We went through Apple CEO Tim Cook’s earnings call with investors on Thursday, and found some genuine surprises during the discussion of the financial results of the holiday 2024 quarter. We also turned up impressive figures showing just how well the company is doing.
Financial details don’t have to be boring. Here are the high points from the call as quickly and as interesting as we can make them.
Highlights of Apple’s hour-long earnings call in just 9 paragraphs
Apple surpasses 2.35 billion active devices: The raw number of Apple devices currently in use boggles the mind. “Thanks to our incredible customer satisfaction and strong loyalty, our installed base of active devices reached an all-time high across all products and geographic segments, and is now over 2.35 billion active devices,” said Apple’s new CFO Kevan Parekh. That’s roughly one Apple device for every 3.4 people on the planet. — Lewis Wallace
Apple Intelligence is not a bust: Apple Intelligence has generally been judged a big dud, but Apple said it’s actually been driving sales of iPhone in regions where it’s available. “In the markets where we had launched Apple intelligence, they outperformed the markets that we did not,” Tim Cook said on the call. — Leander Kahney
Apple’s profit engine is crazy: Apple’s ability to make money is stunning. Apple’s gross margins were 46% for the quarter. As a general rule, businesses aim for 10% to 15% gross margins, but some businesses, like restaurants, struggle to make 5%. Any kind of hardware is particularly difficult to make good margins from — and Apple’s ability to make bushels of it is pretty jaw-dropping. It’s helped hugely by Apple’s Services division, which reported $26 billion in revenues and 75% gross margins — 75%!!!!! — Leander Kahney
iPhone sales fell to “only” $69.1 billion: Long viewed by Wall Street as the key indicator of Apple’s success, iPhone revenues actually fell last quarter … to a measly $69.1 billion. Parekh brushed off the 0.8% drop, calling iPhone sales “roughly flat.” Still, Apple set an all-time record for iPhone upgraders and the active iPhone install base. And Cook said there’s “a lot of innovation left on the smartphone.” — Lewis Wallace
Mac revenue grew by leaps and bounds: With the help of the first MacBook Pro model with Apple’s M4 processor, revenue from Mac sales jumped an impressive 16% versus the same quarter of the previous year to just under $9 billion. Is the growth from upgraders or switchers? Both. “The M4 based products are so compelling that it’s driving both upgrades at the double digit level, and it’s driving switchers at a double digit level,” said Apple’s CEO. — Ed Hardy
iPad sales are up, up, up: Apple is raking in money from tablet sales — $8.1 billion last quarter alone — but don’t give the slim new M4 iPad Pro with an OLED screen the credit. As Cook said during the call, “iPad overall grew 15% for the quarter, and it was more driven by iPad Air and the entry-level iPad than it was the top level iPad.” — Ed Hardy
iPad and Apple Watch are attracting tons of new Apple users: Sales of both iPad and Apple Watch were particularly strong during the quarter, and both products attracted lots of customers who are new to Apple. Cook and co. said more than 50% of sales of both Apple Watch and iPad were to new customers, not upgraders. It amounts to a lot of new Apple users. — Leander Kahney
Services rake in more revenue than ever: Revenue from services like Apple Pay and Apple TV+ grew 14% year over year to set a new record high. “In services, we achieved an all-time revenue record,” Cook said. “And in the past year, we’ve seen nearly $100 billion in revenue from our services business.” With “well over a billion paid subscriptions,” services gross margin hit an astonishing 75%, said Parekh. — Lewis Wallace
India is Apple’s next gigantic growth market: A lot of Apple’s huge growth over the last 10 years or so came from China, which has ballooned into one of Apple’s biggest geographical markets after the U.S. and Europe. The next 10 years of growth will likely come from India. “I’m particularly keen on India,” Cook said during the call. “The iPhone was the top-selling model in India for the quarter and it’s the second-largest smartphone market in the world and third-largest for PCs and tablets. It’s a huge market and we have very modest share in these markets and I think there’s lots of upside there.” — Leander Kahney
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Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
