Apple's 'remarkable' record quarter shows the iPhone still beats AI fears

Apple $AAPL just reminded the market that it still controls the calendar. After weeks of investors interrogating Big Tech about AI capital expenditures, margins, and diminishing returns, Apple showed up Thursday with a very old-fashioned flex: It sold an enormous number of very expensive things, very profitably, very much on time.

In its fiscal 2026 first quarter, Apple reported $143.8 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year earlier, and earnings per share of $2.84, up 19% — records on both counts and above Wall Street’s expectations (revenue of about $138 billion and EPS around $2.67). iPhone revenue hit an all-time high; Services did, too; margins held up; and China flipped from lingering overhang to headline-strength growth. Going in, expectations were already elevated for the holiday quarter. Beating those by this much gets you a lot more room to run.

For a company that has spent the past year being asked whether its best days are behind it, the numbers arrived without any qualifiers. Or as Apple CEO Tim Cook called the earnings: “remarkable.”

The iPhone did the heavy lifting — as expected in the holiday quarter and on the back of one of Apple’s most successful launches in years. Demand was “simply staggering,” Cook told Reuters. Revenue from the device surged to $85.3 billion, powered by what Cook, in the earnings release, called “unprecedented demand,” with records across every geographic segment. 

Any pre-earnings anxiety wasn’t really about whether Apple could sell phones but about where those phones would still sell and whether China had become a structural problem. But Greater China revenue jumped to $25.53 billion from $18.51 billion — a 38% surge that, for one quarter at least, makes the “Apple’s China problem” storyline look prematurely smug.

Services, meanwhile, did exactly what Apple has trained investors to expect. Revenue reached $30 billion, up 14%, extending the steady drumbeat that turns hardware cycles into recurring income. Services is still underwriting everything else — the ballast that lets Apple absorb volatility without rewriting the business model every time consumer demand wobbles.

Margins were the sleeper win. Gross margin came in at 48.2%, above guidance and ahead of expectations, even as component costs — particularly memory — have been creeping higher. Apple is still winning the quiet operational fights. Pricing power, supply-chain discipline, and scale are doing real work here, even as the hardware itself gets more expensive to build.

The market’s reaction reflected that confidence — and its limits. Apple stock rose about 1.8% in after-hours trading, a respectful nod rather than a standing ovation. This wasn’t a relief rally. Investors weren’t braced for disaster. They were checking whether the machine still works. The answer is yes.

Not every line item sparkled. Mac revenue dipped to $8.39 billion (from $8.99 billion a year ago), and the wearables/home/accessories bucket slid to $11.49 billion (from $11.75 billion); AirPods Pro 3 supply constraints were part of the explanation for the softer wearables print. iPad revenue was up modestly to $8.60 billion. Meanwhile, R&D climbed to $10.89 billion from $8.27 billion — an unusually loud tell in a company that prefers its future tense to stay vague until it’s shrink-wrapped.

Shareholders, of course, got their dessert. CFO Kevan Parekh said the quarter generated “nearly $54 billion in operating cash flow,” enabling Apple to return “almost $32 billion to shareholders.” The board also declared a $0.26 per share dividend, payable Feb. 12 to shareholders of record Feb. 9.

But what this quarter didn’t do — and didn’t need to do — was sell a future. While Microsoft $MSFT and Meta $META have spent earnings season narrating multiyear AI buildouts and eyebrow-raising capex commitments, Apple delivered something simpler: execution. In a market that’s increasingly jumpy about “spend today, explain later,” Apple just posted its (big) payoff today.

Apple now counts more than 2.5 billion active devices in its installed base. That’s leverage. That’s Apple saying, “Before you ask about chatbots, remember how many people already live inside our system.” That’s the reason Services keeps compounding, the reason future AI features don’t need splashy launches to reach scale, and the reason Apple can afford to be deliberate about what it promises next. Distribution, at this point, is the moat.

Still, this quarter didn’t settle the AI debate. It didn’t outline a grand vision or commit Apple to an arms race that it clearly doesn’t want to run. Earlier this month, Apple and Google $GOOGL disclosed a multiyear collaboration that puts Google’s Gemini models under the hood of Apple’s next wave of “Apple Intelligence,” including a more personalized Siri slated for later this year. And on earnings day, Apple added a hardware-flavored tell: It bought Israeli startup Q.ai, whose “silent speech” work uses sensors to read tiny facial micromovements and whose audio tech is built for the messy real world — whispers, noise, and all the places voice assistants usually fall apart. 

Together, those moves sketch an Apple approach that looks less like an arms race and more like a supply chain: outsource the foundation where it makes sense, buy the edge cases that can become features, and let the installed base do the scaling. This quarter buys Apple more time to figure out its AI strategy. Strong numbers give Apple room to decide how much intelligence it builds, how much it partners for, and how much margin it’s willing to trade for relevance — on its own schedule.

So hardware still moves at holiday scale, Services still monetizes the installed base with frightening efficiency, and margins are still strong enough to fund whatever Apple wants to call “the next era” on the earnings call.

Apple didn’t pitch a future on Thursday night. It reminded investors why it gets the benefit of the doubt while deciding what that future should look like.