Apple didn’t see the AI Mac boom coming

Apple’s earnings calls usually revolve around the iPhone and Services, and that was true again for the most recent quarter. But the Mac quietly stole the show.

Wall Street had pegged Mac revenue at somewhere in the low $8 billion range. Apple reported $8.4 billion for the quarter ending March 28. That’s a beat, and not just a small one — investors had expected flat year-over-year growth. Instead, Mac sales were up 6% annually. Total company revenue hit $111.2 billion, up 17% from last year.

Some of that growth came from the MacBook Neo, the fun, colorful machine Apple launched in March. But here’s the thing: preorders only started on March 4, and most units didn’t ship until mid-to-late March. Some models sold out immediately, pushing demand into April. So the Neo alone doesn’t fully explain the quarter’s numbers.

Tim Cook told analysts on the earnings call that customer demand for the Neo was “off the charts” and higher than Apple had expected. He also noted a record number of new Mac customers, partly thanks to the Neo. But the bigger story, according to Cook, is that people are buying Macs to run local AI models.

Specifically, OpenClaw — the open-source AI framework that’s been spreading like wildfire — is driving people to desktop Macs. Mac mini and Mac Studio models sold out in recent weeks, and Apple was caught off guard. Cook said: “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, and so we saw higher than expected demand.”

He also mentioned that the Mac mini became the top-selling desktop in China, a market that’s been in an OpenClaw frenzy lately.

Still, Mac revenue was flat compared to the previous quarter, so this new demand hasn’t fully scaled yet. Cook said 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. And it’s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand,” he explained.

Enterprise demand is also playing a role. Apple pointed to companies like Perplexity that have adopted Macs as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants. And Cook mentioned that school systems like Kansas City Public Schools are dropping Chromebooks for the Neo.

Apple is also supply-constrained on the MacBook Neo itself. So between AI-driven desktop demand, enterprise adoption, and a hit product that can’t be made fast enough, the Mac is having a moment. Apple just didn’t see it coming.