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.
I 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.
I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute
I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill, but in the last few years the web has become increasingly hostile with ads, fake reviews, bad information (Especially sites like Reddit.com), and bad deals. A lot of places that used to have good information have since been astroturfed. And Search Engines like Google will happily serve them up on the front page of any relevant web search.
"I don't understand why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation' "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
Is this because they don't have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?
People 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.
> 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.
Seems 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).
You can easily turn the "ads" off though. The only true ad are the start menu ones which is a single toggle in Settings. I have much bigger issues with setup time. I just got a Windows laptop and it took (not exaggerating) 3 hours to finally get to the desktop. Multiple reboots at the POST, then taking forever to download Windows updates and get through all the setup screens. Compared to a Mac setup it's an insanely long time to just use your computer.
That is even not counting the additional Windows updates after you get to the desktop and updates from the OEM. This is also with a Microsoft account while restoring my own settings from OneDrive.
> We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
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.
People choose what to outsource and, as cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment, they go to a dealer/mechanic. Personally, I've never done a lot of personal car mechanic work.
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.
> cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment
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.
These are all relatively simple TO YOU. You are not everyone though. Some people lack the mobility, strength or even time to do these things. Some people just don't want to get dirty working on their car. Some people don't have the space to do these kinds of maintenance.
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.
Changing a pad/disc/caliper isn’t “hard” but it’s time consuming and very messy. Most people probably don’t find spending 2 hours getting the car jacked, tires off, etc to be a good or enjoyable use of time!
> it is very simple to change a brake pad and disc
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.
You're overstating how easy these tasks are for many people. Doing brake pads/rotors or changing oil requires a driveway, some tools, and (for oil) a way to collect and dispose of the old fluids. Not everyone has access to those things - for instance, people who live in an apartment complex may not have the space to work on their car.
Sure, everything you say was true for many folks 40 years ago too though! My point is, the processes haven't really changed for the common maintenance tasks over this period, people's perception of the difficulty certainly appears to have though.
Actually, in modern times you can buy an oil extraction pump off Amazon for $100, making oil changes so much easier than they were 40 years ago! A lot of [especially European] cars have the filter accessible from the top, meaning that you can change oil in 15 minutes in any apartment parking space by doing little more than popping the hood!
Except many new cars are locked down in software, for example not allowing to release rear parking brakes without authorized service subscription, keeping the electronic keys for each VIN unique and stored in the cloud. Yes, there are workarounds on releasing the brakes manually but it is a burden.
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.
Cars are both more complicated and way more reliable. You used to spend a Sunday changing your plugs and points. Now your car lacks points and if the plugs last less than 100000km it's a disappointment. You used to need new clutch plates on the regular, now nobody ever needs them or if they do need them the car is a total loss because good luck getting to the clutches. On my current car the closest I ever came to working on it was replacing the wiper blades.
Modern cars are also way harder to work on than in the past. You used to be able to buy a Haynes manual for every major car and could do most of the repair work if you wanted! Nowadays, not so much. Specialized tools galore, tearing apart the whole car for minor hidden things... This one is far more on the car manufacturers than consumers IMHO. I am also sad about the death of the manual transmission. Glad to have gotten one of the final years that Mini will be producing them!
> 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.
My wife has been without a desktop or laptop for more than a decade. Her primary computing devices are her phone and iPad.
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.
There'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.
It 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?
I pay full price, and use cheap MVNOs for phone service. Ends up being much cheaper and no mobile carrier shenanigans polluting my phones, sim lock, etc.
Around 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.
Good 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.
Eddy 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.
Most 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)
> 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.
Even 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.
And 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.
I 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.
I 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.
> 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.
Their 2025 US taxes are actually higher. In Q4 2024 "Apple paid a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in order to resolve the tax issue with Ireland, which dates to 2016."
Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!").
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.
