$AAPL Home Game Earnings Preview Digest for FQ4 2016 (Part 3): Mac Commentary
(This is excerpted from my “unapologetically” TL;DR earnings preview. Full link to the 4000+ word post here. Important note + disclaimer here.)
Last 11 fiscal quarters of year-over-year unit growth/decline, GAAP sell-in reporting basis (FQ1 2014 — FQ3 2016): 19%, 5%, 13%, 21%, 14%, 10%, 9%, 3%, -4%, -12%, -11%
Year-ago Units and ASP: 5.71M units, $1205 ASP
My Horseshoe Toss for FQ4: 4.33M units, $1195 ASP
With not terribly much to say, you’re in luck — I’ll keep this brief.
Macs are super-old, excepting the retina MacBook 12. iMacs are about a year old. The retina MBPs, something around 520 days old. MacBook Air, around 600 days old. It gets worse, but those are the products that really matter. (Sorry, Mac mini and Mac Pro owners, Mac Pro owners in particular. Hope Apple has something for you soon.)
ASP really doesn’t matter as much when attempting to “forecast” an essentially assured year-on-year unit drop. So, I decided to be a little “bold” for entertainment purposes, and assume a -24% unit growth rate…which, given how some Wall Street analysts are, may actually be in the middle of those estimates. Heh.
Anyway, why a “sequential acceleration” in unit growth decline when it was only 11% last quarter? Here’s where I don my tinfoil hat, with some indirect support from FQ3. Apple, in order to aggressively manage channel inventory plus, incidentally, “low-key” its GAAP numbers a bit, could drain the channel of old iMacs and really old rMBPs and MacBook Airs to make way for whatever may be announced on October 27. -10–15% unit growth on a GAAP basis was already pretty likely. Add to that Apple’s traditional 4–5 week supply of Mac channel inventory, and there’s room to sellthrough quite a bit more units than were produced in the quarter (unless people are really, really big on custom configurations, and can actually tell if their MacBook was assembled weeks versus days ago 😂).
Again, somewhat like iPhone, -24% units may be too bold to the downside. But it’s no fun to play it too safe each quarter, so there you have it!
Speaking of downside, over the coming year we’ll see whether Apple’s newest Macs can hold up against the continued inexorable downtrend in PC unit growth.
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Index:
FQ4 2016 AAPL Earnings Digest, Part 1: iPhone
FQ4 2016 AAPL Earnings Digest, Part 2: iPad
FQ4 2016 AAPL Earnings Digest, Part 4: Watch/Other Products
FQ4 2016 AAPL Earnings Digest: Looking Ahead to FQ1 2017 (the big December quarter)
