Apple Reports $8.4 Billion in Mac Revenue as AI Demand Catches Company Off Guard

Apple reported $8.4 billion in Mac revenue for its second fiscal quarter ended March 28, surpassing Wall Street expectations of roughly $8 billion, as demand for local AI workloads drove stronger-than-anticipated sales of the Mac mini and Mac Studio.

Total company revenue for the quarter reached $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period a year earlier, with iPhone sales and Services remaining the largest contributors.

Mac sales rose 6% year over year — a result that investors had not anticipated. Analysts had expected performance to come in essentially flat before the earnings call.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts that the company had under-estimated how quickly customers were gravitating toward Mac hardware to run local AI models, including OpenClaw, a platform that has driven significant demand particularly in China.

"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 the Mac mini and Mac Studio.

Cook noted that the Mac mini had become the top-selling desktop in China, a market he described as being in an OpenClaw frenzy. Enterprise adoption was also a factor, with Apple pointing to companies such as Perplexity turning to the Mac as a preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants.

The recently launched MacBook Neo also contributed to the quarter's results, though its impact was limited. Preorders for the Neo began March 4, meaning most units shipped in mid- to late March, and some demand may have extended into April as certain models sold out.

Cook described customer demand for the Neo as "off the charts" and said Apple set a record in the quarter for customers new to the Mac, partly driven by the new device. The company also reported that school systems, including Kansas City Public Schools, had switched from Chromebooks to the Neo.

Despite the quarterly beat, Mac revenue was flat on a quarter-over-quarter basis, signaling that the new wave of AI-driven demand has yet to reach full scale.

Apple acknowledged supply constraints on both the Mac mini and MacBook Neo, and Cook said it may take the company "several months" to reach supply-demand balance on those 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.

The results underscore a broader dynamic taking shape across the personal computing market: AI workloads — once assumed to require cloud infrastructure or dedicated data center hardware — are increasingly being run at the device level, pulling consumer and enterprise buyers toward higher-powered local machines. Whether Apple can resolve its supply constraints quickly enough to capture that momentum in the quarters ahead remains an open question.

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