| Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market. Small is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Apple sold nearly $11 billion worth of Macs last quarter. Once you get out of the HN echo chamber and enterprise IT circles, Macs are quite popular. In a way, they never did "mass market". Having an Apple Store within a 20 minute drive of 80% of the American public counts as mass market [1]. Haven't been lately because pandemic but my local Apple Stores were always packed with people. And of course there's a Best Buy, Micro Center and other regional retailers that sell Macs in places with no Apple Stores. It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with. I've been involved in user groups since the 80's; trust me, most Mac users are just regular people—not music producers and cinematographers. An M1 Mac mini, which certainly outperforms most PCs in it's price class. The retail price starts at $699 but is available for significantly less via 3rd parties like Amazon. If you think of the market segment as "non-plastic computers that don't suck", Apple is doing quite well. And now that Apple Silicon performance continues to outpace the industry as a whole, this will continue. The other segment is the "I like nice things" crowd. They aren't price sensitive; they just like nice things and Macs have that in spades compared to the vast majority of PCs. [1]: https://www.apple.com/retail/storelist/ |
It's like when people say their iPhone is better quality than a $200 Xiaomi phone. Well, duh??? Why are you even comparing them? If you look at higher tier Xiaomi phones, or in your example, laptops from reputable companies such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, they're much closer in build quality, have a choice of tradeoffs ( you can choose if you want small, light, long battery life, type of screen, ports, performance, etc. and not have Apple choose), and were still quite a bit cheaper than equivalent specs Macbooks. That's no longer quite as valid for laptops due to the M1s l, but is still valid for phones.