Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs

Apple’s iPhone sales and Services revenue were the stars of the show in the tech giant’s most recent quarter, but the Mac quietly outperformed — helped by growing demand for AI workloads.

Wall Street investors had expected to see Mac revenue in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second quarter ended March 28 — a notable beat for a non-core segment of the tech giant’s business. In addition, investors ahead of earnings believed that Mac sales would be essentially flat year-over-year. Instead, Mac sales were up 6% on an annual basis, the company told investors. The company’s total revenue was $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period last year.

Apple chalked up some of the Mac growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, those fun, colorful computers were only on sale for a few weeks after the March 4 preorders began. Realistically, most units shipped mid- to late March, and some demand may have been pushed into April as certain models sold out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday that customer demand for the Neo was “off the charts” and higher than Apple had expected. He also noted that Apple set a record in the quarter for customers new to the Mac, partly due to the Neo.

Cook attributed the Mac sales growth to the use of the platform for running local AI models, like OpenClaw — something that took Apple somewhat by surprise as Mac mini and Mac Studio devices sold out in recent weeks.

“Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher than expected demand,” Cook said of these Mac sales. He also noted that the Mac mini was the top-selling desktop in China — a market that’s been in an OpenClaw frenzy as of late.

Still, Mac revenue was flat on a quarter-over-quarter basis, suggesting this new demand has yet to scale. Cook said it may take Apple “several months” to reach supply-demand balance on the Mac mini and Studio models.

“We’re not at the point where we’re saying this [constraint] is going to end anytime soon. And it’s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand,” Cook explained.

Enterprise demand for the Mac was also at play. Apple pointed to a couple of larger companies, including Perplexity, that had turned to Mac as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants.

He also said Apple was “supply constrained on the MacBook Neo,” and has even seen school systems, like Kansas City Public Schools, dropping Chromebooks for the Neo.