Posted by mfiguiere 3 days ago
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.
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.
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).
We had that development with cars. 40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car. Nowadays, we have a subscription for seat warmers. The manual tells you to visit the dealer to get your brakes checked. Makes me sad, somehow. But people have choosen this path as a collective.
On the other hand, I've done my own cooking more than not.
You make choices about what you do yourself and what you have others do for you.
For the consumable stuff every car owner has to deal with, nothing has really changed in 40 years, honestly! A brake service is still done the exact same way, same with virtually all the fluid services.
I just find far more people parrot "modern cars are so complicated" today and don't even consider that in fact, it is relatively simple to change a brake pad and disc, or your own oil, perhaps an air filter, even on most brand new cars. Fluids filters and brakes are like 90% of most people's maintenance needs nowadays.
YouTube has also massively lowered the barrier to working on cars, given there are multiple easy to follow guides for just about any car service for any car model you can think of.
Not everyone needs to know how to compile their own kernel, build their own furniture or clean their laundry perfectly. Everyone has their own interests and areas of expertise they want to delve in to. Now I can screw up a brake job working on it all day and rewatching YouTube videos wondering what I missed, or I can take it to a shop and get it done in an hour for cheap. That's just me though. I spent a lot of time working on cars in my youth and I'm just tired of spending my time on it. I don't like it and I am more than willing to pay someone who does like it to do it.
That is irrelevant to the argument he is making that things have not gotten harder in the last 40 years in regards to car maintenance that you can do at home.
His point is that the perception that car maintenance has gotten harder for the average joe does not match reality. Almost all of the things that need periodic on modern cars are more or less the same as they were in 1985.
BTW just before Covid, or during Covid, I took a car mechanic course from the local De Anza college - no hands on, so that's why I think it was during Covid. But after 5 years and no experience, I have forgotten except the abstract concepts. Then imagine people who never had to look under the hood -- ever.
But my primary takeaway was that this is hard & dirty work, and there are numerous ways in which you can make mistakes that ruin the car and/or endanger your safety, so generally paying a professional to do it is a more sensible way.
Of course, if you enjoy doing this, or have a very old car, or more time than money, the trade-offs are different.
Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.
(Air filters are, admittedly, pretty easy.)
I also choose not to mow my lawn at this point. I'm perfectly capable of doing so but just prefer not to do so,
I can attest that changing a brake pad is mission impossible level without the proper tools. The tools and experience are what make it look easy, for someone that has both.
What is so noble about changing your oil?
Also similarly as with iPhones, many cars require connecting to the authorized service to change headlights and other parts since they are paired with the MCU.
I know how to work on my car but I am not able to because someone decided to lock it down.
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.
For doing tasks like online banking or booking plane tickets, I find the mobile experience frustrating and therefore do it on my laptop. She finds the laptop clunky and finds mobile much easier.
This is logical result of walled gardens.
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?
The big carriers hide the phone in the price but you're still paying it. I just use US Mobile unlimited plans for $35/mo, plus it gives me free international service which was the real advantage for me. Paying 1/3 the annual service plan and $0/day int'l roaming instead of $15/day.
This is reputation laundering. 'Services revenue' is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.
So Mac is doing very well!
Though if the Mac Pro with all those slots could run nvidia GPUs I’d be even crazier I think.
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.
Theres also the fact much of the developing world went straight to mobile, skipping laptops.
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
(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-bes...
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.
EDIT: Ack, you're right. Bad comment, self.
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.
The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.
I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.
The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.
The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.
Android has about 70% market share and there are countries where only rich people get to use iOS devices.
Other population layers also need phones and digital services.
Apple could probably get > 50% market share in those countries if they significantly reduced their margins (they’d still be profitable but of course it makes little sense m)
Truth is Apple doesn't care about those countries where regular citizens cannot afford Apple, they see themselves as the Ferrari, Bentley, Karan Acoustics, ... of the computer world.
Those are very niche luxury brands, that sell impractical status products (there isn’t really and equivalent for them in the “computer world”) for the 1% or subset of it. Apple is not that, it’s an upper middle tier mass market brand.
But yes, they certainly don’t care about markets where they can’t be competitive while maintaining their margins
That's a wonderful idea.
