Apple’s fiscal 2024 in charts
On Halloween, Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, posting another flat sales quarter even while continuing to beat all-time quarterly revenue records. And as usual, I filled a bunch of numbers into a Numbers spreadsheet, ran my little charting Automator app, and posted out a bunch of (six?) colorful charts.
It being the fiscal fourth quarter, of course, means it’s also the end of Apple’s fiscal year. That gives me the opportunity to cart out a separate set of charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.
Let’s dig into the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 26 years:
After the extreme revenue gains Apple made in fiscal 2021 (probably due to a combination of sales egged on by the pandemic and the arrival of Apple silicon), the past three years have been much quieter. While 2022’s record revenue was the proverbial “tough compare,” the fact that the company has held on to most of the revenue from that record year is still pretty impressive—unless you’re an investor who is only looking for signs of more growth.
Speaking of growth: Usually, in the year or two following a major growth spurt, there’s a backslide year, and that was most definitely 2023. But 2024 follows a bit of another trend: after the backslide, a stabilization. This fiscal year’s modest 2% growth rate won’t wow many people, but it does show improvement from the slight 3% slide last year.
Of course, the driver of half of Apple’s revenue is the iPhone. As the iPhone goes, so goes Apple:
The iPhone more or less matched last year’s total. (There was actually a $600 million improvement that got washed out of my chart because I’m so jaded that I round to the nearest billion.) The most interesting things to note in this macro view: Unlike the last two revenue spikes, which were followed by two down years and then another spike, this latest four-year period features a spike, a growth year, and then two slightly down years.
What does that mean? I don’t know, but it suggests that Apple’s most recent sales peak was a bit longer, and the resulting post-peak period also seems to have been extended. After a couple of three-year periods, we’re currently in year four of the current reset. What 2025 has in store is anyone’s guess.
Now let’s look at the Mac, which followed up its record-breaking 2022 with a down year, but has found a new plateau:
The Mac’s sales increased massively in 2021 and even further in 2022. The combination of COVID lockdowns driving sales and Apple moving to Apple silicon led to unprecedented Mac sales. But last year, the Mac came back to earth.
In 2024, the Mac stabilized and grew by about $600 million. The good news for Apple is that after all those new sales, the Mac didn’t take a few years off because literally everyone who wanted a new Mac had just bought one. In fact, Apple’s continued insistence on comparing new Macs to Intel-based models shows that it clearly thinks there are still many Intel Macs in the installed base that are ripe for updates.
If you remove 2020 and 2021, Mac sales figures have continued to grow at a steady pace for the last 15 years, after a huge growth period in the first decade of the century. After a decade of hanging out in the $20s, the Mac seems to be a $30 billion-a-year business with room for growth.
It’s been a rough comedown from pandemic highs for the iPad:
After a nice spike in 2021, iPad sales are down for the third consecutive year. However, it’s all a matter of perspective. Even with a gap of more than a year with no new iPads—until the line began to be refreshed earlier this year—the last four years of iPad sales are all higher than any year since 2014.
Will history repeat itself, with the iPad receding into a six-year slide into the doldrums of low-$20-billion years? I’m doubtful. Quarterly iPad sales have perked up thanks to, you know, the release of new iPads. I don’t think a $30 billion sales year is going to be a regular occurrence, but after the late-2010s doldrums, it does feel like the iPad’s in a better place.
Now let’s look at the popular and growing Services and Wearables, Home, and Accessories lines:
After eight straight years of annual growth, the Wearables curve is bending the other way. $37 billion is still a big number, but it’s the lowest total since 2020. And the arrival of the Vision Pro didn’t really contribute at all to that number.
Apple’s recent AirPods announcements suggest that it’s re-engaging with that product for the first time in a little while, and Apple Watch sales seem good but not spectacular. I wonder if Apple’s rumored re-engagement with the smart home market might goose these numbers over the next few years. We’ll see.
Turning to Services, Apple has yet to run out of fuel for its growth rocket. In the last few fiscal years, Services have grown by $14B, $10B, $7B, and $11B. After the iPhone, services are Apple’s second most important financial line. Next year, they will almost certainly crack the $100B level. There’s a reason Apple has added services to its classic secret-sauce cocktail of hardware and software.
This brings us to the final chart, which I run here every year to properly contextualize all of Apple’s product lines. When I run the numbers as individual charts, they all seem more or less the same. But they are very definitely not all created equal. (It’s still impressive to see Services lift away from the others, though.)
See you back here next year for more annual charts!
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