These days are very busy in the tech world as several major companies present financial results. Sony, Nintendo and Apple meet this week, for example, and we already know the results of the American company.
John Turnus debuted in his first call as Apple CEO to investors, commenting on the Mac’s excellent results, but if you’re wondering how the iPhone is doing, the answer is “like a rocket.” And China has a good share of the credit.
Brief information. In this quarter (July to September), the company reported revenue of $114.5 billion, up 12% from the same quarter last year. If we focus on products, there are two clear motions:
- iPhone with revenue of $57.6 billion, up 17% from the prior year and setting a record for the September quarter.
- service with revenue of $31.6 billion compared to $28.8 billion in the prior year.
- Mac With revenue of 10,800 million compared to 8,700 million in the same quarter of the previous year.
- iPad 6,200 million in revenue, down from 7,000 million in the previous year.
- wearableHome and accessories with revenue of 8.3 billion, which is 8% lower than the same period of the previous year.
Year of the Mac. It’s clear what the core business legs are for an Apple that’s been pivoting for years to become not just an iPhone company, but a services company. However, and here’s the surprise, the Mac performed extremely well in perhaps its worst year.
I’m not going to go into it too much because my colleague Lacourt already broke it down yesterday, but basically in a year where an unprecedented component crisis made things very difficult for consumer tech, Macs stood out with 28.7% growth in the previous quarter and 23.7% growth in the current period compared to the same period a year ago.
Mainly responsible for the price of the MacBook Neo, but models like the Mini or Studio that are very capable of running AI models locally, something that is quite interesting and profiles like Sam Altman don’t like one bit.
“Our active device base reached an all-time high in China with a record year for iPhone” – John Turnus
China. Devices aside, one very interesting point from the shareholder call was when Turnus answered a question about 28% growth in fiscal 2026 and the health of that market. The manager commented that this last quarter meant a 21% increase in revenue in China, which marked a record for the July to September quarter for the company.
The main culprit here was the iPhone, maintaining last year’s trend and registering a record for the September quarter, but also for Macs where they saw double-digit growth in the last period. This possibility of using them to drive AI locally makes a lot of sense in China, where AI adoption faces fewer barriers than in the West (for example, it also happens in Japan or South Korea) and where open models are dominant.
Turnus highlighted that China has become an even more priority market for the company, a country where the three iPhone models (base, Pro and ‘E’) have become the leading smartphones by sales numbers, and considers that there is potential for further growth. And even more so when the company was coming off two years in a row of declines.
A new year begins. China is establishing itself as the most promising market for some time. It’s a huge pie that Apple, Nvidia and other Western companies want to sink their teeth into. In Nvidia’s case, we’ve had GPU sales restrictions for AI for months, and Jensen Huang himself, very close to the current US government, has positioned himself to relax that friction and be able to enter that huge market legally.
Apple is doing very well in China and interestingly a new financial quarter has started for Apple. Although iPhones started going on sale in September, the current quarter starting in October would better reflect early sales of the iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone Duo and the new MacBook M6 and MacBook Touch that went on sale this week, as well as periods like November 11 and Black Friday.
When they present the results in a few months, we will see that China continues to consolidate itself as the market where we pay more attention and, above all, we will satisfy our curiosity to see if the Mac continues to grow at the healthy pace of recent months.
Picture | Xataka (edited)
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