MacBook Pro and MacBook Air overwhelmingly drive Mac sales

New research claims to have details on exactly how dominant MacBook Pro and MacBook Air sales are, versus desktop contemporaries.

Mac sales have been declining, with even the 2023 MacBook Air seeing a significant drop in demand. A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) says that of all Apple's Mac sales, though, a clear 90% are the portable MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

Apple does not release the details of its Mac sales figures, and CIRP does not detail its research methodology. The report does claim to cover all US Mac sales for the year of 2023.

In that period, CIRP says that the MacBook Pro represented 51% of all Mac sales in the US. The MacBook Air took 39%.

The remaining 10% of sales is distributed fairly uniformly across the various desktop Macs available. The iMac and Mac Pro comprise 4% and 3% of the total sales, respectively.

Then both the Mac mini and the Mac Studio represent just 1% of US Mac sales each.

Mac computer shares (twelve months ending December 2023)

Within the MacBook Air sales, there's a small but noticeable preference for the larger screen size. About 53% of buyers chose the 15-inch model.

With the MacBook Pro, the small difference is reversed as 54% chose the 14-inch edition, while 46% bought the 16-inch model.

The preference for larger display sizes in laptops suggests a changing consumer mindset towards portability without compromising functionality. Apple's strategic focus on laptops doesn't diminish the value of desktops.

CIRP's report concludes that, naturally, the sales figures are why Apple tends to concentrate on promoting its portable Macs. It theorizes that new, thinner designs are making the larger-screen MacBook Air more attractive than their arguably bulkier predecessors.

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10 Comments

tht 5654 comments · 23 Years

About 9 months ago

Frankly don't believe that Mac Pro number. And the Macbook Pro has majority share? Don't know about that either.

Apple's Mac ASP would be on order $2000 if these numbers are right. That would be the envy of the PC world.

mike1 3437 comments · 10 Years

tht said:

Frankly don't believe that Mac Pro number. And the Macbook Pro has majority share? Don't know about that either.

Apple's Mac ASP would be on order $2000 if these numbers are right. That would be the envy of the PC world.

I would believe for dollar share, not necessarily unit share.

Marvin 15355 comments · 18 Years

tht said:

Frankly don't believe that Mac Pro number. And the Macbook Pro has majority share? Don't know about that either.

Apple's Mac ASP would be on order $2000 if these numbers are right. That would be the envy of the PC world.

It says here they survey 500 recent Apple hardware buyers every quarter and the reports say they are US numbers:

https://cirpapple.substack.com/about

1% = 5 people.

According to survey sites, this sample size should be enough for reliable data on tens of millions of customers:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
https://www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/

but these numbers are clearly off, possibly due to the people they are surveying and where. If they do the surveys outside Apple Stores, that wouldn't represent online purchasing data.

Steam has a hardware survey:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Ignoring the unidentified segment (Mac Studio is missing), that says roughly:
Macbook Pro: 54%
Macbook Air: 32%
iMac: 10%
Mac mini: 4%
Mac Pro 0.5%

These are weighted by gaming but would be a larger sample survey. Laptop proportion is 86%. People wonder why the desktop lines get less attention, it's because the trend is continuing down and people are moving to laptops.

Marvin said:

tht said:

Frankly don't believe that Mac Pro number. And the Macbook Pro has majority share? Don't know about that either.

Apple's Mac ASP would be on order $2000 if these numbers are right. That would be the envy of the PC world.

It says here they survey 500 recent Apple hardware buyers every quarter and the reports say they are US numbers:

https://cirpapple.substack.com/about

1% = 5 people.

According to survey sites, this sample size should be enough for reliable data on tens of millions of customers:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
https://www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/

but these numbers are clearly off, possibly due to the people they are surveying and where. If they do the surveys outside Apple Stores, that wouldn't represent online purchasing data.

Steam has a hardware survey:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Ignoring the unidentified segment (Mac Studio is missing), that says roughly:
Macbook Pro: 54%
Macbook Air: 32%
iMac: 10%
Mac mini: 4%
Mac Pro 0.5%

These are weighted by gaming but would be a larger sample survey. Laptop proportion is 86%. People wonder why the desktop lines get less attention, it's because the trend is continuing down and people are moving to laptops.

I believe laptops are around 85% to 90% of Macs sold. The respective percentages between MBA and MBP? Would need to see something more in depth.

If we knew what the relative share of Macs sold to enterprise customers and home buyers, I can see parsing out what the relative share of the product lines are. Like 40% of Mac laptops are enterprise deployments. If so, I can believe that MBP number.

I don’t mind seeing surveys of 500, 1000, 2000 buyers. There’s always a proprietary weighting of the respective buyers that is applied in these types of things. These market analysts get paid for their capability to provide market information. So, they have something to adjust the raw market survey data into a market wide set of numbers.

tht said:

Marvin said:

tht said:

Frankly don't believe that Mac Pro number. And the Macbook Pro has majority share? Don't know about that either.

Apple's Mac ASP would be on order $2000 if these numbers are right. That would be the envy of the PC world.

It says here they survey 500 recent Apple hardware buyers every quarter and the reports say they are US numbers:

https://cirpapple.substack.com/about

1% = 5 people.

According to survey sites, this sample size should be enough for reliable data on tens of millions of customers:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
https://www.checkmarket.com/sample-size-calculator/

but these numbers are clearly off, possibly due to the people they are surveying and where. If they do the surveys outside Apple Stores, that wouldn't represent online purchasing data.

Steam has a hardware survey:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Ignoring the unidentified segment (Mac Studio is missing), that says roughly:
Macbook Pro: 54%
Macbook Air: 32%
iMac: 10%
Mac mini: 4%
Mac Pro 0.5%

These are weighted by gaming but would be a larger sample survey. Laptop proportion is 86%. People wonder why the desktop lines get less attention, it's because the trend is continuing down and people are moving to laptops.

The respective percentages between MBA and MBP? Would need to see something more in depth.
If we knew what the relative share of Macs sold to enterprise customers and home buyers, I can see parsing out what the relative share of the product lines are. Like 40% of Mac laptops are enterprise deployments. If so, I can believe that MBP number.

I would expect the Air to outsell the MBP just on price. Given that the ASP didn't change, it could only have been the entry $1299 MBP that increased the numbers. Apple did say this model sold really well, likely among students and developers but I doubt it outsold the Air overall. The surveys must be skewed towards education/enterprise users like the gaming surveys are skewed towards models with better GPUs.

Another test is number of Geekbench results (if they filtered duplicate hardware, it would be more accurate):
Macbook Pro = 7028 pages (55%)
Macbook Air = 2485 (20%)
iMac = 1179 (10%)
Mac Studio = 483 (4%)
Mac mini = 1141 (9%)
Mac Pro = 408 (3%)

The numbers vary between different sets of data but the overall proportions are fairly similar.