8 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019
MACUSER HOW APPLE REINVENTS ITS CORE BUSINESS1999: THE MAC COMEBACK
Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997
and we all know what happened next. But
that transformation took a while. Look at a
sample quarter from twenty years ago—
the fourth fiscal quarter of 1999—and you’ll
see a very different company than the
Apple of today.
First off, there was only really one
Apple product back then: the Mac. 80
percent of Apple’s revenue came from the
Mac, with 20 percent coming from other
products, mostly Mac accessories and
software. In the fourth quarter of 1999,
Apple’s total revenue was $1.34 billion,
generating $111 million in profit. To put that
in perspective, Apple generated that much
revenue every two days or so in the third
quarter of 2019.
In the fourth quarter of 1999, Apple
sold 772,000 Macs. We don’t know how
many Macs
Apple sells in
a quarter now,
because it
stopped
releasing unit
sales figures
last year, but
it’s probably in
the ballpark of
four million.
Keep this in
mind when you
consider that the Mac is now only
roughly 10 percent of Apple’s overall
business: back when the Mac was 80
percent of Apple’s business, Apple was
selling less than a fifth as many Macs
per quarter as it is in 2019.Apple Q4 1999
REVENUE BY CATEGORY20%
OTHER80%
MACTotal Apple Revenue
FOUR-QUARTER AVERAGE