Apple has been surprised by the AI-driven demand for Macs

Apple’s iPhone sales and services revenues were the stars of the show in the tech giant’s latest quarter, but the Mac has quietly outperformed — thanks to growing demand for artificial intelligence workloads.

Wall Street investors were expecting 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 win for a non-core segment of the tech giant’s business. Additionally, investors believed before the earnings announcement that Mac sales would be essentially flat year over year. Instead, Mac sales rose 6% year over year, the company told investors. The company’s total revenues reached $111.2 billion, an increase of 17% over the same period last year.

Apple has attributed some of the Mac’s growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, these fun and colorful PCs were only on sale for a few weeks after pre-orders began on March 4th. Realistically, most units shipped in 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 second-quarter 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 this quarter for new Mac customers, in part due to the Neo.

Cook attributed the growth in Mac sales to the use of the platform to run native AI models, such as OpenClaw, something that somewhat surprised Apple with the sale of Mac Mini and Mac Studio devices in recent weeks.

“These two platforms are great for AI and agent tools, and customers are realizing that faster than we expected, so we’ve seen higher than expected demand,” Cook said of these Mac sales. He also noted that the Mac Mini was the best-selling desktop PC in China — a market that has been in an OpenClaw craze lately.

However, Mac revenue remained flat quarter-on-quarter, indicating that this new demand has not yet expanded. Cook said it could take Apple “several months” to reach a balance of supply and demand for the Mac Mini and Studio models.

“We are not at the point where we are saying this [constraint] It will end anytime soon. Cook explained that this is not due to a problem in itself, other than that we have reduced demand.

Enterprise demand for Macs has also been influential. Apple has pointed to a couple of major companies, including Perplexity, that have turned to the Mac as its platform of choice for building enterprise-level AI assistants.

He also said Apple was “supply-constrained on the MacBook Neo,” and had even seen school systems, like Kansas City Public Schools, abandon Chromebooks in favor of the Neo.