Reported quarterly revenue: ~$111 billion, so a 17% year-over-year increase.
Diluted earnings per share: ~$2. 22% increase compared to the same quarter last year.
Operating cash flow: surpassed $28 billion. Record for a March quarter.
iPhone: Record March-quarter revenue of ~$57 billion, heavily supported by demand for the iPhone 17.
Services: Hit an all-time high revenue record of ~$31 billion.
Capital Allocation: The board raised the quarterly cash dividend by 4% to $0.27 per share and authorized an additional $100 billion for share repurchases.
More generally, we're seeing a transition in their financials away from hardware dependence. At this point we can pretty conclusively say that Apple is now a hardware manufacturer mainly, backed up by a high-margin services ecosystem. Services revenue has grown consistently, providing a smoothing function against the more spikey revenue from the hardware product cycles.
Overall they've managed to maintain an ability to deliver double-digit growth, despite creating categories of product which haven't succeeded, providing enough free cash flow to continue their insane (in terms of scale) capital return program (dividends and massive buybacks in the main).
Doesn't this prove that they are hardware independent? Even having products not in stock was a Steve Jobs thing and this is possibly a temporary effect of supply chains changing.
I always wonder if this is a possibility. They've worked so closely with TSMC that they've many times over the decade bankrolled R&D and equipment that TSMC uses. I would be super interested to know if that relationship has left them enough know-how of the fab process to someday control their destiny there, that would actually be pretty insane.
The capital return program was a massive own goal in my humble opinion. It will work for now but soon Apple will go through their Intel years because they spent too long sweating their (admittedly incredible) assets. Something like Harmony OS is going to eat their lunch and they will only have themselves to blame.
I imagine you're saying the capital return program is a mistake because they should reinvest the money in R&D etc.
I think the issue is there's diminishing returns to spending, and in some cases it can be outright negative. For example, one major thing you can do with money is hire more people. Hiring more people than you can handle is a great way to grind everything to a halt. You're basically making a bet when you hire that the additional capacity outweighs the danger of coordination failure.
Perhaps you could invest more money in fabs or something like that. I don't know, I'm a software person. But I did work at apple on software for 15 years, and I do not think throwing more money at software is particularly effective. The biggest teams at apple are often the least functional.
I wonder if there’s a breakdown of their top performing or fastest growing services. It’s interesting how they dont seem to promote the services that much yet are seeing tremendous growth.
Always remember that most of their “services” revenue is the App Store 30% tax on casino games for children, and the commissions for Safari default search engine coming from Google. These two are Apple’s twin licenses to print money, and both of them grow without Apple needing to innovate or really do anything.
App Store grows as the addictive game publishers improve their manipulation skills, and Google’s check grows as browser usage increases. Every time someone types, say, “Citibank” into the search box and doesn’t add .com, Apple earns a tiny payment from Google.
I’m sure they als make a decent chunk of money from iCloud as users who buy base models are almost certainly forced to make use of iCloud Photo Library to free up enough space on the device to even function; but I suspect it’s orders of magnitude less than that.
The other reading is that the company plans to shift to a no-growth one, since it starts to return 100's of Bs to the shareholders, essentially admitting they cannot invest them in the company itself.
I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.
It still blows my mind that this is the same company.
In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.
The joke is that NeXT acquired Apple and got paid to do it.
There’s a lot of truth to it. A huge amount of the software stack is inherited from NeXT. Steve Jobs was inherited from NeXT. Modern Apple is vastly more successful than NeXT ever was, but there’s a lot of continuity there as well.
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most users it was seamless.
There's only a handful of sources for the services revenue which is growing like crazy, I wonder if they've been able to negotiate a higher ad revenue cut with Google which was revealed to be 36% in Google's antitrust trial, leaving a lot of money on the table.
It definitely looks like they've been able to stall the effect of rulings allowing apps to use third party payments. But earlier this week the courts reversed a stay of December's injunction that limits Apple to a very small fee, in their arguments against the stay Epic claimed developers were hesitant to use 3rd party payments until they knew what the final cost would be and that reversing the stay would mitigate their fears so it will be interesting to see what happens next quarter.
So I really wanted to understand the different kinds of margins. Yes, this was made with the help on an AI.
Net profit margin: 26.6% ($29.58B / $111.18B) — what shareholders keep after taxes and everything else.
