Comment by haunter
6 days ago
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
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There's a book out there (I don't remember the author, title, or anything really) written by a guy who traveled around the world, over several years, in a VW bus(?). The thing that struck me is, he got home within a couple days of when he planned to, before he even took off. The entire trip was planned.
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Speaking from a developing country with a large population of less educated people, I think you would be surprised to find out that a majority of the people in the world simply don't do "research work". Successfully booking a flight ticket from a straightforward app on their phone is already at their limit (BTW, ~80% of people in the world have never taken a plane). For most other "research" requirement like planning a trip, they would just search on tiktok to see what those influencers have to say (or nowadays, ask the AI)
I feel exactly the same way. There are personal finance management softwares that are mobile exclusive.
Like, have you tried doing data entry on a phone? Who is using these products?
I'm with you, but I guess users don't care (and I really don't get it).
None of the mobile finance apps I've used even have half the reporting ability I want (presumably because users don't care, and not because it wouldn't fit on the screen).
The camera on the back of the phone actually helps quite a bit with said data entry.
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The vast majority of people.
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.
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You don't really have to buy a new laptop every year though. If it wasn't for my work provided laptop I'd still use my 2015 mbp
I still use my thinkpad from 2012. It runs fine with Linux on it, i had to replace the hdd and some other parts but otherwise it’s holding up. Granted I only do very simple stuff on it, no dev work, video or gaming. Mostly browser, reading, writing, music and chatting
You don’t have to buy a phone every year either
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?
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?
You don't need a lot of space to see everything, because you can store information in your memory.
You narrow down your options by having knowledge like "I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let's plan the itinerary in this way..."
I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.
And it's simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you're distracted, you're not pruning useless information, you don't know what you don't know.
I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
I get the feeling that people don't do research work. They buy whatever is affordable that gets advertised to them first. They can't even tell the difference between ads and search results. Their devices are primarily for media consumption and they create little if anything. They have zero need for most of the computing power their devices offer, could get by just fine on a phone from 10 years ago if it were still being supported, and they really only want the latest models for social status reasons.
> I really don't get how people do research work … without a computer
People used to do it in their heads.
Einstein, Tolkien, Hawking, Newton, Shakespeare, Euclid, Archimedes.
With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)
> (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)
Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend's just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don't want to carry my laptop/iPad anywhere.
Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.
That's an exceptionally high bar of talent and creativity. For the 99.999+% of us, the computer and the mobile has made completion of many tasks highly efficient. Like surfing HN on a lazy Saturday morning...
Socrates famously frowned upon the written medium and preferred his memories for storage
you mean very intelligent and very smart people used to do it in their head without computer or calculator
these days only idiots would do so on pen and paper only
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.
For a lot of people, time is more valuable than money.
They get on their phone and complete a task and move on.
Spending an hour comparing a dozen tabs on a computer to save $30 on a flight is less important than spending that time with their loved ones.
Yes exactly this. My time is more valuable than the research and headache.
I would understand if you saved $500 or more. If you are frequent flyer, that would add up.
Whenever I travel I'm also coordinating with at least 2 other people. That may include my wife/extended family, or friends. I may jump on my desktop for research, but ultimately I'm sending a browser tab to my phone to share via txt with others.
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). 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 get why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation's "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.
> I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill
If you’re not getting paid to promote them, you’re not a shill. Honest recommendations are welcome!
> I don't understand why people don't use travel agents
I laughed. Just used a travel agent.
Shill it out my dude. I want to know where the good stuff is hiding.
My wife and I travel a lot, we aren’t that price sensitive. We are going to fly Delta where we both have status and stay in a Hyatt or Hilton brand hotel where I have status. It takes us less than 10 minutes to make travel plans on our phones.
Very few people do any research work. They usually click whatever platform they are already in (ie: mytrip.xxx) and just book the ticket there and probably pay using Apple Pay straight from their phone.
This.
Searching the internet on a phone feels like exploring the world through the eye of a needle.
People do research work without a mac. A Windows box or Chromebook to do the stuff you want is less than half the cost of an Air, and a MBP is priced out of everything but status-conscious executive (and para-executive) consumers and FAANG-adjacent tech folks.
Nah people just don’t do research work.
Maybe one in 100k does
I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can't open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.
> 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.
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> the Windows 11 debacle
Seems to imply that anyone cares beyond a niche. I use Windows 11 on my gaming PC and emulator PC, and I don't care at all. It works perfectly fine.
OS X is much worse in my opinion, with awful window management and constant bugs breaking basic functionality.
The only decent OS experience I've ever had is with KDE and Gnome. But Linux sucks at running games, and there is no good Linux/x86 hardware out there.
Pick your poison.
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Depends where on the world the people are located and their budget for laptops beyond 500 euros.
> Windows 11 debacle
Do you really think that anything MSFT has done with MW11 --unfriendly to consumers or not-- will significantly impede the success of MW11?
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Yeah, I agree. I have an Apple Watch 5 and I don’t really look at new models if they don’t have new sensors. Even then, I wait to see if they are useful. AirPods get replaced if they get broken maybe. I’m still rocking my 2018 iPad and I don’t feel like I need an updated one. iPhone gets replaced once they become unsupported. I’m still deciding if I want to commit to the ecosystem by getting a Mac or get a Framework.
> 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.
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.
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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!
