OPINION: It’s the weekend again, which means it’s time to look back at our winners and losers from the past week’s tech headlines.
The most exciting news this week came from Apple when it unveiled its latest version MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers, making the company an easy choice for our winner. That being said, the iPhone maker has almost certainly been hurt by the general downturn in the smartphone market.
Read on to find out more about this week’s winners and losers.
Winner: Apple
Apple is our winner this week after the company quietly made a major announcement about its Mac lineup.
Apple not only introduced updates to its MacBook Pro and Mac Mini computers, but also showed off powerful new chips that will power these Macs.
The M2 Pro and M2 Max are the latest additions to Apple’s own Silicon lineup, with the Pro extending the existing M2 architecture with a 12-core CPU, up to a 19-core GPU, and up to 32GB of fast unified memory.
The Max goes even further with a 38-core GPU and up to 96GB of unified memory, making it the world’s most powerful and efficient professional laptop chip, according to Apple.
Both chips can be found in the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops, while the M2 and M2 Pro power the new Mac Mini.
The MacBook range as a whole has seen incredible leaps and bounds since Apple started developing its own chips to replace the older Intel-based MacBooks, and we can’t wait to see what these new chipsets bring.
Loser: Smartphones
Our loser this week is almost every smartphone manufacturer (including Apple) after it was established that the mobile market has seen huge decline at the end of 2022.
According to A market report According to Canalys Research, the 4th quarter of 2022 was the worst of the year and the worst 4th quarter of the entire decade.
While this is bad news for all manufacturers, Apple has emerged as the better of the victims as the company managed to wrest the top spot from Samsung when it comes to market share.
Apple currently has 25% of the market, while Samsung is just shy of 20%, although of course that could all change when the latter introduces its Galaxy S23 line in February. Meanwhile, Xiaomi ranks third with 11% of the market in Q4, followed by Oppo and Vivo.
Canalys attributes the sharp drop in year-on-year performance to smartphone vendors struggling in a difficult macroeconomic environment that erupted in 2022, when high-end devices felt the brunt of the crisis in Q4.
You might think this is good news for budget phone makers, but low- and mid-range smartphones were the first to suffer at the start of the year.
The outlook for 2023 doesn’t look so bright either, with Canalys forecasting flat-to-marginal growth for the smartphone market this year, blaming “rising interest rates, slowing economic growth and an increasingly tight labor market” among the reasons.
