Apple This

Back in June Apple announced that it sold 4.4 million Macs during the month, the most ever for that quarter of the year. In addition to that, the company also announced that those figures also showed a year-over-year growth rate that the rest of the industry hasn’t seen since 2010. Apple sold 18% more Macs in the quarter than the same quarter the previous year with revenue from the oldest line of Macs contributing 15% of the company’s $37.4 billion in total sales.

According to a statement from Technology Business Research analyst Ezra Gottheil, “I was pleasantly surprised by the Mac numbers. The rumors of the death of the personal computer are, of course, highly exaggerated.” When Chief of Research and Head of U.S. Business for Kantar WorldPanel Comtech Carolina Milanesi was asked for her reaction, she stated, “No, I’m not surprised by the Mac numbers. The PC business is almost all mid- and low-end, and that’s not where Apple plays, so they’ll continue to outperform.”

The sales of Apple’s Macs came in significantly higher than the predictions of nearly every single Wall Street analyst polled by Fortune. Apple beat the 3.9 million average of nearly three-dozen analysts by 12% . None of the 34 financial experts surveyed by Fortune had placed a bet higher than what Apple had recorded. “We had a record June quarter for the Mac, and demand has been very strong for our portables in particular,” stated CEO of Apple Time Cook.

In addition to that, Apple’s CFO Luca Maestri praised the fact that Apple was able to beat the PC industry average in 32 of the last 33 quarters. The one quarter in the last eight years that Apple failed to match or beat the average was Q4 od 2012, which was caused by a production fiasco which left the company without iMacs to sell for several months.

Research firm IDC stated that global PC shipments for the June quarter, with a majority of them running Windows OS, fell to 2% with Gartner noting that the shipments fell flat compared to last year. Gartner’s Van Baker believes the increase in sales was caused by the MacBook Air, the company’s thinnest and lightest notebook. Baker stated, “The MacBook Air is still a very strong product and people like it a lot. It puts them in a good position for continued growth.”

Gotheil and Baker both believe that Apple benefited from the minor bounce back in the overall PC business from the previous quarter, though for different reasons. Gotheil believes that users with aging PCs running Windows (likely ones bought around 2008-2009) picked a Mac as a replacement/upgrade whereas Barker believes there is a different reason for the spike.

“Some of these Macs, I think, went to people who had bought a tablet thinking that it would be a replacement PC,” said Baker. “But then those consumers said, ‘Tablets are nice and I like tablets, but a notebook is still a better idea.’ In the developed economies, that’s a dynamic that is operating.”

In addition to that, all three analysts noted that one potential reason for the increase in sales was the price drop that Apple instituted for the MacBook Air line back in April. Apple decreased prices of all four stock model MacBook Airs by $100 and, for the first time, offered a sub-$900 Air, selling the 11″ 128GB Air for $899 to consumers and $849 to college students and parents of students. Gotheil added, “The MacBook Air is a more attractive choice with those price cuts, and it’s a pretty robust notebook.”