I’ve recently heard the suspicion that Apple has a problem because its new Macs are too good. It’s a thesis that works as follows:

The M-Series Macs are such a massive leap from the Intel-based Macs that people won’t need to buy a new computer once they have an M-Series Mac. It follows that Apple now sells fewer Macs because people keep their Macs for longer. Apple has a problem when people buy fewer Macs.

This thesis is simple enough to gain traction in a social bubble that shares some common beliefs about technology. However, it also has some flaws: For one, only the early adopters and power users regularly bought the latest Macs despite already owning one that was more than adequate for their needs. Additionally, Apple makes most of its money with iPhones and services, not Macs.

As humans, we are likely to extrapolate our personal experiences to other people. This helps us live our lives without spending much energy thinking about other people, but it’s also a problem in our globalized world, with the internet largely in English. The group of people networked into a huge English-speaking bubble focused on technology is unnaturally large for any social group. It lures the people inside this bubble into a sense of normality for their bubble’s behavior and point of view—just like any social bubble does.

I suspect the early adopter crowd misjudges the likely behavior of people outside its bubble. It overestimates the impact of the M-Series chip on the upgrade cycle of normal users and, thus, the impact of the M-Series chips on Apple’s balance sheet. Most Mac users are not early adopters—most people are not early adopters. A few early adopters no longer buying more Macs than they need won’t have much of an impact on Apple’s bottom line.

A view outside the bubble into other bubbles I am part of shows me that many people were on a five- to eight-year upgrade cycle for their Macs before the M-Series. It is far too early to predict if this upgrade cycle will be longer or shorter with M-Series Macs.

Software usually grows to utilize all available resources.

1. When SSDs became standard, apps like Photoshop opened noticeably faster. What used to take a minute or two suddenly took one or two seconds. Today, Photoshop is back to opening as slowly as it did when HDDs were standard. The app has gotten more complicated and resource-intensive — just within the limitations of its user’s patience.

2. With a larger GPU-core count making its way into more and more consumer devices, the features included that make use of these GPU cores have grown in number and complexity. 3D renders have graduated from being an exception when unavoidable to decorative purposes that are only there to bring delight.

3. An increasing number of AI-powered features run in the background on our devices. Just a few years ago, it used to be revolutionary that Apple’s Photos app found faces and could guess which face belonged to which contact. Today, when I snap a picture of a plant, my iPhone tells me what kind of plant it is within a minute or less.

All these changes mean that computers, phones, tablets, etc., still start to feel slow and in need of replacement at about the same rate as they did before the M-series Macs. Now throw in the rumored AI features of macOS 15, iOS 18, and iPadOS 18, and it’s clear that an M1 Mac or an iPhone 12 Pro running an A14 Bionic will struggle to keep up.

⌞w⌝