M1 Mac mini overtakes entire Japanese desktop market in less than 2 weeks

https://appleterm.com/2020/11/30/m1-mac-mini-desktop-market-share-japan/

by gumby • 6 years ago

87 64 6 years ago

bsagdiyev2• 6 years ago

Unless I suck at reading comprehension, 27 some percent is still less than 100 percent. It gained some share but this just seems like a cheap, no substance article riding on the Apple choo choo going around HN recently.

maurovz• 6 years ago

It has the lead...

mgh2• 6 years ago

Maybe they meant 100% increase in market share

bsagdiyev2• 6 years ago

Which makes sense, but it was worded in a way to whip up attention and those cherished internet points, I think.

samatman• 6 years ago

Pretty sure the point is that Apple is now the #1 desktop manufacturer in Japan, and they weren't before.

I think that's a fair use of the word "overtake", I'd use something else for grabbing the entire market. "obliterate" maybe?

I agree that it's kind of low in content and interest for HN, don't expect it to stay on the front page for long. I found it mildly interesting.

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

Pretty sure the point is that Apple is now the #1 desktop manufacturer in Japan, and they weren't before.

Over a 2 week period.

It's pretty rare to see market share over a 2 week period because product launches skew the hell out of these numbers.

bee_rider• 6 years ago

Overtake is when you go past something. Apple is moving faster than anybody else but hasn't caught up yet.

vsareto• 6 years ago

I'd use something else for grabbing the entire market. "obliterate" maybe?

"monopolize" works well

stu2b50• 6 years ago

Going from 14% to 27% in 2 weeks is a pretty extreme trend, especially in a market that's typically very slow moving, considering desktop upgrades occur at a far slower cadence than, say, mobile phones.

mey• 6 years ago

Pent up demand from stagnation on the desktop space for the last 5+ years?

whoisjuan• 6 years ago

This sound like a solid milestone actually. 27% of market share (since launching). Apple is now the desktop sales leader in that particular market. Went from 15% to 27% share of sales(sold quantities in a given time). Which means Apple is selling a lot of M1 Mac Minis in Japan.

27 some percent is still less than 100 percent

Of course 100% of the desktop sales are not going to be Apple's. 27% of the desktop sales in a market like Japan sounds very impressive to me.

fastball• 6 years ago

It's an ambiguously worded sentence.

What they mean is: if you take the entire Japanese desktop computer market (not some subset of it, like "low-power desktops", the "entire" desktop market), and you look at which individual computer manufacturer has the highest market share, Apple has just overtaken Lenovo Japan.

How I might've worded it: Apple now has a marketshare plurality in the Japanese desktop computer market after the introduction of their M1 Mac Mini.

triangleman• 6 years ago

Overtakes, not takes over.

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

Did the content of this article change since you posted? Because I'm not seeing anything referring to 100% of anything.

the_only_law• 6 years ago

Looked at buying one recently, much longer ship times that even the new Macbooks.

selykg• 6 years ago

Suspect this is developers snagging them since they're the cheaper option for getting their apps tested and all that. Also I hear MacMiniColo or whatever they're calling themselves these days ordered a ton of them.

antr2• 6 years ago

Unrelated comment.

I've seen the M1 Mac Mini teardown, and this new model has retained the same footprint as its Intel predecessor despite it looking like much less space was needed. I really look forward to a much smaller mac mini version in the future.

crancher• 6 years ago

A Mini size of the AppleTV would be great.

hangonhn• 6 years ago

I know this is highly improbable but I would love, love, love to see a Raspberry Pi with an M1 in it.

Diederich2• 6 years ago

much smaller mac mini

Eh...why make it smaller when you can give it room for extra storage? In the 'old days' I'd have also mentioned giving it room for extra memory too. :(

antr2• 6 years ago

I don't see Apple giving users the option to upgrade their Mac Minis to third party storage solutions.

beervirus2• 6 years ago

It has room physically, but there's no place to connect it.

jasonsync• 6 years ago

The Mini in Mac Mini is no longer Mini. But it could be More Mini. Make it Mini.