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Cars are a lot safer now. People routinely walk away from collisions that would have killed everyone in the vehicle back in 70s. So there is some gain to the trade off.
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> Makes me sad
On one hand, yes. But also, cars are now an appliance. They rarely break, can be bought quite cheaply (if that’s what you want) and consume little time. I like this.
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> 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.
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.
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I pay full price up front. Just bought an iPhone 17 pro and sold the 16 pro on Swappa. I've never found a trade-in deal that was better than selling a phone myself, and the 1 or 2 times I've tried it, I've ended up frustrated by having a locked phone, and paid it off early anyway.
The big carriers hide the phone in the price but you're still paying it. I just use US Mobile unlimited plans for $35/mo, plus it gives me free international service which was the real advantage for me. Paying 1/3 the annual service plan and $0/day int'l roaming instead of $15/day.
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.
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.
>We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
This is logical result of walled gardens.
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.
If only devs wanted to build for mac like they did 15 years ago when the hardware was shitty
Crazier if Apple got into the GPU business.
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Interesting that Wearables is flat.
AirPods completely saturated their market incredibly quickly.
I presume AirPods sales at this point are mostly just replacing lost AirPods...
The changes for the watch were also very uninspiring this year.
> 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.
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.
IIRC, tech in general was trading at very low multiples 10 years ago. Microsoft was also ~ 10, and Google and Facebook were probably < 20 as well.
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...
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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.
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Great, Apple is probably going to force more ads onto all of its platforms to drive service growth.
In ancient times Apple prided itself on not polluting its platforms with intrusive advertisements, but the line has been crossed and going back seems unlikely at this point.
Yeah, the corporation cancer.
DRM slowdowns have also made the built-in apps like TV worse for watching shows than just pirating and watching them with IINA etc. In Jobs' days iTunes even let you play purchased songs on any computer.
I wish there was a law or something that did not allow shareholders & board members who did not have an understanding of the industry, to influence or dictate the course of a company, without feedback from its USERS/customers.
Stakeholders such as customers, employees, and the general public are all affected by corporate actions, but they don't seem to have much of a voice in current corporate governance structures.
Google's law says that "don't be evil" and "unlimited growth" are ultimately opposing forces.
If anything, they're the iPhone company and they are massively understating how much of their revenue is directly attributable to the iPhone.
Take "Services" for example: most of their services are things like App Store revenue and Google Search revenue, something they technically have on all of their platforms, but the lion's share of that revenue comes directly from iPhone users subscribed to iPhone apps, playing iPhone gacha games or using Google (or any of the other officially supported search engines) in the iPhone version of Safari. The reason to have iCloud+ is to be able to backup your phone, and the photos you take on your phone, and store the emails and iMessages and other data you create on your phone. It's all there accessible on the Mac and iPad too, but they have far more iPhone customers than Mac or iPad customers.
Even the smaller services are mostly supported by iPhone users: most AppleCare users, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, arguably you could make a case that Apple TV+ (a.k.a. just Apple TV now for some reason) is the one service that isn't directly attributable to the iPhone, but that is also like the one part of their services division that has had prior reports that it isn't exactly turning a profit, and I don't think you can even apply for an Apple Card unless you own an iPhone.
It's the same with most of the other divisions: the reason to have an Apple Watch or AirPods is they go great with your iPhone. They have their individual appeal, and at least with the AirPods, you don't technically need an iPhone to use them, but these are at the end of the day iPhone accessories, the same as their Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse lines or displays are Mac accessories even though technically, any iPad could also take advantage of them now, or you could plug a Magic Keyboard into a Windows PC or something. The math on that doesn't change just because of technicalities like that.
So yeah, Apple is the iPhone company and has been for a very long time now. Macs & iPads, the tens of billions of dollar businesses that they are, are just side gigs for them and Services/Wearables et al. is just obfuscating the degree to which they are the iPhone company.
The day Playground evolves to something similar to XCode is when iPadPro takes over.
That’ll be a good day for the iPad but take over? Not a chance in hell.
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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
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.
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)
iCloud (and the Mac) App Store, AppleCare are Mac products as well. But to your point, sure, Mac sales are a fraction of the phone's—the latter's loss would be devastating for Apple and for services.
It's too bad the world has moved on as it has. I liked Apple a lot when they were just a computer company.
I've been using my 16" MacBook Pro with M2 Max and 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD, for more than 2 years and I feel or see no reason to upgrade.
At least not until there's an external design refresh. But maybe I'll get the M5 Max just for the heck of it.
Mostly because it'd be a pain to move all the data and state (the Time Machine or Mac-to-Mac transfer is not always perfect and hands-free in my experience)
They're just too good for their own good.
Their computers don’t need to be replaced often so that makes total sense to me. Both of my m1 series Macs will be more than adequate for my web dev needs for the next few years or at least until Apple force deprecates them.
Kind of funny they don't separate out accessories as its own category. If I were to guess it's because they don't want to advertise how much they make selling dongles.
It is also clearly why Apple wants to control all e-commerce and is fighting tooth and nail to keep controt
I get that the phones outsell the Macs but just wild Ipads almost match Macs.
Especially given how long an ipad lives, and how overpowered they are for a large portion of their users.
i'd love to know how much of that "services" revenue is just iCloud storage for storing iPhone backups.
Any data on the Vision Pro?