Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs

Apple’s revenue from iPhone sales and services 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.

Investors on Wall Street did expected to see Mac revenues in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second quarter ended March 28 – a remarkable gain for a non-core segment of the tech giant’s business. Furthermore, before the earnings, investors believed that Mac sales would essentially increase flat on an annual basis. Instead, Mac sales rose 6% year over year, the company told investors. The company’s total revenue was $111.2 billion, up 17% from the same period last year.

Apple attributed some of the Mac growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, those fun, colorful computers were only available for purchase for a few weeks after March 4 pre-orders began. Realistically, most units shipped in mid-to-late March, and some of the demand may have been pushed back to April as certain models sold out.

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

Cook attributed the growth in Mac sales to the platform’s use for running local AI models such as OpenClaw – something that took Apple somewhat by surprise when Mac mini and Mac Studio devices sold out in recent weeks.

“These are both great platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of these is happening faster than we predicted, and so we saw higher-than-expected demand,” Cook said of these Mac sales. He also noted that the Mac mini was the best-selling desktop in China, a market that is was in an OpenClaw frenzy as of late.

Still, Mac revenues remained flat quarter-over-quarter, indicating that this new demand has yet to scale. Cook said it could take Apple “several months” to reach a balance between supply and demand on the Mac mini and Studio models.

“We’re not at the point where we’re saying this yet [constraint] will end soon. And that is not necessarily due to a problem, other than that we simply underestimated the demand,” Cook explains.

Corporate demand for the Mac also played a role. Apple pointed to a few larger companies, including Perplexity, that had chosen the Mac as their platform of choice for building enterprise-level AI assistants.

He also said that Apple had “limited supply on the MacBook Neo,” and has even seen school systems, like Kansas City Public Schools, drop Chromebooks for the Neo.