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Apple reports fourth quarter results
- perfmode 1y agoDeclining Mac sales aren’t concerning because Macs are high quality. People can skip generations and use their M1s for years.
- skoskie 1y agoThinking this through… I spent around $3500 and $4500 on my last two MBPs, but got 9 years of use out of each of them. That’s only $450/yr. But where I used to get a new iPhone every other year, I’m now on the fourth year of my 13P and it still works great. That’s only $300/yr. It’s interesting to think about.
- fragmede 1y agoFor us as consumers to think about, but there are multiple teams in many companies (not just Apple) that are dedicated to (exploiting) this interesting fact.
- Jaxan 1y agoI still use my iPhone SE after 8 years and bought it for 170€. That’s under 25€ per year :-). (Ok I had the battery replaced for 30€ once.)
- gilgoomesh 1y agoMac sales are up 12%, year over year. It's Apple's fastest growing hardware category. They're just going to be lower next month (year over year), due to the release cycles being different.
- lapcat 1y agoThis stuck out like a sore thumb to me: Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion [EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration. "the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
- nerdponx 1y agoEnough to pay for everything DOGE and the Trump admin cut in 2025, assuming a big chunk of that is US taxes.
- aauchter 1y agoEffective US tax rate is higher in 2025. The 2024 tax number was inflated due to a one time payment relating to Ireland which actually dates back to 2016.
- nomel 1y agoAre different sources of income taxed differently? Could it partly be from some change in income sources? Seems Services is more significant this quarter.
- Psillisp 1y ago[flagged]
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- hdgvhicv 1y ago[flagged]
- aauchter 1y agoTheir 2025 US taxes are actually higher. In Q4 2024 "Apple paid a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in order to resolve the tax issue with Ireland, which dates to 2016." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-205041625.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
- WorldPeas 1y ago[flagged]
- hyperhello 1y agoWhat do you mean serves them right? They made records.
- WorldPeas 1y agoThe title was changed since I made my comment. Seems the message of their earnings increase outdid trepidation about their future.
- dang 1y agoFWIW the submitted title was "Apple reports fourth quarter results" and hasn't changed.
- hyperhello 1y agoI really like that you seem to go through the auto-junked posts to investigate what happened. It says good things about Hacker News.
- dang 1y agoOnly some of them, alas - there's too much for us to see it all. But we do what we can, and readers can always help out by emailing hn@ycombinator.com when they notice an important miss.
- WorldPeas 1y agoThank you dang. I was likely mistaken having seen their stock dip, then commenting before it went up. I appreciate you correcting the record and think I need to take a break from the internet. Honesty is a big deal.
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- haunter 1y agoKind of telling that 1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad. 2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services (millions) iPhone $209,586 Mac $33,708 iPad $28,023 Wearables, Home and Accessories $35,686 Services $109,158 Total $416,161 Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
- lapcat 1y agoThese are the wrong numbers. You posted the 2024 numbers, not the 2025 numbers. 2025: iPhone $209.586 billion, Mac $33.708 billion, iPad $28.023 billion, Wearables, Home and Accessories $35.686 billion, Services $109.158 billion, Total $416.161 billion
- haunter 1y agoYeah you are right, my bad! Fixed
- lapcat 1y agoI think your conclusion is also wrong. iPad sales are flat, and wearables are actually declining: (Wearables, home, and accessories already surpassed Mac sales, although I don't know what exactly is included in accessories.) Also, I don't think it's useful to compare wearables to Mac, because Watch isn't much of a computing platform, AirPods aren't a computing platform at all, and Vision Pro has almost no sales. This category is mostly accessories to iPhone. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-best-fiscal-year-with-q4-record/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-bes...
- fyrn_ 1y agoWearables may include lightning charger cables :) ?
- bilsbie 1y agoHow come they don’t add AI?
- peterspath 1y agoThey have enough "AI" stuff. People just don't know it is AI. That is the best way of integrating AI into your product(s). The tech behind stuff doesn't really matter for the end user. other companies should also follow that trend, use ai for useful features, just give the feature a good name... no need to mention "ai"... because next year it could be something else that is powering the feature.
