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SE/30 Production numbers?
- Thread starter MiMac
- Start date
The SE/30 was on sale for nearly 2 years and clearly sold well given just how common they are. The value is high right now because people really like the SE/30, and they need restoration work to be reliable nowadays - they're not rare though. I'd guess production numbers would be high.
Apple never published production numbers but it would've been high. The SE/30 was a popular model produced at a time when Apple was doing quite well in the business and graphics markets. At any given time in the UK at least, there are usually 4 or 5 SE/30s for sale on eBay, and more worldwide. They're really not uncommon at all, they just attract high prices because they're one of the 'must have' models.
Accurate numbers on sales for pretty much any specific model of Mac are scarce. On an official Apple-sourced level, you occasionally get the odd mention in keynotes but sadly there are no official documents or resources I know of that make things crystal clear. I did a fair bit of research into this last year and came up quite short.
As a reference point: Supermac, the maker of Mac clones, managed to sell 100,000 units in its entire lifespan - that's pretty much less than 35,000 per year and in business terms is disastrous. This is a number sourced from Kennedy Brandt, who worked at SuperMac in its heyday. It's one of the only first-hand numbers on sales of any type of Mac that I've found. This is an example of extremely bad sales by late 90s standards.
Apple sold 800,000 iMac G3s in the first five months of its production. They sold 1,600,000 beige G3s in fourteen months. These numbers were presented by Jobs in the Macworld 1999 keynote to rapturous applause. I can only assume from this that these are examples of extremely good sales by late 90s standards.
It's easy to forget that, while the SE/30 may have been popular, the home computing market in 1989 was a fraction of what it was by 2000. According to a rather comprehensive webpage from Jeremy Reimer, Apple shipped 1,100,000 Macs in total in 1989. That number ballooned up to more than 4,000,000 by 1995.
The SE/30 was one of quite a few models sold in its lifespan and it was also quite expensive, which means it is unlikely that it took up the bulk of the 2,400,000 Macs that Apple sold in 1989 and 1990. It also occupied a weird spot in the market, price-to-performance-wise. By my count, Apple sold seven other models in that time frame (Plus, SE, II, IIx, IIcx, IIci, IIfx). The Classic didn't show up until October 1990 so it's unlikely that it's included in the 1990 sales numbers in a meaningful way.
This information is quite vague so we have to make some assumptions. My biggest assumption is that the Plus and the SE took up the majority of Mac sales, based purely on the fact that these two models were comparatively cheap and are by far the most common from this period today. If we assume that these two models took up 50% of the total sales, that leaves us with 1,200,000 shipments for the other six models that were sold in that time frame. Divided equally, that's a nice round 200,000 sales per model and I think gives us a reasonable estimate for a low-end sales figure for the SE/30. Again based purely on my own assumptions, I'd be really surprised if the SE/30 represented 25% of total sales so I think 600,000 as an extreme high-end sales estimate is reasonable.
TL;DR: Based on reading some numbers, making some assumptions, and a primordial gut feeling, I'd say Apple sold between 200,000 and 600,000 SE/30s.
As a reference point: Supermac, the maker of Mac clones, managed to sell 100,000 units in its entire lifespan - that's pretty much less than 35,000 per year and in business terms is disastrous. This is a number sourced from Kennedy Brandt, who worked at SuperMac in its heyday. It's one of the only first-hand numbers on sales of any type of Mac that I've found. This is an example of extremely bad sales by late 90s standards.
Apple sold 800,000 iMac G3s in the first five months of its production. They sold 1,600,000 beige G3s in fourteen months. These numbers were presented by Jobs in the Macworld 1999 keynote to rapturous applause. I can only assume from this that these are examples of extremely good sales by late 90s standards.
It's easy to forget that, while the SE/30 may have been popular, the home computing market in 1989 was a fraction of what it was by 2000. According to a rather comprehensive webpage from Jeremy Reimer, Apple shipped 1,100,000 Macs in total in 1989. That number ballooned up to more than 4,000,000 by 1995.
The SE/30 was one of quite a few models sold in its lifespan and it was also quite expensive, which means it is unlikely that it took up the bulk of the 2,400,000 Macs that Apple sold in 1989 and 1990. It also occupied a weird spot in the market, price-to-performance-wise. By my count, Apple sold seven other models in that time frame (Plus, SE, II, IIx, IIcx, IIci, IIfx). The Classic didn't show up until October 1990 so it's unlikely that it's included in the 1990 sales numbers in a meaningful way.
This information is quite vague so we have to make some assumptions. My biggest assumption is that the Plus and the SE took up the majority of Mac sales, based purely on the fact that these two models were comparatively cheap and are by far the most common from this period today. If we assume that these two models took up 50% of the total sales, that leaves us with 1,200,000 shipments for the other six models that were sold in that time frame. Divided equally, that's a nice round 200,000 sales per model and I think gives us a reasonable estimate for a low-end sales figure for the SE/30. Again based purely on my own assumptions, I'd be really surprised if the SE/30 represented 25% of total sales so I think 600,000 as an extreme high-end sales estimate is reasonable.
TL;DR: Based on reading some numbers, making some assumptions, and a primordial gut feeling, I'd say Apple sold between 200,000 and 600,000 SE/30s.
Excellent summary CircuitBored, I was thinking that there must be some were in the region of 500k units especially considering the market around the time of 1990 and the SE/30’s place in comparison with the Macintosh II. So my current assumptions considering an attrition rate of 5% per year from lost, damaged, irreparable is that we are dealing with a current population of around 80K to 90k units to satisfy the vintage enthusiasts. Maybe smaller if recent years of cap goo and battery bombed boards take their toll.
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