Ask Paul: April 17 ⭐️

Happy Friday! We're heading off to Cuernavaca for a long weekend away, so let's get this going with a blessedly lighter-than-usual Ask Paul after last week's magnum opus.
"I Ditched Password Generators and Made a Better One in Excel"

You have wasted your life.
💻 Marketshare is hard
helix2301 asks:

On MacBreak Weekly, they were talking about how Apple MacBook Neo sold way more than expected, and Apple is starting to run out of old chips. The argument was that Apple was going to use MacBook Neo to get a larger marketshare.

These things are difficult to know unless Apple provides any real data, but it's clear that the MacBook Neo has sold well and you can see on Apple's website that the delivery time for a purchase is out to two to three weeks. Among the unknowns is how many of the A18 Pro chips Apple has and/or can be manufactured and what the plans are for the future, with one rumor pointing to the A19 Pro and a 12 GB RAM configuration that would definitely be an improvement over the current 8 GB.

But stepping back and looking at this more generally, I've never understood why the Mac doesn't have higher marketshare. This dates back, literally, to the 2001 Mac OS X launch, which was technically impressive and quickly became viable for mainstream audiences (say, by the time Tiger landed in 2005). Apple has always had impressive hardware designs, the prices were almost always on-point, with the mainstream configurations in a sort of entry-level premium part of the market. And in more recent years, the Mac has benefitted just from being in the Apple ecosystem where the iPhone halo effect is quite real. And yet ... somehow, inexplicably, Apple has never moved the needle on Mac usage or marketshare numbers. I don't get it.

So yes, the MacBook Neo is an interesting example of good timing, arriving as it did right as the component shortage was kneecapping PC makers already hobbled by low margins, and right pricing, something Apple doesn't always get right. There was nothing inevitable about this product per se–if it had cost $100 to $200 more than it does, I'm not sure anyone would have complained or found that odd–but Apple really did "think different" here. Yes, it has low-end Apple Watch and iPhone devices, but neither is as hobbled as this thing is. And the timing, with iPadOS 26 finally turning that device into a real computer if you want that, is also curious. But Apple is curious. They often seem to zig when the rest of the world zags.

Then on FRD, you said Apple is 6th biggest PC manufactor and this big gap between 5 and 6, and a bigger gap when you get into the top 3.

If you look at the most recent quarterly PC sales data from IDC and the most recent annual (2025) data, you can see that Apple is the number four computer maker. It ended 2025 with about 9 percent marketshare–which is units sold–and one has to assume the Neo contributed to Apple hitting 9.5 percent share in the most recent quarter. It's reasonable to...