Mike Wuerthele
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook this week took a swipe at Mac sales estimates, as true sales figures came in higher than predicted by Gartner, pushing Apple to a third consecutive quarter of growth in both volume and earnings.
In Tuesday's quarterly earnings report, Apple declared sales of 4.29 million units of Macs, up slightly from the same period in 2016. While not as profound a jump as the holiday quarter when the 2016 MacBook Pro launched, availability of new machines for the most recent quarter was for only half the reporting period or less, depending on configuration.
Gartner's preliminary statistics, published July 12, showed Apple rising one spot to end the quarter in fourth place with 4.24 million units shipped to vendors and sold to customers directly. The estimated performance was down 0.4 percent compared to last year, when the company sold 4.25 million Macs.
The difference in units between Apple's actual sales numbers and Gartner's shipment estimates means that the company had a year-over-year growth in the Mac, not a contraction. Apple has maintained Mac sales growth for the entirety of the 2017 fiscal year.
According to the same estimates, Apple captured 6.9 percent of the worldwide market for the quarter, up from 6.7 percent in the second quarter of 2016. At the time, AppleInsider noted that the numbers seemed peculiar, given Apple's wide swath of updates of its Mac line in June at the WWDC.
Cook declared in the earnings conference call that the Mac's volume worldwide has grown seven percent year-over-year. Cook also noted that the growth was despite IDC's latest estimate of a four percent contraction in the PC market.
Gartner predicted in January that worldwide device shipments of PCs, tablets, and smartphones would remain static until 2018. While that may be the case industry-wide, Apple's actual sales figures have exceeded Gartner's shipment predictions consistently — and the rest of the industry reports shipments, not actual sales.
It is not clear when Apple will refresh its product lineup again. Apple updated its MacBook Pro and iMac lines at the WWDC, and teased the forthcoming iMac Pro which will start shipping later in 2017. In April, Apple said that there was a new Mac Pro coming, but not in 2017, and that the Mac mini was an important part of the company's product plan.
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Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
75 Comments
But but...the MacBook Pro is overpriced and the dongle hell issue keeps everyone from buying them! And those iMacs...gosh, those are just so lame today!
Where are all of these people who basically said the new MacBook Pro will be a failure because of its lack of ports, you need a dongle for everything, its way too expensive? And don't give me this crap about well what if it had more ports and was cheaper, they'd sell twice as much. Thats absolute pure BS! That touch bar is just a gimmick and won't help sell the MacBook Pro.
Where are these people now? All quiet with their tail between their legs in defeat as usual. They never learn. Apple know its market a hell of a lot better than any one of us here. They see things we will never see. They have more data than we could possibly ever get. We need to stop trying to run Apple to suit our own needs. Our needs may not be the needs of the majority which is a hell of a lot more important to Apple as a company than a very small set of customers.
One of these days investors will wake up and realize the majority of analysts haven't the faintest idea what they're doing or saying. I don't know when that time will be because there are a lot of business-ignorant people out there who blindly trust what analysts are saying, all while the analysts are working on ways to short a stock for their own gain. Even if analysts declare they don't have AAPL stock, they have enough stock that is affected by what AAPL does, giving them some kind of self-justification for coming up with bogus comments and numbers all the time. The first thing investors need to know is not to trust what analysts say because they always have ulterior motives.
Did anyone else read that headline has Apple defeating the market of contractors? I had no idea contractors were in competition with Apple. LOL.
Huzzah. Most curious to hear how the haters and critics spin these facts to fit their narrative...
I was amused to see how the haters on MR spun the increase in ipad sales — “This is just the cheap new ipad padding the numbers!” first time i’d heard of anyone criticizing Apple for offering cheap ipads! what will they complain about next?!!