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Discussion (92 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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).
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.
Something else you can do is buy companies.
Hopefully there is work being done on the replacement for the Mach kernel and OSX / iOS in general. If there isn't that would be a grave mistake and exactly the kind of one someone like Tim Cook would make. Look at how he fumbled AI at Apple. I'm not saying he isn't talented, he is, but he isn't a product guy or an engineer.
This could happen in parallel with existing software dev skunkworks style.
And "Harmony OS" is going to threaten their ecosystem of hardware, software, services, and developers?
"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.
We can observe with Apple’s pricing staying stable that they have some of the best supplier arrangements in the industry.
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.
You could.
Or you could have no fab and no supply of chips for your business.
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.
Nonsense. They make 72% of their revenue from hardware, and without those hardware sales, the Services category would be nil.
It'd make them leaders in batteries.
It'd keep America at the forefront of EVs.
Huge disappointment.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/614379/weel-evb-electric-concept-...
It still blows my mind that this is the same company.
They're a monster. Vastly impressive stuff.
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.
With more products, will Apple collapse under the weight of the complexity?
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.
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.
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.
Why in a couple of generations? You've put your finger on why the product failed: Apple's fear of connectivity. Apple zealously cripples the I/O on all of its mobile products, rendering them unusable for so many things.
All the Vision Pro needed was a video input. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, filmmakers, engineers, travelers... all would have been a ready market for an excellent head-mounted video device. But nope... Apple can't have people doing anything with its products that it didn't think of.
I'm more sad they cancelled their EV project. We need more healthy competition there than public spying VR ski goggles.
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.
For me, I much prefer the convenience of having all my subscriptions centrally located in the App Store, and, more importantly, being able to cancel them with one click there too.
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.
If the bubble bursts, Apple with its mountain of cash will be ready to buy the carcasses of whatever is left.
Google did this for several years in the early 2000s – snapping up talent and data center capacity from the casualties of the dotcom bust.
Also, remember H100 will be ~years old. Sometimes I wonder whether the average HN crowd really thinks through things.
Apple has historically shown an unwillingness to deploy capital to "own" things. They partner with TSMC for manufactoring, they get their panels from Samsung, Google on Gemini ..
Vertically integrated doesnt mean they "make" everything, but instead partners build things to their specification.
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.
The only money that shareholders keep is the dividend per share which was $0.27 out of a profit of $2.01 per share.