Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results
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Apple reported its Q4 2025 results, sparking discussion on the company's financials, product sales, and industry trends, with commenters analyzing the data and debating implications for Apple's future.
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Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion
Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion
[EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration.
"the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
What could have possibly changed…
Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.
[0] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-an...
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/primers/primer-not-all-taxe...
- spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest of the economy
- spend their profits to try and grow, and succeed; not only spreading capital but creating new wealth that will eventually work its way around to the shareholders
- return it to shareholders, where it gets taxed
So you could have a situation where you have $1m in profit, and you want to buy a $1m machine, but the machine goes on your balance sheet and not your income statement, so your books still show $1m in profit, even though you now have no cash. And now you still have to pay tax on the $1m.
Now, in the next year, the rules allow you to write off say $200k of that machine, reducing your profit by that much. Eventually, you get to write off much / all of the machine.
But cash is king, and on a cash basis, the tax man is doing very much better than the business in this scenario.
Better to dispense with all the accounting intrigues, tax corporations at 0%, and just tax dividends, buybacks, and salaries.
I thought corporate income tax was a tax on profits, and if a company pays a dividend that doesn't lower profits so wouldn't that be after taxes?
There isn't a "right" answer, there are trade offs between incentives that drive the flows into different places.
Companies are single-purpose wealth creation machines, let them find their optimal investment mix. Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.
> Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.
This is a reactionary policy to the existing system, not a sustainable new one. At the minimum, it incentivizes:
1. Hoarding cash
2. The acquisition of assets unrelated to the core business (real estate for example)
3. Increased corporate debt (no tax on interest payments)
4. Shifts from salary to stock options
5. Acquisitions over investments in new product lines or R&D
Functionally, you and I probably disagree on some things though - I would want to encourage companies to spend their money on salaries, pushing the money towards the broad consumer base.
Corporate tax rates were insanely higher many decades ago. Both industry and the public thrived despite it. Corporate tax rate slashed, public flounders, corporations act in ungrounded and bizarre ways. This is not a healthy system.
"The last part" of GP is taxing the company's money when it's distributed to shareholders, and that is absolutely already happening. You might not like the current rates or loopholes (neither do I), but I think most of the somewhat-wealthy big tech engineers on this board can attest that it "is happening".
Taxing company profits directly may be less efficient from an economics point of view but it's much more politically palatable.
This is the last part. Where do you think the money goes if not to employees or owners?
Land value tax is a consumption tax too, since defending and servicing and routing around one’s occupied surface area of the earth is very costly for the rest of society.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad.
2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined
Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services
(millions)
iPhone $209,586
Mac $33,708
iPad $28,023
Wearables, Home and Accessories $35,686
Services $109,158
Total $416,161
Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
2025: iPhone $209.586 billion, Mac $33.708 billion, iPad $28.023 billion, Wearables, Home and Accessories $35.686 billion, Services $109.158 billion, Total $416.161 billion
(Wearables, home, and accessories already surpassed Mac sales, although I don't know what exactly is included in accessories.)
Also, I don't think it's useful to compare wearables to Mac, because Watch isn't much of a computing platform, AirPods aren't a computing platform at all, and Vision Pro has almost no sales. This category is mostly accessories to iPhone.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-bes...
Re: Macbooks generally. My mind was somewhat blown when a former co-worker told me their kid didn't want a Macbook. They were fine with an iPhone for their schoolwork.
Personally, I still find MacBooks as the least replaceable category--other than the iPhone. Anything else I could live without as needed.
EDIT: Ack, you're right. Bad comment, self.
Apple no longer announces unit sales. In any case, it has always been true that Mac Average Selling Price is much higher than iPad Average Selling Price. In the sense of unit sales, iPad is bigger than Mac and has been for many years, so in that respect the 2024 Q4 results would not prove anything new.
The OP was giving a false narrative about future growth that is contrary to what recent quarterly results have shown.
The second reason is likely that there are computers that are 1/3 of the price subsidized by the terrible ad-supported OS installs. (Has anyone tried to setup a MS computer lately, it's an ad-box).
The better question is, who do you know pays full price up front for an iPhone with no discounts? Only people who destroy or lose their current iPhone? The parents of teenagers giving the teenager the old phone and replacing theirs?
The big carriers hide the phone in the price but you're still paying it. I just use US Mobile unlimited plans for $35/mo, plus it gives me free international service which was the real advantage for me. Paying 1/3 the annual service plan and $0/day int'l roaming instead of $15/day.
