9 ms·
Kind of telling that 1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) bar
by haunter 1y ago
Kind of telling that
1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad.
2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined
Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services
(millions)
iPhone $209,586
Mac $33,708
iPad $28,023
Wearables, Home and Accessories $35,686
Services $109,158
Total $416,161
Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
- lapcat 1y agoThese are the wrong numbers. You posted the 2024 numbers, not the 2025 numbers. 2025: iPhone $209.586 billion, Mac $33.708 billion, iPad $28.023 billion, Wearables, Home and Accessories $35.686 billion, Services $109.158 billion, Total $416.161 billion
- haunter 1y agoYeah you are right, my bad! Fixed
- lapcat 1y agoI think your conclusion is also wrong. iPad sales are flat, and wearables are actually declining: (Wearables, home, and accessories already surpassed Mac sales, although I don't know what exactly is included in accessories.) Also, I don't think it's useful to compare wearables to Mac, because Watch isn't much of a computing platform, AirPods aren't a computing platform at all, and Vision Pro has almost no sales. This category is mostly accessories to iPhone. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-best-fiscal-year-with-q4-record/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-bes...
- fyrn_ 1y agoWearables may include lightning charger cables :) ?
- ghaff 1y agoI find iPads only marginally interesting now that I don't travel as much. Although the newer magnetic keyboards make them more usable as laptop replacements than they used to be. (Still not totally sold--maybe next longer trip.) Re: Macbooks generally. My mind was somewhat blown when a former co-worker told me their kid didn't want a Macbook. They were fine with an iPhone for their schoolwork. Personally, I still find MacBooks as the least replaceable category--other than the iPhone. Anything else I could live without as needed.
- browningstreet 1y agoNot too long ago the iPad was painted as a disappointing product line, relative to the iPhone. It's still bigger than the entire Mac business. Alas. EDIT: Ack, you're right. Bad comment, self.
- lapcat 1y agoNo, iPad is not bigger than Mac. It's smaller. Look again at the numbers.
- swiftcoder 1y agoYeah, but since the average Mac costs >3x the average iPad, we're still talking about 2-3x the number of iPad sales as Mac sales
- lapcat 1y agoThe OP was referring to dollar sales, not unit sales. Apple no longer announces unit sales. In any case, it has always been true that Mac Average Selling Price is much higher than iPad Average Selling Price. In the sense of unit sales, iPad is bigger than Mac and has been for many years, so in that respect the 2024 Q4 results would not prove anything new. The OP was giving a false narrative about future growth that is contrary to what recent quarterly results have shown.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xfour 1y agoSeems like the obvious reason for this is that Mac is now a niche for people that operate computers, where there are likely 6 people that don't for every 1 that does. We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate. The second reason is likely that there are computers that are 1/3 of the price subsidized by the terrible ad-supported OS installs. (Has anyone tried to setup a MS computer lately, it's an ad-box).
- Terr_ 1y ago> We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate. I 'member when "personal" computers were going to be a kind of capital-equipment made available to the masses, creating new levels of autonomy and personal control over our own lives, working for our goals and interests... Whoops. Folks like Stallman did warn me though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ReptileMan 1y ago>We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate. This is logical result of walled gardens.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThere's also the fact that it's tough to share a smartphone like you can a computer. I suspect Apple hasn't made user switching a thing on iOS for this reason.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoIt also helps that they are moving phone financing off their balance sheet and onto AT&T’s, where people who don’t know anything think AT&T is giving away iPhone 17s right now, when of course, actually, Apple is. The better question is, who do you know pays full price up front for an iPhone with no discounts? Only people who destroy or lose their current iPhone? The parents of teenagers giving the teenager the old phone and replacing theirs?
- racl101 1y agoIf they ever stopped making Macs guess I'd start using Linux other than just for servers.
- _vqpz 1y agoOne would hope that before ceasing to make the hardware that they open it up and actually allow you to install other OSes
- seemaze 1y agoFramework desktop incoming here. (mac/iPad/i)OS 26 tipped me over the edge. Eyeing whether 7 years of GrapheneOS on a pixel will suffice as well..
- gigatexal 1y agoGood luck. I went the other way on the laptop desktop side (I was always an iPhone guy throughout it all). I’m super happy. I won’t go back.
- 827a 1y ago> Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs. Are we reading the same quarterly report? Wearables/Home/Accessories is slightly higher than the Mac, yes, but its a category that has been trending poorly for Apple for ~18 months now IIRC, and that hasn't gotten better this quarter (9.04B->9.01B 3mo YoY). There's no foreseeable future where Vision starts driving Mac-like revenue (meaning, it'll be at least 2 years). Airpods are huge mainstays but have really hit market capacity and aren't growing. Apple Watch will see strong growth if they can successfully get glucose monitoring working, but that's an *if, and until then its slipping from an "upgrade every 3 years" to even longer lifecycle for most people. Meanwhile: Mac is their fastest growing hardware segment by revenue (+12% 3mo YoY) (iPhone is +6%, iPad is flat, Services +15%). iPhone aint going anywhere, Services are carrying their growth, but Mac is very solidly the #3 darling of this report. Their other product lines (Apple Watch, iPad, Airpods, etc) are interesting, successful businesses, but its unlikely we're going to see much growth out of them over the next 2 years. The story is iPhone, Services, and Mac, in that order, and there's no #4.
