Apple’s Q2 2026 Results
Apple (transcript, MacRumors, Hacker News):
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17 percent year over year. Diluted earnings per share was $2.01, up 22 percent year over year.
“Today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever, with revenue of $111.2 billion and double-digit growth across every geographic segment,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “iPhone achieved a March quarter revenue record, fueled by such extraordinary demand for the iPhone 17 lineup. During the quarter, Services achieved yet another all-time record, and we were excited to introduce remarkable new products to our strongest lineup ever. That included the addition of the iPhone 17e and the M4-powered iPad Air, along with the launch of MacBook Neo, which is captivating customers all around the world.”
And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs[…]
Margins are now at 49.3%.
iPhone saw a quarterly revenue record, fueled by “extraordinary demand” for the iPhone 17 family, reaching $57 billion in revenue (up 22%), while Services hit yet another all-time record ($31 billion in revenue, up 16%). Mac revenue was up 6% (to $8.4 billion), iPad revenue was up 8% (to $6.9 billion), and Wearables, Home, and Accessories were up 5% (to $7.9 billion). Apple’s installed user base also reached a “new all-time high” of 2.5 billion active devices.
The company gave unexpectedly strong guidance for the June quarter, with expectations of 14–17% total revenue growth, in spite of uncertainty surrounding tariffs, wars, and RAMageddon.
Those holiday quarters are huge. They stand out on any chart you make. The other quarters, well, they’re the sag in the saddle. They’re important because you need 12 months to make a calendar, but they’ve never had the sizzle of the holiday quarter.
Which is why it’s so impressive that, for two successive “boring” quarters, Apple has generated more than $100 billion in revenue. In 2020, Apple’s “boring” quarters averaged $60.9 billion in revenue. That a company this large can still grow this much in five years is astounding.
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The key concept here seems to be flexibility. It sure sounds to me like Apple wants the ability to, for example, stash a little extra cash away so that it’s capable of making big moves if it needs to. Maybe that’s capital expenditures involving AI stuff. Maybe it’s keeping enough cash ready to spring if there’s a company it feels like it can acquire, in whole or in part.
The dichotomy is so wild that it now gets written about every single quarter. But the dichotomy also keeps growing every single quarter as Big Tech keeps ramping CapEx and yes, Apple stays the same! I mean the chart above says it all by showing it all.
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Last year, the numbers exploded. This year, they’ll explode even further. Amazon will hit $200B spent for the year. Google will be close behind at $190B. Microsoft should be around the same at $190B. Meta at $145B. Apple? Again, they hit $4.344B in CapEx in the first half of 2026 – which was down a bit year on year – so they should end in that $9B to $10B range, assuming some level of ramp.
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Either Apple is right and the rest of Big Tech will have lit hundreds of billions – perhaps trillions when all is said and done – of dollars on fire, or Apple is going to be in big trouble.
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What’s especially wild there is that Apple is most famously the company that doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone else if at all possible. It’s the “Tim Cook Doctrine” for chrissakes! Either they’ve forgotten that fear, which stems from the times Apple nearly died in their history when others refused to play ball with them, and have been lulled to complacency by years of iPhone dominance, or again, they just think this will be like web search. Not something they need to fully own.
Troublingly, Apple is pushing harder into advertising. In the Q&A with analysts, Parekh said the company had added more ad inventory to the App Store and would bring ads to Apple Maps in the US and Canada this summer. Apple spins the increase in ads as helping developers and local businesses, but even Apple’s pet 451 Research firm won’t be able to come up with double-digit numbers for customer satisfaction with ads.
Tim Cook said that the Mac mini and Mac Studio could be hard to get for months to come.
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Shipping delays for the Mac mini and the Mac Studio have been increasing over the last few months, and the waits for some models stretch into months. Apple stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB RAM entirely, and it stopped accepting orders for some models with higher amounts of RAM. As of last week, the base Mac mini was listed as “Currently Unavailable” from Apple’s online store because it is out of stock.
Apple was very optimistic about the MacBook Neo before announcing it, but the company still “undercalled” the level of enthusiasm that the laptop would generate, according to Cook.
Previously:
- John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
- MacBook Neo Sales
- Ads in Apple Maps
- Apple’s Q1 2026 Results
- More App Store Ad Spots
- Apple’s Q2 2025 Results
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It would be fair to say that controlling key technologies is quite important if there is not enough competition in them, and that makes Apple be at the mercy of the providers of those technologies. They see sufficient competition in the AI field now.