We had that development with cars. 40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car. Nowadays, we have a subscription for seat warmers. The manual tells you to visit the dealer to get your brakes checked. Makes me sad, somehow. But people have choosen this path as a collective.
On the other hand, I've done my own cooking more than not.
You make choices about what you do yourself and what you have others do for you.
Where new cars get shitty is the electronics that get shoehorned in to control systems that were previously controlled by a button or dial.
For the consumable stuff every car owner has to deal with, nothing has really changed in 40 years, honestly! A brake service is still done the exact same way, same with virtually all the fluid services.
I just find far more people parrot "modern cars are so complicated" today and don't even consider that in fact, it is relatively simple to change a brake pad and disc, or your own oil, perhaps an air filter, even on most brand new cars. Fluids filters and brakes are like 90% of most people's maintenance needs nowadays.
YouTube has also massively lowered the barrier to working on cars, given there are multiple easy to follow guides for just about any car service for any car model you can think of.
Also similarly as with iPhones, many cars require connecting to the authorized service to change headlights and other parts since they are paired with the MCU.
I know how to work on my car but I am not able to because someone decided to lock it down.
> https://www.brakeandfrontend.com/quick-answer-electronic-par...
You typically need the piston fully retracted to replace pads, which very rarely happens just by disengaging the park brake.
If you are old enough to have changed a manual handbrake pad, you normally had to screw the piston back in before you could fit the thicker new pad with a "caliper rewind tool" even if the handbrake was off, the electronic parking brake service mode essentially does this for you, or unblocks the piston permitting a rewind tool to work.
> https://www.thedrive.com/guides-and-gear/how-to-use-a-brake-...
FWIW, I've never found an electronic parking brake I couldn't rewind myself after a few minutes on google.
On the cars I've worked on, the hand brake did not actuate the primary caliper so retracting the piston wasn't an issue.
(Air filters are, admittedly, pretty easy.)
I also choose not to mow my lawn at this point. I'm perfectly capable of doing so but just prefer not to do so,
Not everyone needs to know how to compile their own kernel, build their own furniture or clean their laundry perfectly. Everyone has their own interests and areas of expertise they want to delve in to. Now I can screw up a brake job working on it all day and rewatching YouTube videos wondering what I missed, or I can take it to a shop and get it done in an hour for cheap. That's just me though. I spent a lot of time working on cars in my youth and I'm just tired of spending my time on it. I don't like it and I am more than willing to pay someone who does like it to do it.
That is irrelevant to the argument he is making that things have not gotten harder in the last 40 years in regards to car maintenance that you can do at home.
His point is that the perception that car maintenance has gotten harder for the average joe does not match reality. Almost all of the things that need periodic on modern cars are more or less the same as they were in 1985.
BTW just before Covid, or during Covid, I took a car mechanic course from the local De Anza college - no hands on, so that's why I think it was during Covid. But after 5 years and no experience, I have forgotten except the abstract concepts. Then imagine people who never had to look under the hood -- ever.
But my primary takeaway was that this is hard & dirty work, and there are numerous ways in which you can make mistakes that ruin the car and/or endanger your safety, so generally paying a professional to do it is a more sensible way.
Of course, if you enjoy doing this, or have a very old car, or more time than money, the trade-offs are different.
Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.
Again it is like 5 mins of hands on work if you are taking your time.
I can attest that changing a brake pad is mission impossible level without the proper tools. The tools and experience are what make it look easy, for someone that has both.
What is so noble about changing your oil?
On one hand, yes. But also, cars are now an appliance. They rarely break, can be bought quite cheaply (if that’s what you want) and consume little time. I like this.
We will see if it lives up to the promise, but the dealer said ‘don’t bother’ when I asked about serving.
So far that has held true, but it’s early years.
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
This is logical result of walled gardens.
I 'member when "personal" computers were going to be a kind of capital-equipment made available to the masses, creating new levels of autonomy and personal control over our own lives, working for our goals and interests... Whoops.
Folks like Stallman did warn me though.
That is even not counting the additional Windows updates after you get to the desktop and updates from the OEM. This is also with a Microsoft account while restoring my own settings from OneDrive.
For doing tasks like online banking or booking plane tickets, I find the mobile experience frustrating and therefore do it on my laptop. She finds the laptop clunky and finds mobile much easier.
Are we reading the same quarterly report?
