“Apple yesterday said it sold a record number of Macs in the September quarter, dealing out 5.7 million machines to customers worldwide,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld. “With those sales, the Mac reached a major milestone for the first time — sales of 20 million or more machines in an Apple fiscal year — by logging a total of 20.6 million over the last four quarters.”
“Apple has been able to maintain Mac sales growth in the face of continued struggles by the PC industry overall: Researcher IDC recently pegged the business as down 11% for the September quarter, while rival Gartner tapped the contraction at 8%,” Keizer reports. “Revenue from Mac sales reached almost $6.9 billion, representing 13.4% of Apple’s total of $51.5 billion; that’s the largest slice of revenue for the almost-overlooked line in a year. To put that amount in context, the revenue Apple booked from its Mac line alone last quarter was more than the entire company recorded in the third quarter of 2007.”
“The Mac again out-earned the once-sexier iPad, and by a wider margin than before,” Keizer reports. “With iPad unit sales down 19.8% and revenue off 19.6%, the tablet accounted for just 8.3% of Apple’s total revenue for the quarter, the smallest portion ever. The $4.3 billion that Apple booked on iPad sales was the smallest amount since the first quarter of 2011, less than a year after the tablet’s debut.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The iPad remains the future. As we wrote last January:
The #1 reason why iPad sales have plateaued is because Apple builds iPads so damn well. Apple iPads last for years and years. We’ve handed down gen-1 iPads to pre-schoolers, years ago, and they’re still working just fine! Thrown around, walked on, dripped on, you name it – the iPad just keeps on ticking. The upgrade cycle for iPads is simply not going to match the cycle for subsidized phones on two-year contracts.
Even during its “pause,” iPad sold 9.883 million units in the quarter.