Correct. Corporate income tax is really a tax on shareholders (alternative to paying tax is paying shareholders a dividend). The corporate tax rate hits all owners regardless of income/wealth. That includes pension funds, 401ks, small investors, etc. Proponents of progressive taxes should be against corporate tax and in favor of income tax, property tax, etc.
It also takes money away from the corporation, when they should be doing one of these:
- 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
Depends on what it gets spent on - capital purchases dont reduce net income. You can write it off, but there are rules limiting how much.
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.
Earned income tax makes no sense, it targets the young and hard working, and work should be maximally rewarded. Land value tax is what makes sense, targeting rent seekers and the wealthy. Also consumption taxes, if one is concerned about things like the environment or substance abuse.
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.
Actually it was a huge tax addition in 2024 (from Europe over dispute about how Ireland had taxed Apple for many years). In 2024 Apple added 14.4 billion in additional taxes accrued over many years.
Are different sources of income taxed differently? Could it partly be from some change in income sources? Seems Services is more significant this quarter.
Effective US tax rate is higher in 2025. The 2024 tax number was inflated due to a one time payment relating to Ireland which actually dates back to 2016.
They have enough "AI" stuff. People just don't know it is AI. That is the best way of integrating AI into your product(s). The tech behind stuff doesn't really matter for the end user.
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.
Siri can’t tell the time and people on Android can remove passerby’s from pictures, we can’t. I’m an Apple fanboy but Apple has been coasting for 10 years.
Siri can tell the time (I just checked - I’ve never tried before now) and you’ve been able to remove people/cars from photos for a while now I believe. Looks like iOS 16? Still took way too long and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is crap compared to Android (I haven’t used it). They also finally added call screening - idk why that took so long as my Pixel 3 had it over 5 years ago.
Serves them right. Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don't. I thought Apple was supposed to be a simple company selling complicated things.
> Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don't.
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.
AirPods are certainly super popular, but I can't think of many places that are extreme outliers in almost every category like the Bay Area. A lot of startups have failed assuming their business that worked for Bay Area customers would work elsewhere.
This is true but airpods is a bad example. They are a runaway success. Estimates are they did around $25bn of revenue in the last year. For context the highest annual revenue Bose ever did was $4bn (since declined). Sonos does something like $1.5bn. If Airpods was a standalone company it would be one of the biggest consumer hardware companies in the world.
Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.
I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.
There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.
In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.
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.
I 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.
I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute
I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill, but in the last few years the web has become increasingly hostile with ads, fake reviews, bad information (Especially sites like Reddit.com), and bad deals. A lot of places that used to have good information have since been astroturfed. And Search Engines like Google will happily serve them up on the front page of any relevant web search.
"I don't understand why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation' "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
Is this because they don't have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?
Perhaps 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?
People 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.
Or rather not buying laptops as often as phone. 2015 Mac or other premium laptop is good enough for internet surfing.
> 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.
I wonder how much the Windows 11 debacle will increase Mac sales by.
It'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.
Hahaha that was some targetted downvoting! Must have hit a nerve.
Seems 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).
You can easily turn the "ads" off though. The only true ad are the start menu ones which is a single toggle in Settings. I have much bigger issues with setup time. I just got a Windows laptop and it took (not exaggerating) 3 hours to finally get to the desktop. Multiple reboots at the POST, then taking forever to download Windows updates and get through all the setup screens. Compared to a Mac setup it's an insanely long time to just use your computer.
That is even not counting the additional Windows updates after you get to the desktop and updates from the OEM. This is also with a Microsoft account while restoring my own settings from OneDrive.
> We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
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.
People choose what to outsource and, as cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment, they go to a dealer/mechanic. Personally, I've never done a lot of personal car mechanic work.
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.
> cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment
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.
These are all relatively simple TO YOU. You are not everyone though. Some people lack the mobility, strength or even time to do these things. Some people just don't want to get dirty working on their car. Some people don't have the space to do these kinds of maintenance.
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.
