An analyst round-up by Philip Elmer-DeWitt shows clear expectations of the fourth quarterly year-on-year decline in a row of Mac sales. Most of the estimates are very strongly clustered around the 5M mark, with the average suggesting a 10.79% fall from last year’s 5.7M to 5.1M this year.
The sales estimates among the 19 analysts surveyed ranged from 4.65M at the low end to 5.8M at the top end – but it’s notable that just two companies are predicting sales growth …
While Mac sales have been falling for a full year now, they have so far been falling less than the PC sector as a whole. If the consensus view is correct, that will definitely not be the case this quarter (calendar Q3, Apple fiscal Q4).
There is, though, good reason for particularly poor sales this quarter: we’re of course all waiting impatiently for all-new MacBook Pro models to be announced on Thursday, with refreshes to MacBook Air and iMac lines too. The real test for Apple will be its fiscal Q1 2017 numbers, which will reflect sales of the shiny new devices.
We won’t have long to wait for the actual sales numbers: Apple will be announcing them tomorrow.
As for those new Macs, we’re expecting to see the MacBook Pro get an OLED touch panel, Touch ID power button, USB-C, Skylake CPUs and the option of an AMD Polaris GPU. Externally, the new machines are expected to be slimmer and have a reduced footprint, but not to adopt the wedge shape of the MacBook Air and 12-inch MacBook.
On the MacBook Air side, the rumors are for a minor refresh of the 13-inch model, though possibly not an updated 11-incher. We’re expecting a similarly minor update to the iMac.