> The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago.
I don't think Macs are even a consideration for most "hackers." You can't build you own machine, Linux support is limited, they just cater to a crowd that wants a polished experience and don't mind giving up their freedom for it.
As for the phone market, I think Apple's success mostly comes to a combination of clever marketing and phone users being on average even less technically-minded than desktop users. Add to that social pressure now the the iPhone is dominant. That being said you couldn't pay me to give up my Pixel running Graphene, a device that is completely immune to corporate spyware, forced "upgrades," sideloading restrictions and compliance with idiotic laws like client-side scanning (if it ever happens).
But where I used to get a new iPhone every other year, I’m now on the fourth year of my 13P and it still works great. That’s only $300/yr.
It’s interesting to think about.
Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion
Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion
[EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration.
"the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.
[0] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-an...
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/primers/primer-not-all-taxe...
Corporate tax rates were insanely higher many decades ago. Both industry and the public thrived despite it. Corporate tax rate slashed, public flounders, corporations act in ungrounded and bizarre ways. This is not a healthy system.
"The last part" of GP is taxing the company's money when it's distributed to shareholders, and that is absolutely already happening. You might not like the current rates or loopholes (neither do I), but I think most of the somewhat-wealthy big tech engineers on this board can attest that it "is happening".
Taxing company profits directly may be less efficient from an economics point of view but it's much more politically palatable.
This is the last part. Where do you think the money goes if not to employees or owners?
Land value tax is a consumption tax too, since defending and servicing and routing around one’s occupied surface area of the earth is very costly for the rest of society.
- spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest of the economy
- spend their profits to try and grow, and succeed; not only spreading capital but creating new wealth that will eventually work its way around to the shareholders
- return it to shareholders, where it gets taxed
So you could have a situation where you have $1m in profit, and you want to buy a $1m machine, but the machine goes on your balance sheet and not your income statement, so your books still show $1m in profit, even though you now have no cash. And now you still have to pay tax on the $1m.
Now, in the next year, the rules allow you to write off say $200k of that machine, reducing your profit by that much. Eventually, you get to write off much / all of the machine.
But cash is king, and on a cash basis, the tax man is doing very much better than the business in this scenario.
Better to dispense with all the accounting intrigues, tax corporations at 0%, and just tax dividends, buybacks, and salaries.
What could have possibly changed…
And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.
Which was a conglomerate of a bunch of state-funded US research labs.
And the US cut its science funding.
Misery all the way down!
And glass/mirrors from Zeiss, amongst a whole bunch others:
> ASML employs more than 42,000 people[1] from 143 nationalities and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers.[6]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
* https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...
Let's also not forget the the two most prominent chip design software companies, Cadence and Synopsys, are American:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies
There are all sorts of inter-dependencies between companies and countries: welcome to globalization.
I think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity
What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
> The fund’s expansion includes a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona. Apple is the largest customer at this state-of-the-art facility, which employs more than 2,000 workers to manufacture the chips in the United States. Mass production of Apple chips began last month.
Also Chip Wars is really good. I may be confusing which one is which because I read them back to back, but they overlap!
We're not giving them EUV and they can't reinvent it, so they're stuck.
Onshore TSMC fabs followed by Intel fabs.
Properly motivated, I think Intel and Apple could do a lot relatively quickly.
It takes years to bring a fab online. Fab 21 in Arizona took 5 years to enter mass production from ground breaking. Some believe it could be done in two but that’s yet to be demonstrated. Then there are the wafers themselves. The total time it takes to process one wafer at the single nm scale is around 100 days.
So realistically, even if one makes up their mind to make a fab fast, you’re looking at 3 years before you have your first sellable wafer.
What does this even mean? When I went to my local Apple Store to see the iPhone air in person (to decide if it was right for me, which it was), they had a line out the door for people who wanted to buy new phones. Their Mac business is very healthy since introducing their own silicon. Everyone in the Bay Area (skewed, I know) has AirPods on the train or at the grocery store.
other companies should also follow that trend, use ai for useful features, just give the feature a good name... no need to mention "ai"... because next year it could be something else that is powering the feature.