The Mac continues to be a success story. During the last three months of 2014, Apple moved 5.52 million Macs around the world, a fourteen percent annual increase from the 4.84 million units shipped in the year-ago quarter. Apple now sells more Macs than iPods and, more importantly the Mac has been outpacing the rest of the PC industry for years now, consistently posting a double-digit growth.
Exhibit A: Mac shipments for all of 2014 were up 14.43 percent from a year earlier.
During the same periods, global PC shipments were on a downward spiral and declined 2.1 percent versus the previous year. The Mac momentum is expected to go unabated throughout 2015, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers who spoke to DigiTimes.
Estimating Mac shipments to beat the industry’s average in 2015 as it did in 2014, DigiTimes Research is now projecting total Mac notebooks and desktops to grow between ten and fifteen percent on an annual basis to some 20-23 million units in 2015.
The projected figure is up sharply from the 19.59 million Macs shipped a year earlier. By comparison, global PC shipments are expected to drop 3.3 percent in the year.
Interestingly enough, DigiTimes said it’s “likely” that Apple will lower the prices of its 11 and 13-inch MacBook Airs following the launch of a rumored twelve-inch Retina Air.
That computer, according to BGR’s sources, could “possibly” get its formal unveiling at an alleged Apple Watch media event in March or April.
In other supply chain news, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is said to be eyeing Apple mobile chip orders in 2016 after Samsung has reportedly secured the majority of the Apple A9 output in 2015.
TSMC expects to have its fan-out (InFO) wafer-level packaging (WLP) technology ready for its 16-nanometer FinFET process manufacturing in 2016, and for a more-advanced 10-nanometer process in 2017.
TSMC is hoping to leverage the combination of the InFO-WLP and FinFET process to win manufacturing orders for the Apple A10 chip in 2016, market watchers said, because InFO-WLP is a cheaper alternative to TSMC’s existing CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) packaging technology.
iPad Pro vs. 12-inch MacBook Pro rendering via Martin Hajek.
Source: DigiTimes