In the years after it converted to x86 and launched the first Core 2 Duo Macs and Mac Pros, Apple enjoyed increased market share and better Mac business performance. Even after the iPhone and iPad had dwarfed Macintosh sales, it remained a potent additional income stream and Mac market share grew throughout the Great Recession and the decline of the PC market. A new report claims the bloom is truly off this particular rose, however, with Mac user share falling to 6.1% in December, compared with 9.6% as recently as April, 2016 — a five-year low.

The figures come from Net Applications and are a measure of OS user share rather than market share, Computerworld reports. User share refers to the percentage of people who are using a particular operating system (all flavors of OS X / macOS in this case) while market share refers to overall product sales. Apple claimed that its latest MacBook Pros had more pre-orders than any previous launch, but we won’t know whether that represented an initial surge of pent-up demand or sustained product sales. The latest MacBook Pros have been roundly criticized for battery life issues, high prices, dongle requirements, limited Thunderbolt compatibility, and Apple’s ongoing failure to provide anything like a reasonable update timeline for the MacBook Pro. The rumors were sufficiently loud for Tim Cook to address them in a memo to staff last month.

I can’t say whether the increased chatter around flawed Apple products will be reflected in quarterly sales data. But this is the first time in years that I’ve seen such a sustained flow of negative publicity around the company’s design decisions. It took Apple longer than expected to ship its AirPods, the devices only fit certain types of ears (and offer no support for the kinds of third party accessories that might hold them more securely), its Mac Pro continues to languish, and reports from inside the company point to an executive team that has slashed investment into macOS and turned it into a third-rate also-ran within the company. MacOS software engineers’ primary responsibility is to continue unifying macOS and iOS features, while the Mac hardware team doesn’t receive anything like the attention it used to.

I’ve discussed the limited CPU upgrade options available to the Mac Pro on several occasions, but Apple could’ve easily refreshed the platform to offer more CPU cores, better GPUs, lower prices, and more memory. On the mobile side, its continued use of Skylake, dongle-happy port design, and 16GB memory limitation (along with a minimum $2000+ pricetag for a 15-inch display) have turned the MacBook Pro from a genuine professional system into high-end consumer hardware that can’t perform the sorts of tasks professional video and audio editors do without a swath of dongles and add-on hardware. That sort of issue is common in the PC industry — which is one reason why some MacBook owners bought MacBooks in the first place. Meanwhile, Apple has dropped some of the peripherals it used to manufacture for its platform, like routers and monitors, even though the cohesive ecosystem structure was another way Apple distinguished itself from its competition.

Nothing that’s happened in 2016 constitutes more than a troubling ripple in Apple’s long-term future, provided the company responds to the criticism its gotten and addresses customer complaints. If it continues to deprioritize macOS and its professional users, those users will eventually move to hardware that suits them better. Apple grew its market share substantially with the advent of x86 on OS X, but there’s no rule that says these customers can’t buy other hardware. Apple’s customer-hostile maneuvers and poor design decisions gave no one any reason to buy a Mac in 2016. Hopefully 2017 will deliver a better suite of products.