Operating margin: 32.3% ($35.89B / $111.18B) — left after the product and running the company (staff, R&D, marketing, stores).
Gross margin: 49.3% ($54.78B / $111.18B) — left after paying suppliers and contract manufacturers. Shows how much more customers pay than it costs to build.
If they’re going hard in on services maybe they’ll finally go up against Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, proper.
Between the two someone needs to disrupt it with a cheaper stripped down alternative (from a big player) because the prices are going through the roof.
It seems to me that Apple is only going to be further increasing the number of price points and "levels" of caliber of devices, from budget/entry level all the way to new heights such as things like iPhone Ultra or Macbook Ultra, because services will be have an even wider net to cast into (If you're buying Ultra devices, you'll probably get AppleCare+, and if you have new apple devices such as the Neo or 17e etc, you'll be more likely to get Apple music or books or fitness or whatnot.
They pretty much still only have a "Good -> Better -> Best" ladder for the majority of their products, with a handful of "niche" offerings sprinkled in. Complexity hasn't increased much from those days, they added one extra column and row
iPhone: iPhone 17e -> iPhone 17 -> iPhone 17 Pro (Niche: iPhone Air)
iPad: iPad -> iPad Air - > iPad Pro (Niche: iPad Mini)
Mac Laptop: Macbook Neo -> Macbook Air -> Macbook Pro
Mac Desktop: Mac Mini -> iMac -> Mac Studio
They have product with different screen sizes, but those are really just configuration options on the base product in that tier, now. Compare that to offerings from Samsung or Dell and you can see it could be much, much more complicated.
That was a different era of consumer behavior. Consumers are hyper targeted with personalized organic and paid messages. The algorithmic media ecosystem mitigates or counters complex product offerings. For example, my YouTube feed displays Apple Pro devices reviews over other lines like iPad basic. Also, purchase power acts as a natural filter.
The customer base is also so much bigger. Just before the the iMac was introduced, they were selling under half a million Macs per quarter. And that was divided up among a bunch of different models. That makes it much harder to manage production and inventory, and your development costs get spread across fewer units. With 10x more Mac sales and 100x more iPhone sales, there’s more room for variety.
There is a difference between 5 B revenue and 400 B revenue.
Also the price point shifted from primarily a 2K machine, to all price ranges, with the original iPhone being a few hundred bucks. More sales smaller units so the number of products being sold is more than it appears based on the revenue comparison.
Maybe the price per unit is available somewhere for people to trend how it changed over 2-3 decades.
I am personally saddest to hear about the discontinuation of the Vision Pro - in a couple of generations there was a solid chance that it would be easy sell for me and/or other people who don't VR/AR game but probably would use it for media/productivity.
There is tons of EV competition. 252 new EV models were announced at the Beijing Auto Show last week. Reviews of the Xiaomi SU7 2026 generally acknowledge it as best in class. etc.
For the same reason that Yahoo should have bought Google after the dot-com bust. AI is useful and will eventually change the world. Many companies won't be able to provide sufficient returns, but will still have useful assets that Apple could buy at a discount.
That's the case for now, but I get this feeling that in 3 years we're all likely to just be running local models on Apple Silicon and they're gonna be having the last laugh.
Short version:
Reported quarterly revenue: ~$111 billion, so a 17% year-over-year increase.
Diluted earnings per share: ~$2. 22% increase compared to the same quarter last year.
Operating cash flow: surpassed $28 billion. Record for a March quarter.
iPhone: Record March-quarter revenue of ~$57 billion, heavily supported by demand for the iPhone 17.
Services: Hit an all-time high revenue record of ~$31 billion.
Capital Allocation: The board raised the quarterly cash dividend by 4% to $0.27 per share and authorized an additional $100 billion for share repurchases.
More generally, we're seeing a transition in their financials away from hardware dependence. At this point we can pretty conclusively say that Apple is now a hardware manufacturer mainly, backed up by a high-margin services ecosystem. Services revenue has grown consistently, providing a smoothing function against the more spikey revenue from the hardware product cycles.
Overall they've managed to maintain an ability to deliver double-digit growth, despite creating categories of product which haven't succeeded, providing enough free cash flow to continue their insane (in terms of scale) capital return program (dividends and massive buybacks in the main).
