A few days ago, Apple released the results for its 2025 fiscal third quarter (which ran from March 30, 2025, to June 28, 2025) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically not an important fiscal quarter for Apple, but as Lisa Kailai Han of CNBC reported, Apple’s earnings beat the expectations of Wall Street with record revenue of $95 billion. It was Apple’s best fiscal third quarter ever, up from $85.8 billion last year, which was the previous all-time record. As Dan Moren of Six Colors noted, Apple is about to enter an era where it breaks $100 billion in revenue every quarter, which is quite remarkable. As usual, however, I’m not as interested in the financial details as I am in what Apple said during the call with analysts that provides interesting insight into Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad. If you want to get all of the nitty-gritty details, you can listen to the audio from the announcement conference call on the Apple website, or you can read a transcript of the call prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors. Apple’s official press release is here. Here are the items that stood out to me.
iPhone
Apple’s iPhone revenue for the quarter was $44.6 billion, up from $39.3 billion this time last year. This was the number that surprised most of the analysts. With all of the uncertainty over tariffs, it is possible that some people purchased an iPhone sooner than normal to try to save money if the price had to increase, and Apple seemed to acknowledge that possibility on its call with investors.
This past quarter, Apple sold its 3 billionth iPhone. That’s a big number.
When asked whether the increasing importance of AI would reduce interest in devices with a screen, such as the iPhone, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that while Apple is certainly looking at other types of devices, it is “difficult to see a world where iPhone’s not living in it.” That’s an interesting answer to me. On the one hand, it does seem like Apple is falling behind other tech companies in the field of AI. But on the other hand, as long as people are still buying iPhones to use with AI platforms, Apple may have more time to figure out how to best take advantage of this new wave of AI.
iPad
iPad revenue was $6.6 billion. That’s down from the big iPad quarter that Apple had this time last year ($7.2 billion), but that makes sense because Apple introduced two new iPads in 2024 Q3 (a new iPad Air and a new iPad Pro) whereas there were no new iPads introduced in the past quarter.
It will be interesting to see if the exciting new features coming in iPadOS 26 this Fall translates into more iPad sales. I doubt we will have an answer on that before Apple releases its 2026 Q1 results in January.
Other
Tim Cook tried to put a positive spin on Apple and AI. He called AI “one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime.” He said that Apple is using AI in virtually all of its products and is significantly increasing its investments in AI. He remarked: “Apple has always been about taking the most advanced technologies and making them easy to use and accessible for everyone, and that’s at the heart of our AI strategy.” Apple also looks to use AI in ways that are “deeply personal, private, and seamless, right where users need them.”
Cook said that Apple is reallocating a lot of people in Apple so that they change their focus to AI. That could help, but there have been many recent headlines about other tech companies hiring away some of Apple’s AI talent, so Apple will also have to make up for that loss.
Apple’s services revenue continues to increase every quarter and was $27.4 billion this past quarter, up 13% from this time last year. However, Apple also acknowledged that a lawsuit involving Google could change how much money Google pays Apple each year to send search traffic from the Safari web browser—Apple isn’t disclosing how much money that it, but it is clearly a lot—so there is a possibility that service revenue may decrease in the future because of a lawsuit.
Cook noted that the tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration resulted in $800 million in costs this past quarter. Apple expects that to increase to $1.1 billion in the current quarter, although Cook noted that future tariff rates are highly uncertain.
