The Mac is absolutely killing it right now

Apple just released its quarterly earnings results. Here are the important take-aways.

It’s easy to yawn when you see a headline like this one Thursday at The Verge: “Apple reports best March quarter ever with new records for iPhone and Mac.” After all, Apple has been one of the most profitable companies in the world for many years now. But I’ve been in the game long enough to remember a time when Apple was barely getting by, the Mac was struggling against the Wintel behemoth, and the corporate press was writing endless stories about Apple being an acquisition target. As a long-time Apple enthusiast, that perspective really helps me appreciate the golden era of Apple that we’re currently living through. Here’s some of the most important things to know about Apple’s just-released quarterly numbers. From the aforementioned article at The Verge:

…the Mac continues to surge. “The last seven Mac quarters have now been the top seven quarters ever in the history of the Mac,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC.

The turnaround in the Mac’s fortunes over the last two years is one of the biggest success stories in the company’s history. Apple addressed just about every meaningful criticism it received from the Apple community and the tech press over the last decade. It’s clear that Apple is prioritizing the Mac, and gone are the concerns that Apple might give up on the Mac out of disinterest, or outsized-emphasis on its iPhone division. And everyone is feeling great about Apple Silicon. The M1 family of chips are powerful, whisper quiet, and cool with a generational leap in battery life. As I wrote just this week in my six month review of the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro, these are the best laptops Apple has ever made in every conceivable way. It’s clear that the market is responding favorably to the direction Apple is taking the Mac. Apple has so many products and services, and the Mac in 2022 is a small slice of Apple’s overall revenue pie chart, but the Mac was what brought me to Apple twenty-two years ago, so I have an outsized amount of care for its fortunes.

Patrick McGee, writing on Twitter:

Apple services now has 825mn subscribers, up 165mn from a year before, says Luca Maestri, chief financial officer.

“We’re obviously very happy given all the investment we made in recent years,” he tells @FT

That’s spread across all of Apple’s services including Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, etc. It would be neat to see an official breakdown of subscriber numbers for each service. Apple clearly wants to impress you with the big cumulative number for all of its services. For example, Spotify has 406 million subscribers, though a more direct comparison would be to their 180 million paid subscribers. Disney+ has about 43 million paid subscribers. Apple TV+ is presumed to have about 25 million subscribers. Apple isn’t a market leader with any of its services, but it has a healthy number of them and is in no way getting embarrassed. Furthermore, the fact that it’s not a market leader in any of these areas helps its efforts to fend off antitrust attacks, at times brought by competitors like Spotify. At the end of the day, Apple’s not squandering its investment in its services products. They’re making money for the company and buying it real cultural clout, as we saw a few weeks ago when Apple became the first streaming service to haul in a best picture Oscar for CODA.

The iPad, on the other hand, was down ever so slightly. Apple blamed component shortages, and that’s likely at least part of the reason. It’s possible though that customers who might have chosen an iPad three years ago are now choosing a Mac instead. Before Apple Silicon came to the Mac, I was somewhat bearish about the Mac’s longterm prospects and pretty bullish on the future of the iPad. I still think the iPad could become a peer computer class to the Mac, but I now see a really bright future for the Mac as well.

There’s no telling how long these banner years for Apple will last, but I’m savoring each and every one. It’s a good time to be an Apple enthusiast.