Macbook Shipments are expected to reach 15 million units in 2017, a gain of 10% year over year, primarily driven due to the introduction of the new Macbook Pro models.
The report was published by Digitimes today. According to this new report by the popular south east asian publication,
“Although the new MacBook Pros with OLED Touch Bar have a high ASP, demand is still rather strong. MacBook Pros using the Kaby Lake platform are expected to be released sometime later in 2017, and the platform’s low power consumption is expected to trigger a replacement trend among existing MacBook users, the market watchers noted.”
The other driver behind the increased shipments is likely to be price reduction for the existing Macbook models that do not have the Touch Bar functionality.
The report also suggests that Apple is expected to unveil a new 12-inch MacBook in early second quarter of 2017 with an additional memory option of 16GB.
The other Kaby Lake based models, including the one rumored to sport 32 GB memory will not start mass production until third/fourth quarter of 2017.
This new line of Intel based Macbooks (Kaby Lake) are generating excitement among the Appe fans who look forward to the high memory specs along with superior battery optimization.
For an industry that has struggled to see meaningful sales momentum in the last few years, this could be some good news.
2016 was one of the worst performing years for notebook sales. In the last quarter of 2016,
Apple sold 4.886 million Macs in Q4 2016 and revenue of $5.7 bn – a real disappointment, given that Apple sold 5.7 million Macs in Q4 2015, generating revenue of $6.8 bn. Unit sales are therefore down 14.4 percent year-on-year, while revenue is down by 16.6 percent.
The new 2017 models could bring in some much needed excitement for users that have been waiting to upgrade their Macbooks for quite some time now.