Last month, we called out the very strong holiday 2023 trends from Best Buy and the consumer electronics retail category as a whole. We also see that in Apple’s latest quarterly results and visitation trends; our data indicates a +4% increase year-over-year in November and +2% in December. Apple’s Americas revenue increased +2% for the quarter (Oct-Dec 2023), after being down -4% for the prior four quarters. On a global basis, iPhone revenue grew +6% compared to -2% for the prior four quarters and Mac revenue increased +1% versus a decrease of -27% the past four quarters. Wearables & Accessories revenue were down on a difficult compare and the legal issues with the Watch.
In terms of new products and the Vision Pro, Apple CEO Tim Cook noted, “Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary device built on decades of Apple innovation, and it's years ahead of anything else. Apple Vision Pro has a groundbreaking new input system and thousands of innovations, and it will unlock incredible experiences for users and developers that are simply not possible on any other device. There's already so much excitement behind this product from reviewers, customers, and developers. They are praising everything from the incredible experience of watching a movie on a 100-foot screen to remarkable new machine-learning capabilities like hand tracking and room mapping. We can't wait for people to experience the magic for themselves. Moments like these are what we live for at Apple. They are why we do what we do...I think that if you look at it from a price point of view, there's an incredible amount of technology that's packed into the product. There's 5,000 patents in the product. And it's, of course, built on many innovations that Apple has spent multiple years on, from silicon to displays and significant AI and machine learning, all the hand tracking, the room mapping, all of this stuff is driven by AI. We're incredibly excited about it.”
