What Is the Most Popular Apple Product? The 2026 Answer, By the Numbers

Ask which Apple product is most popular and you will get iPhone, confidently, from almost everyone. That is right by one measure and not obviously right by others, and the question has a complication most answers skip past: Apple stopped telling anyone how many things it sells.

In November 2018, on the Q4 earnings call, CFO Luca Maestri put it this way: "A unit of sale is less relevant today than it was in our past." Apple has not reported iPhone, Mac or iPad unit sales since. Every unit figure you will read below — including for the iPhone — is an outside estimate. The revenue figures are not; those come from Apple's own filings.

By revenue, it is the iPhone and it is not close

From Apple's FY2025 results, the year ended 27 September 2025:

Segment	FY2025 revenue	Share of total
iPhone	$209.6bn	50.4%
Services	$109.2bn	26.2%
Wearables, Home & Accessories	$35.7bn	8.6%
Mac	$33.7bn	8.1%
iPad	$28.0bn	6.7%
Total	$416.2bn	100%

The iPhone is slightly more than half of Apple. The most recent quarter, Q3 FY2026 ending 27 June 2026, holds the shape almost exactly: iPhone $54.3bn of $109.4bn, or 49.6%.

One thing in that table deserves a second look. Services at $109.2bn is 1.8 times larger than Mac and iPad combined ($61.7bn). The App Store, iCloud, Apple Music and the rest now out-earn both of Apple's original computer businesses put together, by a wide margin.

By units, the surprise is that AirPods don't win

The intuition is reasonable. AirPods are everywhere, they cost a fraction of an iPhone, people lose them and buy more. Surely they outsell the phone.

They don't, and it isn't close either. Analyst estimates put iPhone shipments around 240-247 million units in 2025. Counterpoint's TWS tracker put Apple's AirPods shipments at 76.5 million units in 2024, a 23.1% share of a market that grew to 331.6 million units.

Roughly three iPhones for every AirPods. Both numbers are estimates — Apple discloses neither — but the gap is far too large to be a methodology artefact.

By installed base, Apple gives one number and it isn't per-product

This is the measure Apple does still report, and it reports it as a single total. From the Q3 FY2026 earnings call in July 2026, CFO Kevan Parekh:

"Our installed base of over two and a half billion active devices has reached another all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments."

The trajectory is steady: more than 2 billion in December 2022, 2.2 billion in January 2024, 2.35 billion in January 2025, 2.5 billion in January 2026. Around 150 million net new active devices a year.

Per-product figures are much harder. Apple's last iPhone-specific disclosure was "over 1 billion active iPhones" in January 2021 — five years stale, and it has not published an update. Figures circulating for active Apple Watch users trace to aggregator blogs rather than Apple or any named analyst firm, and we would not repeat them.

By category share, Apple leads three of four

Category	Product	Share	Rank	Period
Smartphones	iPhone	20.1%	#2, behind Samsung on 22.6%	Q2 2026
Tablets	iPad	~38-40%	#1, more than double Samsung	H1 2026
Smartwatches	Apple Watch	23%	#1	Q1 2026
Wireless earbuds	AirPods	21-23%	#1	2024-25
Personal computers	Mac	9.9%	#4	Q2 2026

The iPhone is the revenue engine but not the category leader — Samsung ships more phones. Apple leads tablets, smartwatches and earbuds outright. These come from IDC, Counterpoint and Omdia; most of their detailed reports sit behind paywalls, so treat the exact percentages as well-corroborated estimates rather than audited figures.

The genuinely counterintuitive one is the Mac. At 9.9% it is fourth in PCs, well behind Lenovo, HP and Dell — but Mac shipments rose 10.1% year over year in Q2 2026 while the overall PC market fell 4.9%. Apple is the only major vendor growing in a shrinking market.

The best-selling individual device

Category shares aggregate across a lineup. For a single model, Counterpoint's Global Handset Model Sales Tracker is the cleanest source, and the answer is unambiguous:

"Apple's iPhone 17 was the world's best-selling smartphone in Q2 2026, capturing 6% of global smartphone unit sales."

The base iPhone 17 took the top spot in both Q1 and Q2 2026, with the 17 Pro Max and 17 Pro at second and third in Q2. The three best-selling phones on the planet were all iPhones — and notably it is the standard model leading, not the Pro.

So what is the answer

Three defensible answers, depending on the question behind the question:

• By money — iPhone, 50.4% of Apple's revenue. From Apple's own filings, not an estimate.
• By units — still iPhone, roughly three times AirPods. Both figures are analyst estimates.
• By single model — the base iPhone 17, the best-selling smartphone in the world for two consecutive quarters.

And the most useful correction: AirPods are the most ubiquitous-feeling Apple product but not the most sold. Ubiquity and volume are different things, and being cheap enough to lose is not the same as outselling the phone.

Two caveats worth stating plainly

Cumulative lifetime figures — total iPhones ever sold, total AirPods — get quoted constantly and are not reliable. Published estimates for lifetime iPhone sales range from 2.3 billion to over 3 billion depending on who is counting and when. That spread is too wide to treat any single figure as fact.

The old line that Apple Watch outsells the entire Swiss watch industry is real in origin — a Strategy Analytics release in February 2020 put Apple Watch at 31 million units for 2019 against 21 million for all Swiss watches combined. Whether it still holds in 2026 we could not confirm with a matching current comparison, so we would not assert it.

What this means if you are buying

Popularity is a decent proxy for support, accessory availability and resale liquidity, and a poor proxy for whether something suits you. The base iPhone 17 outselling both Pro models is the useful signal in all of this: most people, given the choice, find the standard model is enough.

The same logic runs through the rest of the lineup. Base configurations exist because they fit most people, and the upgrade is worth it when you have a specific reason rather than a general anxiety — which is exactly the question we work through in how much memory and storage a Mac actually needs.

We stock the current lineup — iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple Watch and AirPods and accessories — with payment in Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins, free insured shipping and a 14-day return window. The iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 are both in stock, and if you have not paid in crypto before, the checkout walkthrough takes about five minutes.