The Mac No Longer Plays a Leading Role at Apple

40 years ago, on January 24, 1984, Apple released its first iconic product, the Apple Macintosh (later renamed Macintosh 128K). The Macintosh was groundbreaking as it was the first mass-market all-in-one computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse. And while the Mac is still the foundation of everything that Apple later built, it no longer plays a leading role at the company it helped establish.

In the fiscal year ended September 30, 2023, the company formerly known as Apple Computer generated $29.4 billion in revenue selling what it was originally named after: computers. And while that makes Apple’s Mac business of 2023 more than four times as large as it was at the turn of the century, selling laptops and desktop computers is no longer as crucial to the company's overall success as it used to be. Mac sales may have increased more than four-fold over the past two decades, but Apple’s total sales increased almost 50-fold over the same period.

While the release of the first iMac in 1998 marked the beginning of Steve Jobs’ second stint at Apple and the company's return to form, the Mac line has done little more than lay the groundwork for what makes Apple the most valuable company in the world over two decades later. As the following chart illustrates, Mac computers gradually lost importance to Apple as the company introduced one blockbuster product after another (think iPod, iPhone and iPad) in the first decade of the 21st century. In 2023, Mac sales accounted for just 7.7 percent of Apple’s total revenue, down from 86 percent in 2000 and the lowest it's ever been.