It’s tech earnings season, and let’s talk about Apple’s. A monster quarter for them, and while iPhone sales took the headline, Mac revenue grew 25 percent last year. This was driven by the M1 models released in 2021. Protocol highlighted a potential shift in enterprise IT around the Mac and the growth of the developer space. JAMF’s CEO predicted that Apple would become the number one device ecosystem in the enterprise by the end of the decade. An example from the earnings report – is Shopify’s move of its entire workforce to the M1 powered Macs.
Of course, the PC is also seeing a resurgence. After Microsoft’s earnings call, Microsoft product chief Panos Panay believes the PC industry’s pandemic growth is durable. Microsoft reported 25% growth in the revenue it gets from having Windows installed on new PCs, and the global shipments of laptops and desktops for the last quarter surged to surpass 90 million for the second year in a row, and sales for the year reached a level not seen since 2012.
Are there other insights in the earnings reports?
Intel had massive growth in their Data Center group, rising 20% due to “strong server recovery in enterprise and government.”
Western Digital managed to handle supply chain interruptions and saw an 89% increase in cloud revenue over the year prior, but 14% declined sequentially, representing the significant decline in their revenues.
Is it Mac or PC? Yes.
Not a zero-sum game – particularly in a world where the endpoint matters a lot less than it did. Let’s acknowledge the diversity of endpoints as the key trend. It increases the complexity of the management process and the number of skills required.
The other trend is the cloud. Note that Intel and WD’s growth was cloud-driven. That’s why the endpoint data is so essential… that space is messier than ever and should be expected to continue to increase in complexity.
Will there be more Macs in the enterprise? I agree there will be. Will the PC resurge? Yup. Are they mutually exclusive? Nope.