OPINION: It’s the weekend once again, meaning it’s time for us to recall our winner and loser from the tech headlines of the last week.
The most exciting news this week came from Apple as it unveiled its latest MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers, making the company an easy pick for our winner. With that said, the iPhone maker has almost certainly been affected by a general decline in the smartphone market.
Read on to find out more about this week’s winner and loser.
Winner: Apple
Apple is our winner this week after the company quietly made a major announcement regarding its Mac line.
Not only did Apple unveil updates to its MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers, but it also showcased the powerful new chips these Macs will run on.
The M2 Pro and the M2 Max are the latest additions to the company’s own Apple Silicon line, with the Pro scaling up the existing M2 architecture with an up to 12-core CPU, up to 19-core GPU and up to 32GB of fast unified memory.
The Max takes this even further with an up to 38-core GPU and up to 96GB of unified memory, making it the world’s most powerful and efficient pro laptop chip, according to Apple.
Both chips can be found in the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops, while the M2 and M2 Pro power the new Mac Mini.
The MacBook range in general has seen some incredible leaps since Apple began developing its own chips to replace the Intel-powered MacBooks of old, and we can’t wait to see what these new chipsets bring to the table.
Loser: Smartphones
Our loser this week is pretty much every smartphone manufacturer (Apple included) after it was found that the mobile market saw a huge decline at the end of 2022.
According to a market report by Canalys Research, Q4 of 2022 marked the worst annual and Q4 performance in an entire decade.
While this is bad news for every manufacturer involves, Apple came out the best of those affected as the company managed to snatch the top spot from Samsung when it comes to market share.
Apple currently holds 25% of the market while Samsung falls slightly short at 20%, though of course this could all change as the latter unveils its Galaxy S23 line in February. Meanwhile, Xiaomi sweeps in at third place with 11% of the Q4 market, closely followed by Oppo and Vivo.
Canalys attributes the steep year-on-year drop in performance to smartphone vendors struggling in the difficult macroeconomic environment that erupted in 2022, with high-end devices feeling the brunt of the crisis in Q4.
You might think that this would be good news for budget phone makers, but low and mid-range smartphones were the first to suffer earlier in the year.
The outlook isn’t looking all that optimistic for 2023 either, with Canalys forecasting flat to marginal growth for the smartphone market this year with “interest rate hikes, economic slowdowns and an increasingly struggling labor market” among the reasons to blame.