- willtemperley 1y agoI wonder how much the Windows 11 debacle will increase Mac sales by.
- willtemperley 1y ago[flagged]
- JKCalhoun 1y agoIt's hard to see someone living under a rock for this long suddenly deciding to switch the Mac. I suspect iPhone adoption has done a lot more toward Mac adoption.
- leptons 1y agoWe have a 2015 MPB that can no longer receive OS updates, because apple reasons. And because it can't get the latest OS, it can no longer run Signal, or the latest Adobe stuff that we need. So we ditched Apple and bought a Dell. So far it's working great.
- lateforwork 1y agoRevenue growth is more interesting than raw revenue: iPhone up 6% YoY, Mac up 13%, iPad flat, Wearables, Home, and Accessories flat. So Mac is doing very well!
- gigatexal 1y agoMac hardware has been the best it’s ever been. Though if the Mac Pro with all those slots could run nvidia GPUs I’d be even crazier I think.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoCrazier if Apple got into the GPU business.
- jjtheblunt 1y agoThey somewhat are, and have long been, but weren't targeting the same audience as Nvidia has lately. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375/
- Miserlou57 1y agoSerious question because I don’t know about this sort of thing: Apple’s investment in building its own in-house “Apple Silicon” is large. Can anyone definitely prove they haven’t been working on the sort of AI GPU stuff that NVidia has been?
- asdff 1y agoIf only devs wanted to build for mac like they did 15 years ago when the hardware was shitty
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoInteresting that Wearables is flat. AirPods completely saturated their market incredibly quickly.
- tpurves 1y agoAround a decade ago, even as they were just launching Apple Pay, Apple was trading at a multiple barely over 10x. Street was valuing Apple like a manufacturing OEM company. I remember buying a small chunck of shares at the time thinking, this is crazy, just the services revenue off of owning these platforms is going to become massive one day.
- maximus_01 1y agoGood investment decision and obviously the street was very wrong, but the reason the multiple was low was because of concerns earnings were at risk from a) their issues in China (which they solved, at least for now, but was a very valid concern at the time) and b) android eating them (there was a narrative they were about to be blackberried, or that android was doing what windows did to mac). There are good reasons why that didn't happen.
- hnfong 1y agoIIRC, tech in general was trading at very low multiples 10 years ago. Microsoft was also ~ 10, and Google and Facebook were probably < 20 as well.
- madeofpalk 1y ago> Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined This is reputation laundering. 'Services revenue' is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.
- wingspar 1y agoMy understanding is Services includes the billions Google pays for Safari search default, reported to be $20 billion a year.
- tsimionescu 1y ago> Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs. I view this the exact opposite way. The death of the laptop in favor of tablets has been touted for about a decade now, and it has still failed to materialize. Wearables have even surpassed the iPad. Not to mention, the Mac laptops have seen a recent surge of popularity last few years, due to still being the only realistic ARM-based laptop, with the battery life / weight vs performance you get from this. This is still likely to remain the reality for at least a few years, and thus they're likely to snowball even more based on this reputation.
- Gigachad 1y agoEven if people still own laptops, if they aren’t using them as much they aren’t going to upgrade as frequently and they aren’t going to buy the expensive models. Theres also the fact much of the developing world went straight to mobile, skipping laptops.
- tsimionescu 1y agoAnd yet MacBooks, some of the most expensive laptops, ate out selling iPads, and outgrowing them. I don't think the data points in the direction of your argument, quite the opposite.
- layer8 1y agoIn terms of unit sales, Apple sells roughly double the number of iPads over Macs. If the rumors about a cheaper entry-level MacBook are true, that might put a small dent into that, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.
- j1elo 1y agoI really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer. I really cannot stand seeing websites in a small screen without the ability to quickly open 4 browser windows with 4 tabs each for different combinations of dates, for example.
- flyinglizard 1y agoPeople use computers, just not Macs. Which is a shame because it feels like where Apple has the largest advantage compared to their competitors, being that high end Android phones are rather nice and the barrier to making a good tablet is quite low but a laptop is a whole different ball game, and Apple is far ahead of the rest.
- ponector 1y agoOr rather not buying laptops as often as phone. 2015 Mac or other premium laptop is good enough for internet surfing.