Changing a pad/disc/caliper isn’t “hard” but it’s time consuming and very messy. Most people probably don’t find spending 2 hours getting the car jacked, tires off, etc to be a good or enjoyable use of time!
> it is very simple to change a brake pad and disc
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.
You're overstating how easy these tasks are for many people. Doing brake pads/rotors or changing oil requires a driveway, some tools, and (for oil) a way to collect and dispose of the old fluids. Not everyone has access to those things - for instance, people who live in an apartment complex may not have the space to work on their car.
(Air filters are, admittedly, pretty easy.)
Sure, everything you say was true for many folks 40 years ago too though! My point is, the processes haven't really changed for the common maintenance tasks over this period, people's perception of the difficulty certainly appears to have though.
Actually, in modern times you can buy an oil extraction pump off Amazon for $100, making oil changes so much easier than they were 40 years ago! A lot of [especially European] cars have the filter accessible from the top, meaning that you can change oil in 15 minutes in any apartment parking space by doing little more than popping the hood!
Except many new cars are locked down in software, for example not allowing to release rear parking brakes without authorized service subscription, keeping the electronic keys for each VIN unique and stored in the cloud. Yes, there are workarounds on releasing the brakes manually but it is a burden.
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.
Cars are both more complicated and way more reliable. You used to spend a Sunday changing your plugs and points. Now your car lacks points and if the plugs last less than 100000km it's a disappointment. You used to need new clutch plates on the regular, now nobody ever needs them or if they do need them the car is a total loss because good luck getting to the clutches. On my current car the closest I ever came to working on it was replacing the wiper blades.
Modern cars are also way harder to work on than in the past. You used to be able to buy a Haynes manual for every major car and could do most of the repair work if you wanted! Nowadays, not so much. Specialized tools galore, tearing apart the whole car for minor hidden things... This one is far more on the car manufacturers than consumers IMHO. I am also sad about the death of the manual transmission. Glad to have gotten one of the final years that Mini will be producing them!
> 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.
My wife has been without a desktop or laptop for more than a decade. Her primary computing devices are her phone and iPad.
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.
There'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.
>We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
This is logical result of walled gardens.
It 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?
I pay full price, and use cheap MVNOs for phone service. Ends up being much cheaper and no mobile carrier shenanigans polluting my phones, sim lock, etc.
Same. I buy the phone I can afford. And then I pay for cell coverage I can afford. And then I go about my life living it logically.
You didn't trade in your old phone?
> 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.
My understanding is Services includes the billions Google pays for Safari search default, reported to be $20 billion a year.
In 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.
Around 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.
Good 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.
Eddy 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?
Most 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)
Revenue 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!
Mac 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.
Crazier if Apple got into the GPU business.
They 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/
> 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.
Even 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.
And 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.
If they ever stopped making Macs guess I'd start using Linux other than just for servers.
Framework 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..
Good 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.
One would hope that before ceasing to make the hardware that they open it up and actually allow you to install other OSes
These 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
Yeah you are right, my bad! Fixed
I 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-bes...
I 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.
Wearables may include lightning charger cables :) ?
Not 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.
No, iPad is not bigger than Mac. It's smaller. Look again at the numbers.
Interesting that Google and Apple matched their quarterly earnings in revenue .
All these companies depend on TSMC for their life.
And TSMC depends on machines by ASML they can also sell to others.
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 ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.
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.
It’s a conglomerate of researchers that were employed by the feds and private institutions who met have received various forms of grants
I think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity
But what about the next area where science can have a massive impact?
sounds like a totally different thread to me
Had to look up what TSMC meant (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
> 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.
There's an amazing book on Apple in China all about this issue (and more). It's a great read and I'd highly recommend if you're interested.
Also Chip Wars is really good. I may be confusing which one is which because I read them back to back, but they overlap!
Thanks! I've added both to my reading list
If a war rendered TSMC unavailable it would crash the global economy. There is no next best option.
>What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
Onshore TSMC fabs followed by Intel fabs.
Properly motivated, I think Intel and Apple could do a lot relatively quickly.
