Long live the Mac! Apple posts all-time quarterly record in Mac sales
Apple's earnings results yesterday blew away analyst estimates. Yeah, yeah, what else is new?
Apple also set a new iPhone sales record for the September quarter. Par for the course, really.
Apple last quarter sold 5.5 million Macs, more than it's ever sold in any other quarter in company history.
Wait, what?
During the September quarter, Apple sold more Macs than ever before. Indeed, most analysts didn't even think Mac sales for the quarter would break the 5 million threshold. Even more impressive is that Apple last quarter didn't even release any new Mac models. And yet, Mac sales surged.
Year over year, Mac sales increased by a whopping 21%. What's more, revenue from Mac sales increased by 18%. In fact, Apple last quarter generated more money via the Mac ($6.6 billion) than it did with the iPad ($5.3 billion). This marks a huge shift. Consider this: During Apple's 2013 holiday quarter, 20.2% of Apple's revenue came from the iPad while 11.1% came from the Mac.
So despite long-standing assumptions that the iPad was going to marginalize Mac sales, it appears that the Mac is alive and well. You might even say that it's thriving.
So what was behind the Mac's resurgence last quarter? According to Apple's Luca Maestri, the culprits were strong back to school sales and spectacular growth in emerging markets.
We saw great demand in the back-to-school season for both desktops and portables with especially strong growth for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
We achieved double-digit Mac growth across most markets around the world, with particularly impressive performance in emerging markets where Mac sales were up 46%.
These results are truly remarkable given the contraction in the global PC market and we now gain market share for 33 of the last 34 quarters.
With the recent release of Apple's new 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K Display, it'll be interesting to see if exceptionally strong Mac sales will persist during the current holiday quarter.
As for the iPad, sales were down year over year yet again. Still, Tim Cook remains confident in the iPad's long-term prospects, noting during yesterday's conference call: "Over the long arc of time, my own judgment is that iPad has a great future. How the individual 90-day clicks work out, I don't know. But I'm very bullish on where we can take iPad over time."
