Apple may be more of a smartphone company these days, but its legacy product, the personal computer, continues to be popular.
In an upbeat Q1 earnings report with investors Tuesday, Apple said it sold 5.4 million Macs en route to an all-time quarterly revenue record of $78.4 billion dollars.
Yes, the iPhone is still Apple’s bread and butter, generating $54.3 million during a quarter that includes holiday shopping. But the Mac category, which includes iMacs and MacBook laptops (as well as the languishing Mac Pro), brought in just over $7.2 million in revenue, a 7 percent growth.
The Mac category is likely to grow, thanks in part to the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which launched in October.
While Apple lumps together desktop and laptop sales, analysts predict robust sales for the MacBook Pro in the coming year.
Apple’s long-awaited refresh of the MacBook Pro last fall brought a thinner, lighter design that (on high-end models) did away with the top row of function keys in favor of a Touch Bar that gives users control of whatever app they are working on.
It was the most substantial upgrade by Apple on the MacBook Pro since the 2012 Retina models, yet the specs and the price tag initially didn’t sit well with fans. Yes, the machine was thinner but it did away with the standard ports and SD card reader in favor of four USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports.
The price, too, was tough to swallow, with the 13-inch model with Touch Bar starting at $1,799 and the 15-inch machine at $2,399.
But Mac lovers seemed unfazed by initial criticism, according to analysts.
The new MacBook outsold the competitions’ laptops in its first five days, selling nearly as many as all of 2015, according to Slice Intelligence, which looked at online sales and supply-chain reports.
Apple is expected to sell 15 million MacBooks and MacBook Pros this year, sales that are expected to get a boost with new models featuring significantly more RAM and a new Intel processor.
Observers are waiting to see what Apple does with the desktop Macs, which seem to have gone neglected and are overdue for an upgrade.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said last year the company is still committed to the Mac, and has said new iMacs are in the pipeline.
