{"id":87907,"date":"2026-05-01T04:56:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T04:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/apple-was-surprised-by-ai-driven-demand-for-macs\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T04:56:53","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T04:56:53","slug":"apple-was-surprised-by-ai-driven-demand-for-macs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/apple-was-surprised-by-ai-driven-demand-for-macs\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple was surprised by AI-driven demand for Macs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div xmlns:default=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\">\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apple\u2019s iPhone sales and Services revenue were the stars of the show in the tech giant\u2019s most recent quarter, but the Mac quietly outperformed \u2014 helped by growing demand for AI workloads.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wall Street investors had expected to see Mac revenue in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second quarter ended March 28 \u2014 a notable beat for a non-core segment of the tech giant\u2019s business. In addition, investors ahead of earnings believed that Mac sales would be essentially flat year-over-year. Instead, Mac sales were up 6% on an annual basis, the company told investors. The company\u2019s total revenue was $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period last year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apple chalked up some of the Mac growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, those fun, colorful computers were only on sale for a few weeks after the March 4 preorders began. Realistically, most units shipped mid- to late March, and some demand may have been pushed into April as certain models sold out.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company\u2019s Q2 earnings call on Thursday that customer demand for the Neo was \u201coff the charts\u201d and higher than Apple had expected. He also noted that Apple set a record in the quarter for customers new to the Mac, partly due to the Neo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cook attributed the Mac sales growth to the use of the platform for running local AI models, like OpenClaw \u2014 something that took Apple somewhat by surprise as Mac mini and Mac Studio devices sold out in recent weeks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cBoth 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,\u201d Cook said of these Mac sales. He also noted that the Mac mini was the top-selling desktop in China \u2014 a market that\u2019s been in an OpenClaw frenzy as of late.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, Mac revenue was flat on a quarter-over-quarter basis, suggesting this new demand has yet to scale. Cook said it may take Apple \u201cseveral months\u201d to reach supply-demand balance on the Mac mini and Studio models.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-techcrunch-inline-cta\">\n<div class=\"inline-cta__wrapper\">\n<p>Techcrunch event<\/p>\n<div class=\"inline-cta__content\">\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-cta__location\">San Francisco, CA<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-cta__separator\">|<\/span><br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"inline-cta__date\">October 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWe\u2019re not at the point where we\u2019re saying this [constraint] is going to end anytime soon. And it\u2019s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand,\u201d Cook explained. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Enterprise demand for the Mac was also at play. Apple pointed to a couple of larger companies, including Perplexity, that had turned to Mac as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also said Apple was \u201csupply constrained on the MacBook Neo,\u201d and has even seen school systems, like Kansas City Public Schools, dropping Chromebooks for the Neo. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em>When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apple\u2019s iPhone sales and Services revenue were the stars of the show in the tech giant\u2019s most recent quarter, but the Mac quietly outperformed \u2014 helped by growing demand for AI workloads. Wall Street investors had expected to see Mac revenue in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":87908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/CMC_8152.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}