alt Hacker NewsShort 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).
Replies
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.
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 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.
"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.
I wish they’d stop doing buy backs and invest 100B in R&D … imagine what they could do in battery tech or otherwise.
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.
So hardware independent, they don’t even have any Mac minis, Mac pros or Mac studios in stock anymore