- agentcoops 1y agoI bought my dad a Mac laptop when I got my first job out of college and he used it for well over a decade. I even later got him a MacBook Air and he kept using the old one for years yet out of habit… I imagine that’s not an uncommon pattern for non-programmers who aren’t gamers.
- mathgradthrow 1y agothey will pry my 2014 MBP from my cold dead fingers
- JKCalhoun 1y agoPerhaps a lot of people use their "work computer". Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?
- moduspol 1y ago
- JKCalhoun 1y agoEddy Cue was tasked, over a decade ago?, with getting out front with services. Microsoft was doing it. And no one wants to have all their eggs in the iPhone basket. Congrats to Eddy Cue then?
- nerdsniper 1y agoMost of the "Services" are the App Store and iCloud and AppleCare, so it's still directly tied to market share of the iPhone. If iPhone sales drop 20%, "Services" will drop 15% (with some amount of time lag / smoothing)
- JKCalhoun 1y agoiCloud (and the Mac) App Store, AppleCare are Mac products as well. But to your point, sure, Mac sales are a fraction of the phone's—the latter's loss would be devastating for Apple and for services. It's too bad the world has moved on as it has. I liked Apple a lot when they were just a computer company.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoI get that the phones outsell the Macs but just wild Ipads almost match Macs.
- lostlogin 1y agoEspecially given how long an ipad lives, and how overpowered they are for a large portion of their users.
- bmitc 1y agoKind of funny they don't separate out accessories as its own category. If I were to guess it's because they don't want to advertise how much they make selling dongles.
- notatoad 1y agoi'd love to know how much of that "services" revenue is just iCloud storage for storing iPhone backups.
- SllX 1y agoIf anything, they're the iPhone company and they are massively understating how much of their revenue is directly attributable to the iPhone. Take "Services" for example: most of their services are things like App Store revenue and Google Search revenue, something they technically have on all of their platforms, but the lion's share of that revenue comes directly from iPhone users subscribed to iPhone apps, playing iPhone gacha games or using Google (or any of the other officially supported search engines) in the iPhone version of Safari. The reason to have iCloud+ is to be able to backup your phone, and the photos you take on your phone, and store the emails and iMessages and other data you create on your phone. It's all there accessible on the Mac and iPad too, but they have far more iPhone customers than Mac or iPad customers. Even the smaller services are mostly supported by iPhone users: most AppleCare users, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, arguably you could make a case that Apple TV+ (a.k.a. just Apple TV now for some reason) is the one service that isn't directly attributable to the iPhone, but that is also like the one part of their services division that has had prior reports that it isn't exactly turning a profit, and I don't think you can even apply for an Apple Card unless you own an iPhone. It's the same with most of the other divisions: the reason to have an Apple Watch or AirPods is they go great with your iPhone. They have their individual appeal, and at least with the AirPods, you don't technically need an iPhone to use them, but these are at the end of the day iPhone accessories, the same as their Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse lines or displays are Mac accessories even though technically, any iPad could also take advantage of them now, or you could plug a Magic Keyboard into a Windows PC or something. The math on that doesn't change just because of technicalities like that. So yeah, Apple is the iPhone company and has been for a very long time now. Macs & iPads, the tens of billions of dollar businesses that they are, are just side gigs for them and Services/Wearables et al. is just obfuscating the degree to which they are the iPhone company.
- TriangleEdge 1y agoAny data on the Vision Pro?
- socalgal2 1y agoIt is also clearly why Apple wants to control all e-commerce and is fighting tooth and nail to keep controt
- musicale 1y agoGreat, Apple is probably going to force more ads onto all of its platforms to drive service growth. In ancient times Apple prided itself on not polluting its platforms with intrusive advertisements, but the line has been crossed and going back seems unlikely at this point.
- Razengan 1y agoYeah, the corporation cancer. DRM slowdowns have also made the built-in apps like TV worse for watching shows than just pirating and watching them with IINA etc. In Jobs' days iTunes even let you play purchased songs on any computer. I wish there was a law or something that did not allow shareholders & board members who did not have an understanding of the industry, to influence or dictate the course of a company, without feedback from its USERS/customers.
- musicale 1y agoStakeholders such as customers, employees, and the general public are all affected by corporate actions, but they don't seem to have much of a voice in current corporate governance structures. Google's law says that "don't be evil" and "unlimited growth" are ultimately opposing forces.
- dawnerd 1y agoTheir computers don’t need to be replaced often so that makes total sense to me. Both of my m1 series Macs will be more than adequate for my web dev needs for the next few years or at least until Apple force deprecates them.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 1y agoI've been using my 16" MacBook Pro with M2 Max and 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD, for more than 2 years and I feel or see no reason to upgrade. At least not until there's an external design refresh. But maybe I'll get the M5 Max just for the heck of it. Mostly because it'd be a pain to move all the data and state (the Time Machine or Mac-to-Mac transfer is not always perfect and hands-free in my experience) They're just too good for their own good.