- eastbound 1y agoSiri can’t tell the time and people on Android can remove passerby’s from pictures, we can’t. I’m an Apple fanboy but Apple has been coasting for 10 years.
- bikelang 1y agoSiri can tell the time (I just checked - I’ve never tried before now) and you’ve been able to remove people/cars from photos for a while now I believe. Looks like iOS 16? Still took way too long and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is crap compared to Android (I haven’t used it). They also finally added call screening - idk why that took so long as my Pixel 3 had it over 5 years ago.
- digianarchist 1y agoApple is far behind the competition when it comes to image editing... https://www.instagram.com/reels/DPWkNZHjebe/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DPWkNZHjebe/
- bikelang 1y agoYeah no shock there haha
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- oxqbldpxo 1y agoAll these companies depend on TSMC for their life.
- sho_hn 1y agoAnd TSMC depends on machines by ASML they can also sell to others. And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC. Which was a conglomerate of a bunch of state-funded US research labs. And the US cut its science funding. Misery all the way down!
- yieldcrv 1y agoIt’s a conglomerate of researchers that were employed by the feds and private institutions who met have received various forms of grants I think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity
- throw0101a 1y ago> And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC. And glass/mirrors from Zeiss, amongst a whole bunch others: > ASML employs more than 42,000 people[1] from 143 nationalities and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers.[6] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding * https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and-vendors-for-asml/ https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and... Let's also not forget the the two most prominent chip design software companies, Cadence and Synopsys, are American: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies There are all sorts of inter-dependencies between companies and countries: welcome to globalization.
- andy_ppp 1y agoApple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.
- reaperducer 1y agoby the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.
- larkost 1y agoThere were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working. In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.
- MaysonL 1y agoJust last week: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-successfully-runs-an-nvidia-gpu-on-arm-macbook-through-usb4-using-an-external-gpu-docking-station https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-su...
- fnordpiglet 1y agoI don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.
- yRetsyM 1y agoInteresting that Google and Apple matched their quarterly earnings in revenue .
- nullbyte808 1y agoNo wonder they treat the Mac like a third-class citizen. Mac sales barely pay their tax bill.
- trollbridge 1y agoAt this point Macs have a great deal of parts in common with phones and tablets - M4 / M5 chip, flash design, and so on. The main purpose of the Mac (for Apple) is to host the development environment that is used to create apps which sustain the iPhone ecosystem. It does continue to baffle me just how cheap Macs are. $649 for a brand new 16GB MacBook at Best Buy with M2, more than powerful enough to do the aforementioned development. And cheaper than most iPhone models.
- pjmlp 1y agoUS prices, meanwhile in Portugal where minimum wage is about 800 euros bruto, it goes by a mere € 1692, meaning 1962 dollars. https://www.worten.pt/produtos/portatil-apple-914-7662-13-6-apple-m-m2-ram-16-gb-512-gb-ssd-apple-gpu-mrkean-8592978392017 https://www.worten.pt/produtos/portatil-apple-914-7662-13-6-... Hardly a great value for Portuguese households. It gets even worse outside southern Europe.
- YVoyiatzis 1y agoWhy is AAPL still one stock?
- TheJoeMan 1y agoNew law: large companies grow until they become a media company and the C-suite gets to attend the hollywood premiers and awards shows.
- mumber_typhoon 1y agoPersonal take : The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone. I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed. The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well. The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.
- drnick1 1y ago> leaning towards Arch on framework That's a wonderful idea. > The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. I don't think Macs are even a consideration for most "hackers." You can't build you own machine, Linux support is limited, they just cater to a crowd that wants a polished experience and don't mind giving up their freedom for it. As for the phone market, I think Apple's success mostly comes to a combination of clever marketing and phone users being on average even less technically-minded than desktop users. Add to that social pressure now the the iPhone is dominant. That being said you couldn't pay me to give up my Pixel running Graphene, a device that is completely immune to corporate spyware, forced "upgrades," sideloading restrictions and compliance with idiotic laws like client-side scanning (if it ever happens).
- pjmlp 1y agoWon where? Android has about 70% market share and there are countries where only rich people get to use iOS devices. Other population layers also need phones and digital services.
- unit149 1y ago[dead]