Storage has been external for years now. None of the upgradable internals need a large footprint.

Spartan-S63• 6 years ago

Rather than extra storage, how about just more room for a larger cooling solution, whether there's a fan or not. With Apple Silicon, it seems like performance is going to be dictated by the ability to dissipate heat, so I'd rather have a larger Mac mini that can dissipate more heat and boost for longer than a smaller one.

qppo3• 6 years ago

I don't need that much more space for storage (modern SSDs are teeny, and I don't need physical hard drives anymore for home computing).

Cooling though. Give me a bigass heatsink and a fan.

asutekku• 6 years ago

Modern memory and storage are so small there's no reason to keep the size. Have you seen how much empty space there is?

jeffbee• 6 years ago

I'd rather get the missing ports back and keep the footprint.

thom• 6 years ago

I’d rather they fix WiFi and Bluetooth so I get to actually use those ports.

katbyte• 6 years ago

Might need a larger footprint for an upcoming version with more ports ect

grecy• 6 years ago

(pure speculation)

or, maybe they've got a 'Mac Mini Pro' coming using whatever chip they're cooking up for the high-end Mac Book Pro and iMac Pro.. or maybe even more than one of those chips. So in that eventuality they want to maintain the bigger case footprint and much-bigger-than-needed power supply.

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

We don't really know what the needs of the other processors they are going to jam into here will look like. It's likely the next generation M series CPU will need significantly more cooling.

Also, I'd far rather they added an M.2 storage slot (or 2!) rather than making their already small device even smaller.

That said... a fanless, USB-C powered mini of any size would also be A+ as well.

dirtnugget• 6 years ago

Article is somewhat click bait, it refers to "market share" which I would usually assume to be be the installed base. Instead the Japanese source explicitly says (if I can trust google translate) that this figure refers to sales only. Hard to say the overtook the market, they took the crown for sales in a single month so far.

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

Article is somewhat click bait, it refers to "market share" which I would usually assume to be be the installed base.

Pepsi and Coke have "Market Share"... it doesn't refer to the number of houses with Coke in their fridge. Market share is sales share over a period of time.

This particular sampling is pretty worthless though because measuring "Market Share" over a 2 week timeframe is questionable due to launch windows.

gowld• 6 years ago

Pepsi and Coke don't have an install base either, as they are 1-day consumables.

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

You can't look at a market as a 2 week window which corresponds to a new product release. Your results are going to be greatly skewed.

The Mac mini is cheap and has surprisingly good performance. It is the absolutely perfect gateway into Apple's next generation of computing. Someone at Apple should get a merit badge for including this in their initial launch because it was genius.

That there is a big initial spike in demand is completely unsurprising unless you were asleep at a wheel. Much much more interesting is going to be what these numbers look like after Apple burns through initial pent up demand. Won't see that for 6+ months.

Ensorceled• 6 years ago

Exactly. I've been holding off upgrading my parents Mac mini until the next generation ... this is it.

SllX• 6 years ago

I don’t know how true this is for foreign companies operating in Japan, but weekly sales reports are fairly common out of the Japanese market.

beervirus2• 6 years ago

And weekly sales reports will reflect that pent-up demand. It's not surprising that the Mac Mini outsold Lenovo's desktops for a couple of weeks right after it was introduced. It will be news if it keeps outselling them going forward.

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

The headline is a bit over the top. Apple outsold every other desktop in Japan for 2 weeks running. That is news enough and true. Saying they overtook the market suggests more than that to me.

crb002• 6 years ago

I bet it is far more than just M1. For the first time I launched an m6g (Gravition 2) instance of AWS Linux2. Ruby and node are working without a hitch. Bye bye x86.

sudo yum update

sudo yum install git

gpg2 --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 7D2BAF1CF37B13E2069D6956105BD0E739499BDB

\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails

sudo yum install zstd

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.37.2/install... | bash

source ~/.bashrc

nvm install v12.16.1 #From project I am working on

rvm install 2.5.1 #From project I am working on

scottlocklin2• 6 years ago

While their new hardware looks to be great: I will never forgive them for their shitty unusable (unless you put linux on it) $800 minis of the past

ogre_codes10• 6 years ago

Apple left the mini (and the Pro!) to rot for quite a while. I figured nobody bought those unless they were truly desperate or wanted a CI solution.

