in at $10.85bn – an increase of 25% over the previous year.
But if you dig deeper, that number gets really interesting.
The laptop league tables
New research from Strategy Analytics reveals the current standing for the world’s biggest laptop manufacturers.
During 2021, Lenovo shipped 63.4m laptops – more than any of their competitors. In second place was HP with 59m shipments, followed at some distance by Dell with 45.7m.
Apple sits in a lowly fourth place when it comes to total notebooks sold last year. Selling less than half of Lenovo’s impressive total, Tim Cook’s company appears to be continuing its trend of being the only person at a posh dinner party wearing Nike trainers.
They’re the odd one out. The ’crazy one’. The one who puts margin and design before anything even remotely resembling bulk discounting.
Only, that isn’t quite true.
Look again at those numbers, and you spot how important the growth figures are. That’s where the real story is told.
For all Lenovo’s epic shipment figures, it suffered the joint second lowest year-on-year growth of all manufacturers. And with HP biting at its heals when it comes to global laptop market share, it’s clear that things perhaps aren’t quite so rosy at the top of the table.
Things get far worse if we look at the numbers for Q4 2021. During that three month period, Lenovo, HP, and Acer all experienced negative growth (which is business speak for ‘the line on the graph is pointing downwards’).
By comparison, Apple’s MacBook sales growth was the second largest during 2021, coming in at 26%. That trails just behind Dell, which finished the year at the top of the growth charts with an increase of 29% year-on-year.
In fact, it was only Dell and Apple that experienced any form of growth in the notebook space during Q4 of last year (at 14% and 11%, respectively). Every other manufacturer declined.
Dell has some interesting products in the works (including a spooky Touch Bar era MacBook Pro lookalike), but Apple is clearly charging ahead at quite a pace.
Which MacBook is driving sales?
Analysts believe that the strong performance of laptop sales throughout 2021 remains largely a consequence of new hybrid and remote working strategies.
That makes total sense, but when it comes to the MacBook, I think the growth has been further fuelled by two specific events.
The first was the introduction of the M1 chip in 2020. It completely transformed what was fast becoming a confused product line, and one that was hampered by a never-ending battle between minimalist design aspirations and Intel’s thermal constraints.
The second was the rebirth of the MacBook Pro last October. That was huge for Apple, and while its sales figures aren’t broken down by product variant, it’s safe to assume that a huge portion of that $10.85bn sales figure from late last year will consist of beefed-up 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
Remember – a lot of people were waiting for those new machines to finally arrive.
Throw in what I would expect to be an equally impressive shipment figure for MacBook Airs, and it’s no wonder that Apple is fast filling every square inch of Dell’s wing mirror.
Where Apple needs to capitalise
You’d be hard-pressed to want anything more from the MacBook Pro at the moment. It’s more than powerful enough for most people, has all the ports we need, and there’s no longer any reason to moan about the presence of the Touch Bar or absence of MagSafe.
But there’s one area in which Apple can capitalise on this growth and, potentially, ease ahead of Dell in the laptop growth stakes.
The MacBook Air is due a refresh. And as much as I maintain that buying one now isn’t a stupid idea, there are many people waiting for the new version.
I know that, because I receive emails and comments every single day from people who have made the decision to wait. None of us know when it’ll arrive (rumours point to a Spring event, but I remain unconvinced), but it’s enough of an emotive purchase for most people to hold firm and await its arrival.
When that even more powerful, colourful, and entirely redesigned MacBook Air hits the shelves this year, you can bet your bottom dollar that every other laptop manufacturer will call an emergency board meeting. That computer has the potential to light yet another afterburner beneath Apple’s notebook sales.
I have a feeling the laptop league table for 2022 is going to look rather different to last year’s.
3 Comments
I think it would be interesting to know what Apples numbers would have looked like if there were not supply chain constraints. I’m sure their astronomical numbers would have been even higher and they would have sold significantly more Macs, etc.
I agree, Mike – it’s amazing they’ve achieved this in the current climate.
Be interesting to see you try out a Dell Laptop, Mark, if you haven’t already in your Windows experiments.