Looks like Apple's MacBook refresh can't come quick enough

Apple has suffered a huge decline in MacBook shipments in Q1 of 2016, with a slump of no less than 40% compared to sales of the previous quarter.

That's the news from the bean counters over at TrendForce, which has just published a report on notebook sales in the first quarter, showing that Apple only sold 2.53 million units of the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro in Q1 (which is also a substantial and worrying year-on-year drop from 3.4 million units in Q1 2015).

As mentioned, this represents a plunge of 40.4% compared to the last quarter of 2015, and a drop in notebook market share from 9.7% to 7.1%, which means Apple has fallen from fifth to sixth position and is now behind Acer in the overall laptop vendor rankings.

TrendForce observed that the decline is due to a number of issues, including the fact that there were no new MacBooks out, and the prices of existing models weren't dropped at all to clear stock, while there were more favorable winds for Windows notebooks in the form of a good deal of new products being launched with Skylake processors and Windows 10 (convertibles running the latter have been performing very nicely of late).

Lacklustre laptops

Overall, though, the notebook industry isn't faring well at all, as we've seen in recent figures for the broader PC industry (with the exception of the aforementioned 2-in-1s). Total shipments fell to 35.6 million units, which was down 19% compared to the previous quarter – still, that's only half of what Apple slumped by – and this also represented a drop of 7.3% year-on-year.

In the bigger picture for all laptops, one major headwind included the rising price of components such as hard disks, and TrendForce has a predictably gloomy outlook for the year ahead, with notebook shipments estimated to drop by around 5% in 2016.

The top notebook vendor was Lenovo with a 22.2% market share, followed by HP on 20.4%, and then Dell in third place, a fair distance behind with a share of 14.7%.

Via: MacRumors

• Also check out our MacBook Pro 2016 release date, news and rumors roundup