WhoCaresLies• 6 years ago

it is not genius, it is logical

if you make a solicon switch, you should make sure your entire product line is following, otherwise it is going to be fragmented

your odd way of thinking reminds me exactly how a Microsoft guy would think about it

"it works = you must be a genius"

no, that's just logical

unethical_ban2• 6 years ago

Processors are complex. Architectures are over my head. Is there an intelligent layman's video or article series not just on architectures, but how, at a high level, ARM is supposedly so much better than x86 in the long term?

addicted3• 6 years ago

It’s not just (or even) ARM. It’s Apple.

For comparison, the A series chips on iOS devices are years ahead of their competitors on the Android side (largely Qualcomm and Samsung) despite all being on ARM.

That being said, it would indeed be good to hear from someone with expertise as to what Apple has accomplished and why others haven’t been able to.

unethical_ban2• 6 years ago

This is true, and this is an Apple story. But I've seen this attitude on HN a while, including a comment here about AWS' Gravitron processors. It feels like ARM is similar to electric vehicles: Everyone here acts like "of course it's a better, more efficient design" but there are physical forces holding it back. That's just the feeling I get.

altcognito• 6 years ago

It's not. There are fundamental differences in the hardware implementation of handling the instruction codes independent of actual instruction set. This in some senses is no different than AMD being better at x86 than Intel.

My high level understanding is that they integrated a number of components into the chip that typically are external and that they had a trick or two surrounding out of order execution that yielded benefits. Last, they have a more modern manufacturing process and all of this contributes to a significantly better, lower power chip.

kllrnohj2• 6 years ago

ARM vs. x86 is mostly irrelevant and far over-focused.

The main big factor in why the ARM-based M1 is able to have such great instructions per clock is due to the fixed-length instructions making it easier for Apple to have made a very wide CPU core front-end.

Think trying to apply a parallel map to an array vs. a linked-list. It's easier to spawn off 8 jobs in parallels if just getting the right data isn't dependent on previous work. x86's variable-length makes that front-end decoding in parallel more complex.

Then thanks to that high IPC, Apple can keep the clock speeds lower while hitting the performance target they are going for. By keeping the clocks low, power is then also low. Nothing all that special or unique there, the power draw at 3ghz on an M1 is right in line with what you'd expect an equivalent x86 CPU at around 3ghz as well.

Beyond that there's basically no major difference that really matters, and no "inherent" power efficiencies or advantages of any kind, either. If AMD or Intel manage to make an 8-wide x86 CPU core, then you'll see that power efficiency advantage of the M1 vanish overnight. Similarly, Apple is currently the only one making ARM CPU cores that are wider than the typical x86 core is, which is why nobody else has impressive ARM CPUs.

ARM has some advantages in that it just doesn't have the history & legacy that x86 does, but then that's also a disadvantage because legacy software also is very much a thing. What the future holds nobody really knows. At the end of the day what matter is how a CPU performs, not what instruction set it runs.

zamadatix• 6 years ago

I think the options on this are either a lot of hand waving that basically says "it's been done better this time because they didn't need to do it the old way" with more fancy sounding words or you could have some expert conversation that goes deep into the reasoning but doesn't really translate usefully for a layman. A bit like looking to understand an upper level math theory by looking for a video breaking down what the symbols are named - sure you know more about it now but you're not really any closer to understanding the theory than before.

For the "what the symbols are named" level explanation https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... talks about the functional units and what's changed though.

M1 Mac mini overtakes entire Japanese desktop market in less than 2 weeks

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