Wearables/Home/Accessories is slightly higher than the Mac, yes, but its a category that has been trending poorly for Apple for ~18 months now IIRC, and that hasn't gotten better this quarter (9.04B->9.01B 3mo YoY). There's no foreseeable future where Vision starts driving Mac-like revenue (meaning, it'll be at least 2 years). Airpods are huge mainstays but have really hit market capacity and aren't growing. Apple Watch will see strong growth if they can successfully get glucose monitoring working, but that's an *if, and until then its slipping from an "upgrade every 3 years" to even longer lifecycle for most people.
Meanwhile: Mac is their fastest growing hardware segment by revenue (+12% 3mo YoY) (iPhone is +6%, iPad is flat, Services +15%).
iPhone aint going anywhere, Services are carrying their growth, but Mac is very solidly the #3 darling of this report. Their other product lines (Apple Watch, iPad, Airpods, etc) are interesting, successful businesses, but its unlikely we're going to see much growth out of them over the next 2 years. The story is iPhone, Services, and Mac, in that order, and there's no #4.
I suspect iPhone adoption has done a lot more toward Mac adoption.
Hate to say it, but Macs aren't any better. I've worked on literally thousands of laptops, and you win some, and you lose some. There are some shitty Dells, and some good Dells, and there are some shitty MacBooks and some good MacBooks.
I even have a couple of old Dells that are about 10 years old now. Working just fine too.
I think it’s been a while since there was a MBP MLB lawsuit but maybe I’m forgetting about one.
This is the last one I recall.
“Apple faces class-action lawsuit over 2011 MacBook Pro GPU issues“
https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/28/apple-class-action-lawsuit-20...
That CPU was dropped from Windows 10 support with 22H2, pretty much the same time that Apple stopped supporting it in macOS. The last build of Windows 10 supporting that CPU reached "end of service" more than two years ago.
According to the current supported processor list, the oldest Intel CPU supported by Windows 7 was introduced about 5 years after Windows 7 itself [1].
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
It’s a great feeling to get years more life out of your old system with about an hour of work.
Do you really think that anything MSFT has done with MW11 --unfriendly to consumers or not-- will significantly impede the success of MW11?
According to TechRadar this is exactly what has driven the uptick in Mac sales:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/macbooks/never-mind-linu...
The option is between Windows, ChromeOS and Android based laptops (aka tablets with keyboards).
Thus most consumers without endless budgets end up getting a Windows laptop, regardless of its current state.
We had the option with Linux, however first all netbooks already showed the trend with OEMs distros (gotta differentiate), Microsoft reacted, and tablets delivered the final blow.
Ideally there would be nice laptops with other options at consumer shops that people during their Weekend window shopping tour would feel like buying on a whim.
Seems to imply that anyone cares beyond a niche. I use Windows 11 on my gaming PC and emulator PC, and I don't care at all. It works perfectly fine.
OS X is much worse in my opinion, with awful window management and constant bugs breaking basic functionality.
The only decent OS experience I've ever had is with KDE and Gnome. But Linux sucks at running games, and there is no good Linux/x86 hardware out there.
Pick your poison.
This isn't true in the slightest. You must be dealing with some seriously outdated information.
I've been running games on Linux full time for 3 years. I made the switch the week Elden Ring launched when it immediately ran better on Linux than on Windows. That was the top selling game at the time. I've had extremely minimal performance issues since my switch. Other major games I've run include Baldur's Gate 3, multiple Resident Evil games, and the Oblivion remaster.
I'm running a 7600X with a 9070XT as of last month and am finding my hardware is perfectly fine.
Linux compatibility is very high, and Linux install base is becoming a considerable size of total PC gaming market.
So Mac is doing very well!
Though if the Mac Pro with all those slots could run nvidia GPUs I’d be even crazier I think.
Apple’s investment in building its own in-house “Apple Silicon” is large. Can anyone definitely prove they haven’t been working on the sort of AI GPU stuff that NVidia has been?
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/111375/
AirPods completely saturated their market incredibly quickly.
This is reputation laundering. 'Services revenue' is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.
I view this the exact opposite way. The death of the laptop in favor of tablets has been touted for about a decade now, and it has still failed to materialize. Wearables have even surpassed the iPad.
Not to mention, the Mac laptops have seen a recent surge of popularity last few years, due to still being the only realistic ARM-based laptop, with the battery life / weight vs performance you get from this. This is still likely to remain the reality for at least a few years, and thus they're likely to snowball even more based on this reputation.
Theres also the fact much of the developing world went straight to mobile, skipping laptops.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.
Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.
> Some people want the best possible experience
I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.
> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research
Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/
If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)
How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)
But I'm too much of a penny pincher..
But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?
If the rumors about a cheaper entry-level MacBook are true, that might put a small dent into that, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.
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