Apple Mac sales break records amid ex-86-odus to Arm-compatible M1 silicon
- Reference: 1643354888
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/01/28/apple_mac_sales/
- Source link:
For the first quarter of its fiscal 2022 – the three months to December 25 – Apple [1]reported [PDF] revenue of [2]$123.9 billion , up 11 per cent year-over-year. Cupertino made $34.6 billion in profit (or $384M a day) through the quarter, growing 25 per cent from $28.76 billion at this time last year. The US giant's earnings per diluted share were set at $2.10.
Mac sales totaled $10.9 billion, growing by 25 per cent year-over-year. That was record growth, according to Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, on an earnings call with analysts on Thursday.
[3]
"We are one year into our transition to Apple silicon and already the vast majority of our Mac sales are from M1-powered devices which helped drive a record number of upgraders during the December quarter," Maestri enthused. "The last six quarters have been the best six quarters ever for Mac."
[4]
[5]
It's not only the upgraders driving Mac sales, CEO Tim Cook said on the call. "In markets like China, six out of ten sales are to people new to the Mac. It's powered by both upgraders and switchers."
Shopify is upgrading its global workforce to MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and Deloitte Consulting is offering M1 Macs to employees, Maestri announced on the call.
[6]
Mac buyers may have come out in large numbers during the holiday season to upgrade computers, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Tirias Research. But it may be a few quarters until a better picture emerges of how Apple is doing on M1 Macs as heavy holiday purchasing could distort real market trends, he said.
"Clearly, customers see something they like," McCarron opined.
[7]Apple files fresh appeal to stop court order demanding external payment systems in iOS apps
[8]Microsoft poaches Apple chip expert for custom silicon
[9]Apple custom chip guru jumps ship to rejoin Intel
[10]Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill
Apple shifted to the M-series chips and away from Intel chips last year, and introduced MacBook Pro, Air and Mac Mini PCs with the chips this year. The M-series chips are based on the Arm architecture.
Apple faced supply constraints on Macs, but shortages really hurt the iPad. iPad sales were $7.25 billion for the quarter – a decline of 14 per cent from the year-ago quarter of $8.44 billion.
The constraint was in legacy nodes, Cook said, adding "overall we see improvements in the March quarter with constraints going down."
[11]
Apple [12]dropped $6 billion in revenue in the previous fiscal quarter due to chip shortages and supply constraints. At the time, Apple didn't have trouble getting cutting-edge digital chips, but had issues acquiring chips from Southeast Asia, where pandemic-driven events curtailed manufacturing.
Electronics makers and car companies are affected by shortages of cheap chips that include display drivers, USB circuits and power management integrated circuits.
Apple did not provide earnings guidance for the second quarter because of uncertainty caused by COVID-19. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q1_Consolidated_Financial_Statements.pdf
[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/01/apple-reports-first-quarter-results/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YfPM2CRow19INVslVsaY5wAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfPM2CRow19INVslVsaY5wAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfPM2CRow19INVslVsaY5wAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfPM2CRow19INVslVsaY5wAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/02/apple_epic_appeal/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/13/microsoft_apple_chip_expert/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/06/apple_wilcox_intel/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/14/apple_os_updates/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfPM2CRow19INVslVsaY5wAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/chip_shortages_apple/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
ex-86 even
I think it's still to early to declare it an ex-parrot, though, although EPYC chips are also rapidly munching away at its share in the server market, partly because managing the deliberate backdoor Intel left in there apparently saps quite a considerable amount of processing power.
To late to edit the above (I read a lot slower without coffee - they're fixing that most critical of office machines right now), but this is precisely what I referred to: [1]https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/28/intel_spectre_lawsuit/ ..
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/28/intel_spectre_lawsuit/
Never been a fan of the Apple ecosystem or OSX, but even I have to admit the M1-based machines are pretty damned nice. Especially after Macbook development seemed to have hit a pothole the past few years, looking a bit sad next to an XPS. So good on them, and it's going to be a really difficult decision between the Spectre and Macbook I'm being offered at the corporate refresh. (Specs wise, the Macbook is all over it. But then I'd have to get used to OSX again after 10+ years away, and I'm not sure it's worth the bother.)
Shopify is upgrading its global workforce to MacBook Pro and MacBook Air
Stunned to learn that a company with one of THOSE sort of names was not already staffed with macbook-touting fashion victims........
I've got an M1 MacBook Pro 13" for the living room, an M1 Mac Mini on my desk beside my windows machine and also the new 16" Macbook M1 Pro under my desk.
I've been a windows PC user for most of my working life and use it for most work things but I must admit I do like Mac OS. :-)
Anything I build that is cross platform, I always do on the Mac.
Considering the design of software and hardware as one system is not without it's disadvantages, that is for sure. I was staggered by the performance of Reason x86 running on an M1. A native release does now exist though I haven't upgraded. Performance in the emulated mode is basically in line with running the same program on a decent Ryzen desktop.
My main headache with apple is the lack of options for aftermarket customisation. Is it that much to ask to have a system with few PCI-E slots, NVMe etc? Irritating to see the MacBook use a proprietary NVMe form factor. Is it really worth that much more to Apple to reduce the lifespan of the equipment by this type of shortsightedness? RAM expansion obviously not an option, but usually an inevitable upgrade demand too. How M1 will translate to desktop form factor and where folks want high GB's, if not TB+ RAM as an option is a large unknown. I'm quietly hoping that ARM's presence in the server board market means that capability will exist.
With ARM apparently up for grabs again, but "out of reach" to existing big chip outfits (if nVidia isn't allowed to buy it, neither AMD or Intel should be either) there isn't an obvious progression route for anyone. Apple taking control of it's own destiny is, if nothing else, different to what anyone else is doing in the interdependency web.
Extensibility is a reasonable criticism of Apple kit. Walled garden is another. But, geez, it just works. 10 year old macbook JUST fell out of Operating System support, but it still works! Beat myself up all day on the work laptop with Windows 10, it's a pleasure to jump to the Mac for study.
Wasn't sure about the M1 chip, so I purchased an Intel iMac last year. I needed it, but damn, wish I could have waited.
Data point of 1 person, others probably have different experiences. Patches that just work. Patches that don't force themselves on me at inconvenient times or cause me to lose work. An operating system that gets the truck out of my way to get things done. Visually pleasant experience - I can see where different programs are without having to guess! Usable systems even with the lowest specification.
Meanwhile over in iPad land
We’ll just doggedly stick to a policy of using a mobile phone OS, with huge icons, on what is effectively a powerful, high spec convertible Mac and we will continue to scratch our heads wondering why sales are slumping, while telling end users they just don’t understand what they really want.
Whilst it does seem very wasteful, it has been quite nice to be inundated with a bunch of cheap second hand Macs, all at the perfect age to run *BSD and Linux. Weirdly I still find them ugly compared to an understated black Thinkpad but I suppose that is personal choice.
I am also glad that Apple isn't buying up all the Intel chips (effectively to put into landfill the next year) so that is doing well to reduce the cost of other laptop chips.
So all in all, I have no interest in Apples products but there are some real benefits of them moving away to their own vendor specific ARM chip.
A pint for x-86 -->