▲ 96 points
back
107 comments
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
As a company, this is a great problem to have. Way better than the opposite.
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.
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.
That is absurd. Nobody is arguing that Apple should deplete its war chest. Steve Jobs's infantile stance against dividends has fortunately been replaced by a proper return to the company's OWNERS.
And "Harmony OS" is going to threaten their ecosystem of hardware, software, services, and developers?
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.
"More generally, we're seeing a transition in their financials away from hardware dependence."
Nonsense. They make 72% of their revenue from hardware, and without those hardware sales, the Services category would be nil.
Yes, but their hardware growth might have "ceilinged", services is likely where future growth will be.
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.
“They need their own fabs” is a very current events-biased read of the situation.
You can easily end up like AMD or Intel spending years with your own fab that’s uncompetitive.
One of the best things that ever happened to AMD was spinning off their fabs.
Intel only recently righted their ship after spending years with fabs that couldn’t keep up with competition, and even Panther Lake still contains some TSMC silicon.
The AI boom is inevitably not going to last forever. Either demand will subside or production will increase. High prices in tech rarely stick around.
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.
Especially outside of Taiwan.
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 never know why this keeps getting downvoted, is HN really full of investors and not engineers? why do you want buy backs and not R&D?
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.
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 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.
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.
They're going to have another one soon: ads in maps. What a user experience disaster that will be all to make a few more dollars.
I used to tout the superiority of Apple Maps to people by saying "And there no ads, so you can trust the results". I can't do that anymore.
It's worth considering (IMO, anyway) that users don't want to use apps that use third party billing, too. That's my own preference, I avoid them and look for something that lets me pay via the App Store instead. In the cases where I can't do that (Disney, Netflix), I just leave a bad review and send feedback on their website asking to pay in the app.
Among even non-tech people I know, it's now common knowledge to check on the web if you can get a discount without the Apple tax before doing an in-app purchase. I think most people care more about saving 10-30% on their purchases than the convenience.
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?
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.
So I really wanted to understand the different kinds of margins. Yes, this was made with the help of an AI, with lots of iterations to make it applicable to Apple and easily understandable. I attempted to verify the numbers manually fwiw. Now please roast me.
Net profit margin: 26.6% ($29.58B / $111.18B) — what the company and its shareholders keep after taxes and everything else. (edited)
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.
Correction, shareholders don’t keep the profit, the company keeps most of this on its balance sheet which may cause a corresponding rise in the price of Apple’s stock if people did not already anticipate that level of return. (And markets are rational)
The only money that shareholders keep is the dividend per share which was $0.27 out of a profit of $2.01 per share.
I know it is not you but the industry parlance, so a question to anyone knowledgable. Is gross margin ever useful? Sure 50% sounds like a lot, but without R&D and staff and other expenses, you can not make that 50% and even the 100%.
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.
Unless they change their tack, Apple is unlikely to go head to head against Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because they only target their own ecosystem (macOS/iOS). For MS and Google these Apple-owned platforms are not their primary user base.
Apple has no desire to go into the enterprise space.
I was floored to find out recently that the web interface for iCloud (iCloud.com) has no way to edit a spreadsheet in-browser. I thought for sure they’d have browser based Numbers at this point, but nope! I think if they haven’t done this yet it ain’t gonna happen.
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?
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.
Apple is saving a ridiculous amount of money by just licensing Gemini from Google instead of trying to keep up with a frontier model of their own. In a few years when the S-curve has flattened a bit it will probably be way cheaper to catch up if Google then tries to squeeze them.
They're not really in that business, though, so who cares? It's like saying Apple is eating the other guys' lunch on Swift adoption. Or Microsoft is eating their lunch on Video Games. There's no rule that says "All companies must focus on AI."
That they aren’t participating in the AI arms race is very good for current earning
The best quarter on record by 17% and they raise the dividend by a paltry 4%... sigh