Apple’s MacBook sales ride the cultural shift to the WFH enterprise

These things are saving the economy

Apple’s MacBook sales have been strong during the pandemic as millions of workers have picked up this equipment in order to work from home, a report claims.

Robust demand for MacBooks

A Digitimes report cites Taiwanese component makers describing “robust demand” for MacBooks during the third quarter 2020 as companies equip their staff for remote working.

Apple also continues to lead the global tablet market according to analysts.

“Recent sales of its MacBook devices, including MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineups, have increased over 20% from a year earlier, with shipments of related products to Japan and Asia Pacific hitting record highs, said the sources, citing data from Apple,” the report claims.

The data is supported by recent claims from Strategy Analytics, who cited a 27% increase in demand for notebooks across Q2. Lenovo and HP lead, with Apple the fourth biggest PC maker in that space with demand for Mac notebooks up 21%.

A cultural shift is taking place

A shift in the cultural dynamic is taking place.

Logitech recently published data that showed around one billion people globally are now doing so:

“As we sit on his call right now, more than 1 billion people are working from home,” said CEO, Bracken Darrell during a recent fiscal call.

“Any offices they left behind will surely be reconfigured over time to be proportionally more meeting space then working space,” he added.

The expectation is that as Apple revives interest in its notebooks with new Apple Silicon processors and access to hundreds of millions of iOS apps, and as the trend to mobility embraces use of iPads for many tasks, the company will continue to draw benefits from the move to mobility.

Apple’s own data revealed a surge in Mac sales in the last quarter, driven once by the need to get equipped to work remotely. The pandemic’s stubborn refusal to disappear no matter how much authoritarian governments deny its existence suggests the pattern will remain for several years to come.

It’s true, after all, that the Internet itself was developed as a system to help societies survive disasters such as this. All the same, this is a cultural shift, the repercussions of which remain to be explained.

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