So hardware independent, they don’t even have any Mac minis, Mac pros or Mac studios in stock anymore
This comment hits hard as I tried to buy a Mac Mini this morning and could not find one anywhere in Calgary
Doesn't this prove that they are hardware independent? Even having products not in stock was a Steve Jobs thing and this is possibly a temporary effect of supply chains changing.
As a company, this is a great problem to have. Way better than the opposite.
They really need to build their own fabs at this point. AI is going to kill their ASIC and DRAM supply chain if they don't.
"Real men have fabs." - Jerry Sanders, first CEO of AMD.
Actually, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple need to build their own fabs. Maybe Google, Amazon, and Meta too.
Perhaps something that Ternus can add to his legacy-building exercise, given that he led hardware.
I always wonder if this is a possibility. They've worked so closely with TSMC that they've many times over the decade bankrolled R&D and equipment that TSMC uses. I would be super interested to know if that relationship has left them enough know-how of the fab process to someday control their destiny there, that would actually be pretty insane.
The capital return program was a massive own goal in my humble opinion. It will work for now but soon Apple will go through their Intel years because they spent too long sweating their (admittedly incredible) assets. Something like Harmony OS is going to eat their lunch and they will only have themselves to blame.
I imagine you're saying the capital return program is a mistake because they should reinvest the money in R&D etc.
I think the issue is there's diminishing returns to spending, and in some cases it can be outright negative. For example, one major thing you can do with money is hire more people. Hiring more people than you can handle is a great way to grind everything to a halt. You're basically making a bet when you hire that the additional capacity outweighs the danger of coordination failure.
Perhaps you could invest more money in fabs or something like that. I don't know, I'm a software person. But I did work at apple on software for 15 years, and I do not think throwing more money at software is particularly effective. The biggest teams at apple are often the least functional.
I wonder if there’s a breakdown of their top performing or fastest growing services. It’s interesting how they dont seem to promote the services that much yet are seeing tremendous growth.
Always remember that most of their “services” revenue is the App Store 30% tax on casino games for children, and the commissions for Safari default search engine coming from Google. These two are Apple’s twin licenses to print money, and both of them grow without Apple needing to innovate or really do anything.
App Store grows as the addictive game publishers improve their manipulation skills, and Google’s check grows as browser usage increases. Every time someone types, say, “Citibank” into the search box and doesn’t add .com, Apple earns a tiny payment from Google.
I’m sure they als make a decent chunk of money from iCloud as users who buy base models are almost certainly forced to make use of iCloud Photo Library to free up enough space on the device to even function; but I suspect it’s orders of magnitude less than that.
The other reading is that the company plans to shift to a no-growth one, since it starts to return 100's of Bs to the shareholders, essentially admitting they cannot invest them in the company itself.
I wish they’d stop doing buy backs and invest 100B in R&D … imagine what they could do in battery tech or otherwise.
They really should have built a car.
It'd make them leaders in batteries.
It'd keep America at the forefront of EVs.
Huge disappointment.
I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.
It still blows my mind that this is the same company.
In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.
They're a monster. Vastly impressive stuff.
The joke is that NeXT acquired Apple and got paid to do it.
There’s a lot of truth to it. A huge amount of the software stack is inherited from NeXT. Steve Jobs was inherited from NeXT. Modern Apple is vastly more successful than NeXT ever was, but there’s a lot of continuity there as well.
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most users it was seamless.
It's right there in the developer APIs. All of those NS_ prefixes in the MacOS and iOS SDKs stand for NeXTSTEP.
There's only a handful of sources for the services revenue which is growing like crazy, I wonder if they've been able to negotiate a higher ad revenue cut with Google which was revealed to be 36% in Google's antitrust trial, leaving a lot of money on the table.
It definitely looks like they've been able to stall the effect of rulings allowing apps to use third party payments. But earlier this week the courts reversed a stay of December's injunction that limits Apple to a very small fee, in their arguments against the stay Epic claimed developers were hesitant to use 3rd party payments until they knew what the final cost would be and that reversing the stay would mitigate their fears so it will be interesting to see what happens next quarter.
So I really wanted to understand the different kinds of margins. Yes, this was made with the help on an AI.
Net profit margin: 26.6% ($29.58B / $111.18B) — what shareholders keep after taxes and everything else.
