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Apple reports second quarter results
- maz1b 6mo agoIt 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.
- antipaul 6mo agoFocused on "simplicity", they used to have only a "tableful" of products. With more products, will Apple collapse under the weight of the complexity?
- fumar 6mo agoThat 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.
- wat10000 6mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kshacker 6mo agoThere 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.
- fckgw 6mo agoThey 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.
- sudb 6mo agoI 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.
- joe_mamba 6mo ago>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.
- giarc 6mo agoThe competition would have been at the luxury end. Apple would have been competing with Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac, not with Hyundai and Kia.
- twobitshifter 6mo agoWhy luxury? Apple is mass market not luxury.
- bombcar 6mo agoApple sells mass market by marketing it as luxury. And to be fair, it kinda is. The OS on the Neo is the same as on a Mac Pro (RIP)
- joe_mamba 6mo ago> Apple would have been competing with Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac, not with Hyundai and Kia. So? Did I stutter when I said that would be great for competition? Luxury cars go down in value pretty quickly on the used market after they age a while and then become affordable to the masses. I live in an low income migrant EU neighborhood, and it's not full of new Kias and Hyundais, but 10+ year old BMWs, Mercedes and Audis, because some people prefer the status of a used old car from a luxury brand, rather than a new car from a budget brand. Apple entering the ring with their supply chain and attention to detail, would have been a net positive impact to the car industry the same way Tesla was when it entered. No major car brand took EVs seriously before Tesla showed them how to make good cool looking ones, and their media entertainment units, even on 100k German cars, were laggy pieces of shit before Tesla changed the game. Tesla might not win this war, but they certainly moved the industry forward a lot in the right direction.
- flats 6mo agoI 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.
- pwatsonwailes 6mo agoIn 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.
- wat10000 6mo agoThe 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.
- nostrademons 6mo agoIt's right there in the developer APIs. All of those NS_ prefixes in the MacOS and iOS SDKs stand for NeXTSTEP.
- marsten 6mo agoIn 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.
- bombcar 6mo agoMicrosoft had done something similar (twice!) but Apple polished the living daylights out of it.
- 6mo ago
- pwatsonwailes 6mo agoShort 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).
- dmboyd 6mo agoSo hardware independent, they don’t even have any Mac minis, Mac pros or Mac studios in stock anymore
- r0fl 6mo agoThis comment hits hard as I tried to buy a Mac Mini this morning and could not find one anywhere in Calgary
- crazygringo 6mo agoAs a company, this is a great problem to have. Way better than the opposite.
- zitterbewegung 6mo agoDoesn'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.
- nsbk 6mo agoAll 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.
- bitpush 6mo agoIf the bubble bursts why would Apple buy any AI companies?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- williadc 6mo agoFor 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.
- marsten 6mo agoMore likely they would buy the assets of AI companies for pennies on the dollar. There could be a lot of H100s floating around at fire sale prices. Or they would acquire these companies for talent. Google did this for several years in the early 2000s – snapping up talent and data center capacity from the casualties of the dotcom bust.
- bitpush 6mo agoWhat will they do with all that H100s? They dont O&O any data centers. AFAIK, Apple uses GCP for iCloud. 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.
- dieulot 6mo agoCharts: https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/04/apple-announces-record-fiscal-second-quarter/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/04/apple-announces-record-fi...
- brcmthrowaway 6mo agoDecent even though Google, OpenAI, Anthropic eating their lunch on AI.
- uejfiweun 6mo agoThat'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.
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- ryandrake 6mo agoThey'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."
- dangus 6mo agoFun fact: selling iPhones and my TV+ subscription I forgot to cancel and don’t even use is a lot more profitable than selling $2 of compute time for $1 (with 0-6 months of moat).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jjfoooo4 6mo agoThat they aren’t participating in the AI arms race is very good for current earning
- kalleboo 6mo agoApple 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.
- benoau 6mo agoThere'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.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoIt'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.
- benoau 6mo agoFor me there's definitely a trust factor for random app developers and an indifference for non-subscriptions where the one-time fee is irrelevant, but I wouldn't pay an extra $20 - $100 a year in fees to avoid a company like Netflix or Disney managing subscriptions it's just not that hard to do and they're adequate at it.
- LexGray 6mo agoThere may be one or two good examples of companies who do not depend on dark patterns to keep subscriptions, but plenty of the big names are associated with absolute horror stories of numerous hour long phone calls fighting retention specialists to get a service canceled. For me the ease of seeing what subscriptions I have in one place with easy cancellation options avoids the stress of trusting companies with PII and credit card info and ever needing to deal with anything over the phone. That said… making it impossible to sell your product with less than a 30% margin does not seem in line with today’s software and streaming economics. I am not sure the model Apple should adopt, but the current one lacks artistry.
- aetherspawn 6mo agoIf 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.
- marsten 6mo agoUnless 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.
- greedo 6mo agoApple has no desire to go into the enterprise space.
- creinhardt 6mo agoI 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.
- LexGray 6mo agoI presume you mean how you can upload CSV or XLSX spreadsheets but not view them? It does seem an oversight they do not have conversion on the website or the ability to import into a spreadsheet. More interesting is how Pages gives a nice red exclamation saying not a supported file while Numbers gaslights you letting you share something you can’t use.
- lysace 6mo agoSo 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.
- twobitshifter 6mo agoCorrection, 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.
- lysace 6mo agoGood point. I'll add an edit.
- kshacker 6mo agoI 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%.
- prewett 6mo agoThe best quarter on record by 17% and they raise the dividend by a paltry 4%... sigh