“Over the past few days I’ve seen a lot of anger, bitterness, and rage directed towards Apple, especially on the subject of the Mac, and specifically the absence of new hardware at the WWDC 2018 keynote,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet.
“Let’s put on one side for a moment the fact that WWDC 2018 is not the venue for hardware,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “But there’s something a lot bigger and more fundamental that Mac users need to realize and absorb, and that’s the fact that the Mac isn’t a huge part of Apple’s business.”
“Putting the Mac business into perspective, looking at Apple as a computer vendor, the company ships about five to six million Macs a quarter,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “Compare this to the tens of millions of iPhones Apple sells every quarter. Even iPad sales, which are considered pretty soggy, are around twice that of Macs, and the revenue gap between the two products is pretty close.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That “revenue gap” that Kingsley-Hughes glosses over because it doesn’t fit, and actually refutes, his little narrative is in the Mac’s favor. In Q118, Mac generated $6.895 billion in revenue vs. iPad’s $5.862 billion. In Q218, Mac generated $5.848 billion in revenue vs. iPad’s $4.113 billion.
Mac users certainly matter to Apple. Maybe not pro desktop Mac users. Or low-end Mac desktop users. But those are two tiny niches in the Mac universe. This is not to excuse Apple for those two abject and ongoing management failures (the utter and inexplicable stagnation of Mac Pro and Mac mini), but the bulk of the best-selling Mac product lines (MacBook, MacBook Pro) are new to newish and selling very well.