Operating margin: 32.3% ($35.89B / $111.18B) — left after the product and running the company (staff, R&D, marketing, stores).
Gross margin: 49.3% ($54.78B / $111.18B) — left after paying suppliers and contract manufacturers. Shows how much more customers pay than it costs to build.
If they’re going hard in on services maybe they’ll finally go up against Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, proper.
Between the two someone needs to disrupt it with a cheaper stripped down alternative (from a big player) because the prices are going through the roof.
It seems to me that Apple is only going to be further increasing the number of price points and "levels" of caliber of devices, from budget/entry level all the way to new heights such as things like iPhone Ultra or Macbook Ultra, because services will be have an even wider net to cast into (If you're buying Ultra devices, you'll probably get AppleCare+, and if you have new apple devices such as the Neo or 17e etc, you'll be more likely to get Apple music or books or fitness or whatnot.
Focused on "simplicity", they used to have only a "tableful" of products.
With more products, will Apple collapse under the weight of the complexity?
They pretty much still only have a "Good -> Better -> Best" ladder for the majority of their products, with a handful of "niche" offerings sprinkled in. Complexity hasn't increased much from those days, they added one extra column and row
iPhone: iPhone 17e -> iPhone 17 -> iPhone 17 Pro (Niche: iPhone Air)
iPad: iPad -> iPad Air - > iPad Pro (Niche: iPad Mini)
Mac Laptop: Macbook Neo -> Macbook Air -> Macbook Pro
Mac Desktop: Mac Mini -> iMac -> Mac Studio
They have product with different screen sizes, but those are really just configuration options on the base product in that tier, now. Compare that to offerings from Samsung or Dell and you can see it could be much, much more complicated.
That was a different era of consumer behavior. Consumers are hyper targeted with personalized organic and paid messages. The algorithmic media ecosystem mitigates or counters complex product offerings. For example, my YouTube feed displays Apple Pro devices reviews over other lines like iPad basic. Also, purchase power acts as a natural filter.
The customer base is also so much bigger. Just before the the iMac was introduced, they were selling under half a million Macs per quarter. And that was divided up among a bunch of different models. That makes it much harder to manage production and inventory, and your development costs get spread across fewer units. With 10x more Mac sales and 100x more iPhone sales, there’s more room for variety.
There is a difference between 5 B revenue and 400 B revenue.
Also the price point shifted from primarily a 2K machine, to all price ranges, with the original iPhone being a few hundred bucks. More sales smaller units so the number of products being sold is more than it appears based on the revenue comparison.
Maybe the price per unit is available somewhere for people to trend how it changed over 2-3 decades.
I am personally saddest to hear about the discontinuation of the Vision Pro - in a couple of generations there was a solid chance that it would be easy sell for me and/or other people who don't VR/AR game but probably would use it for media/productivity.
I couldn’t find information about discontinuation in the article - did I miss it or is there another source?
Edit, I found this: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/29/apple-vision-pro-m5-flo... - seems like rumors; but perhaps as close to an announcement as we’ll ever get.
The Vision Pro has been getting discontinued about once a month for the past two years.
There's been nothing but rumors about that. I don't think it's getting canned.
>I am personally saddest to hear about the discontinuation of the Vision Pro
I'm more sad they cancelled their EV project. We need more healthy competition there than public spying VR ski goggles.
There is tons of EV competition. 252 new EV models were announced at the Beijing Auto Show last week. Reviews of the Xiaomi SU7 2026 generally acknowledge it as best in class. etc.
Yeah, but Americans can’t buy those.
The competition would have been at the luxury end. Apple would have been competing with Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac, not with Hyundai and Kia.
Charts: https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/04/apple-announces-record-fi...
All this while passing on the leap of faith everybody else is taking in the form of crazy AI investments.
If the bubble bursts, Apple with its mountain of cash will be ready to buy the carcasses of whatever is left.
If the bubble bursts why would Apple buy any AI companies?
For the same reason that Yahoo should have bought Google after the dot-com bust. AI is useful and will eventually change the world. Many companies won't be able to provide sufficient returns, but will still have useful assets that Apple could buy at a discount.
Decent even though Google, OpenAI, Anthropic eating their lunch on AI.
That's the case for now, but I get this feeling that in 3 years we're all likely to just be running local models on Apple Silicon and they're gonna be having the last laugh.