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If true, TSMC would command much higher margins. Their net revenue is a fraction of Nvidia or Apple
TSMC's business is much higher risk, each improvement to manufacturing process is a massive investment that's never a guaranteed success.
This stuck out like a sore thumb to me:
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-...
Their 2025 US taxes are actually higher. In Q4 2024 "Apple paid a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in order to resolve the tax issue with Ireland, which dates to 2016."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!").
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...
Correct. Corporate income tax is really a tax on shareholders (alternative to paying tax is paying shareholders a dividend). The corporate tax rate hits all owners regardless of income/wealth. That includes pension funds, 401ks, small investors, etc. Proponents of progressive taxes should be against corporate tax and in favor of income tax, property tax, etc.
It also takes money away from the corporation, when they should be doing one of these:
- 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
Isn’t that how it already works? They can spend all of their profits or pay taxes on profit and sit on the rest?
Depends on what it gets spent on - capital purchases dont reduce net income. You can write it off, but there are rules limiting how much.
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.
Earned income tax makes no sense, it targets the young and hard working, and work should be maximally rewarded. Land value tax is what makes sense, targeting rent seekers and the wealthy. Also consumption taxes, if one is concerned about things like the environment or substance abuse.
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.
Actually it was a huge tax addition in 2024 (from Europe over dispute about how Ireland had taxed Apple for many years). In 2024 Apple added 14.4 billion in additional taxes accrued over many years.
Are different sources of income taxed differently? Could it partly be from some change in income sources? Seems Services is more significant this quarter.
No, the 2024 number is goosed by paying a big back tax bill after a court decision in the EU.
Yes Tax Avoidance strategies are inversely correlated to enforcement efforts.
What could have possibly changed…
Enough to pay for everything DOGE and the Trump admin cut in 2025, assuming a big chunk of that is US taxes.
Effective US tax rate is higher in 2025. The 2024 tax number was inflated due to a one time payment relating to Ireland which actually dates back to 2016.
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How come they don’t add AI?
They have enough "AI" stuff. People just don't know it is AI. That is the best way of integrating AI into your product(s). The tech behind stuff doesn't really matter for the end user.
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.
Siri can’t tell the time and people on Android can remove passerby’s from pictures, we can’t. I’m an Apple fanboy but Apple has been coasting for 10 years.
Siri can tell the time (I just checked - I’ve never tried before now) and you’ve been able to remove people/cars from photos for a while now I believe. Looks like iOS 16? Still took way too long and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is crap compared to Android (I haven’t used it). They also finally added call screening - idk why that took so long as my Pixel 3 had it over 5 years ago.
Apple is far behind the competition when it comes to image editing...
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DPWkNZHjebe/
If people are buying iPhones without AI mashed into every orifice, why bother?
They tried and made fools of themselves. They're trying again right now.
Serves them right. Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don't. I thought Apple was supposed to be a simple company selling complicated things.
What do you mean serves them right? They made records.
The title was changed since I made my comment. Seems the message of their earnings increase outdid trepidation about their future.
FWIW the submitted title was "Apple reports fourth quarter results" and hasn't changed.
Beats earnings consensus, up 4.5% in after hours, yeah, that’ll learn ‘em. You misread something, but I’m not sure what it is.
> Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don't.
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.
AirPods are certainly super popular, but I can't think of many places that are extreme outliers in almost every category like the Bay Area. A lot of startups have failed assuming their business that worked for Bay Area customers would work elsewhere.
This is true but airpods is a bad example. They are a runaway success. Estimates are they did around $25bn of revenue in the last year. For context the highest annual revenue Bose ever did was $4bn (since declined). Sonos does something like $1.5bn. If Airpods was a standalone company it would be one of the biggest consumer hardware companies in the world.
Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.
They'll just need to start from scratch on all this. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I don't think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.
I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.
"If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple."
Is that true? Does cash mean nothing?
by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use.
I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.
There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.
In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.