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Apple Still Seeing Strong Mac Sales Growth Amid Easing iMac Constraints

Monday March 18, 2013 12:08 pm PDT by Eric Slivka
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster today issued a new research report sharing data from research firm NPD covering Apple's U.S. Mac sales for the January-February timeframe, revealing that Apple's sales are currently up 14% year-over-year. The performance is down somewhat from the 31% growth seen for January alone, but remains very solid as Apple's iMac shortages appear to have eased.
We have analyzed domestic NPD retail data for the months of January and February which suggests Mac sales were up 14% y/y through the first two months of the March quarter. As we have previously discussed, we believe the Y/Y improvement is driven by Apple beginning to improve supply of iMacs as the company noted the product was constrained in the December quarter. CEO Tim Cook noted that iMac sales were down 700k units y/y in December (we note iMac sales are likely far less impacted by iPad, thus the vast majority of the y/y unit decline in December was likely supply).
Despite the strong performance, Munster is maintaining his estimate of an overall 5% decline in worldwide Mac sales for the quarter, even though Apple's worldwide numbers have frequently outperformed the U.S. data gathered by NPD.

mac_lineup_early2013
On the downside, NPD's data shows a return to Munster's expectations for the iPod, with the two-month timeframe seeing sales down 16% year-over-year compared to Munster's projections for a 17% decline. iPod sales had been up 3% in January.

While strong Mac sales are a good sign for Apple, the increasing dominance of the iPhone and iPad in the company's product portfolio means that strong Mac sales have less of an impact on Apple's overall financial performance. In the most recent quarter, Macs accounted for just 10% of Apple's revenue, compared to 20% for the iPad and a dominant 56% for the iPhone.
[ 93 comments ]

Top Rated Comments

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Klae17
18 months ago
Stop sales immediately! THX will sue you!!

Stupid iMac is so thin who would buy it?!

No Mac Pro? Apple will meet its demise!
Rating: 25 Votes
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eltaurus
18 months ago
MAC PROs Please
Rating: 18 Votes
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johncrab
18 months ago
AH, but 14% growth isn't good enough for the lemmings of Wall Street. Never mind the collapsing economy and the economic miracle that Apple is. They are not delivering 150% increases quarter after quarter. Whaaaa!

/snark off
Rating: 16 Votes
Avatar
Rocketman
18 months ago
With Mac at only 10% of revenue and PC sales declining, it might be time for the Mac-Midi expandable, single chip 4 core i7 Mac. And a stackable external enclosure. If all they do is cannibalize PC sales, it would be a winner. As you know all Macs run Windows!

Blade MacPro too.

We have long since needed a Mac that could replace all the utility purposes commodity PC's are installed into. Premium price and quality okay! TCOO is very low. It might need a parallel and serial port option! Okay if it immediately converts to the internal USB/PCIe bus. :D

Rocketman
Rating: 7 Votes
Avatar
\-V-/
18 months ago

Sure it does.







The high end iMac is about half as much as the current Mac Pro... and it's almost on par with the Mac Pro from 4 years ago. The gap will be widened significantly once the new Haswell Mac Pros are released. Now please troll elsewhere.
Rating: 7 Votes
Avatar
JM-Prod
18 months ago

The little skinny retina notebooks have better benchmarks than old big clunk mac pro for most meaningful parameters.

Do the math.

:rolleyes:


My MacPro performs over twice as fast as a top spec-ed iMac or RMBP... Over twice as fast! Do the math yourself little boy...

----------

In a few years will just have ipad or iphone that connects to external display and keyboard and will kick current Mac Pro's a$$


And with GPU-like computing and next generation Xeon CPU's, a Mac Pro would keep the performance threshold to a next generation mobile device, performing realtime raytracing, multilayered 4k stereo video at 48 fps and sophisticated fluid simulations. Technology development does not stop at the low-end.
Rating: 6 Votes
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vmachiel
18 months ago
Awesome. No matter what people say about iOS being dull or iPhone not innovating enough, the Mac is kicking ass comparing to windows.
Rating: 6 Votes
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NOV
18 months ago
Well, strong growth won't be from Mac Pro sales in Europe, that's for sure.
Rating: 6 Votes
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Small White Car
18 months ago
Soon to be re-named "iOS SDK Editor Books"
Rating: 6 Votes
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lifeinhd
18 months ago

So then why even use a Mac Pro? Don't need a Mac Pro for iOS development, Final Cut X is no longer the best video software...

What is benefit of using a Mac Pro vs a Linux or Windows machine? Mac Pro never has support for the best graphics cards.

Just an honest question. Never understood why a Mac Pro would be the choice for true power users...

:apple:


Frankly I'm fine with anything that doesn't run iOS, but since you asked....

These days it's mostly about the ability to dump more stuff inside the case. I use an rMBP with 16GB RAM, I do max it out on occasion running VMs and such and if I could use a desktop, I would have a MP with 24GB to avoid that. I also have two network drives, one for storage and the other a Time Capsule, and they are both slow. If I could have an extra couple drives in the case, I totally would. What do I use my machine for? CAD and software development mostly, meaning I'd never fully take advantage of the MP's dozen cores. That's why so many people, myself included, would love to see a midrange headless Mac. Something not too powerful or expensive we can just chuck a few extra parts into.
Rating: 5 Votes

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