Apple’s Mac business is booming because of AI, and even Apple didn’t see it coming

Apple’s earnings calls are usually about iPhone this and Services that, but this time the Mac quietly stole the show.

Wall Street was expecting Mac revenue to land somewhere in the low $8 billion range for the quarter ending March 28. Apple reported $8.4 billion. That’s a beat, and not a tiny one — especially for a product line that isn’t exactly the company’s main cash cow anymore.

Analysts had also penciled in flat year-over-year growth. Apple delivered 6% annual growth instead. Total revenue hit $111.2 billion, up 17% from a year ago.

So what happened? Part of it is the MacBook Neo, those colorful machines that went up for preorder on March 4. They were only on sale for a few weeks before the quarter closed, and some units didn’t ship until late March or even April because certain configurations sold out. Tim Cook described customer demand for the Neo as “off the charts” and said Apple set a record for new-to-Mac customers in the quarter, partly thanks to that model.

But the real surprise is what’s driving the rest of the growth: people buying Macs to run local AI models.

Cook specifically called out the Mac mini and Mac Studio, which have been selling out in recent weeks. “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,” he said on the earnings call. He also noted that the Mac mini is now the top-selling desktop in China, a market that’s been in an OpenClaw frenzy lately.

OpenClaw, for those not following every AI framework launch, is one of the local model runners that people are using on Apple Silicon. The fact that this is driving hardware sales is interesting because it suggests that the “AI PC” narrative isn’t just marketing fluff — at least not for Apple.

Still, Mac revenue was flat quarter-over-quarter, so this new demand hasn’t scaled yet. Cook admitted it could take “several months” to get supply and demand balanced on the Mac mini and Studio models. “We’re not at the point where we’re saying this constraint is going to end anytime soon,” he said. “And it’s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand.”

Enterprise demand is also playing a role. Apple name-dropped Perplexity as a company that has adopted Macs as its preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants. That’s not nothing.

And then there’s the education angle. Cook said Apple was “supply constrained on the MacBook Neo” and mentioned that Kansas City Public Schools has been dropping Chromebooks in favor of the Neo. That’s a shift worth watching — Chromebooks have had a stranglehold on K-12 for years.

So Apple is in an unusual position: they built great hardware for AI workloads, and now demand is outpacing their own forecasts. It’s a good problem to have, but it does raise a question. If Apple really didn’t see this coming, what else are they underestimating?