MacBook Pro is reportedly king of Macs by a long way, achieving 60% more sales than MacBook Air

The MacBook Pro is the most popular Mac, and by some way, increasing its lead over Apple's other computers, or at least that's the story told by some fresh stats.

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Bar charts showing the breakdown of Mac sales over the last five years (Image Credit: CIRP via Apple Insider)

These statistics were compiled by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), and they show that over the course of 2024, over half the Macs sold by Apple were MacBook Pro models.

CIRP claims that MacBook Pro laptops represented no less than 53% of total Mac sales for Apple in 2024, which was up slightly from 51% the previous year.

In contrast, the MacBook Air dropped to 33% for 2024, compared to 39% the year before.

So, the MacBook Pro has a current lead for overall sales over the MacBook Air of 20% (and the Pro variant sold 60% more units during 2024, in fact).

It's clear enough from this research that Apple's laptops are by far its most popular Macs, but that won't come as a surprise to anyone - notebooks account for 86% of sales, with just 14% being desktop computers (we don't get a breakdown of how those desktop sales are distributed). Although the dominance of laptops actually slipped slightly, from a high of 90% in 2023, due to the MacBook Air's drop in popularity.

Doubtless the MacBook Pro benefited from getting its M4 upgrade well before the MacBook Air. Of course, the M4-toting Pro laptops were on sale in the latter part of 2024, likely doing well during the run-up to the holiday season.

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