Apple’s iPhone lineup is selling well, but the Mac is in a serious rough patch

Apple reported a record September earnings quarter on Thursday, with iPhone revenue up year over year — even with just a week or so of iPhone 15 sales factored into the numbers. But all of the company’s other hardware divisions were down, and as CNBC noted, overall sales were down for the fourth consecutive quarter. The company brought in $89.5 billion in revenue overall for the quarter.

CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that the iPhone 15 lineup is showing stronger early momentum than the 14 series. “If you look at iPhone 15 for that period of time and compare it to iPhone 14 for the same time in the year-ago quarter, iPhone 15 did better than iPhone 14,” he said, adding that the Pro and Pro Max devices were both currently supply-constrained.

The Mac business was hit particularly hard, down 34 percent year over year. So you can see the impetus for Apple holding its M3 event earlier this week, where the company introduced updated MacBook Pros and a refreshed iMac. Cook described the current PC consumer market as “challenging.”

“I think the Mac is going to have a significantly better quarter in the December quarter,” Cook told CNBC. “We’ve got the M3, we’ve got the new products, and we don’t have the compare phenomenon on a year-over-year basis.” Cook claimed that the Mac business was unusually strong at this time last year.

With no new recent models to speak of, iPad revenue fell by 10 percent. Wearables revenue was down by a considerably smaller 3 percent. As usual, Apple’s services unit was a reliable moneymaker and was up 16 percent year over year. “Every main service hit a record,” Cook told CNBC.

Apple’s CEO seems optimistic about the company’s position heading into the holiday shopping season. “We now have our strongest lineup of products ever heading into the holiday season, including the iPhone 15 lineup and our first carbon neutral Apple Watch models, a major milestone in our efforts to make all Apple products carbon neutral by 2030,” he said in a press release.