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Record March quarter, $100B buyback, new CEO incoming
Venture Insights · Venture InsightsPeriod: 2026-Q15 min read
Last updated
Revenue
Greater China Growth
Gross Margin
iPhone revenue grew 22% last quarter with Cook calling demand 'off the charts.' The bull case is that Apple's on-device AI — Apple Intelligence, a personalised Siri, and Gemini integration — creates a durable reason to upgrade that the market has not yet priced. The bear case is that most iPhone users upgrade on a four-year cycle regardless of features, and that Apple Intelligence is table stakes rather than a differentiated driver. The iPhone 18 launch cycle, expected in September 2026 under Ternus's first weeks as CEO, will provide the definitive answer.
Apple's fiscal Q2 (March 2026 quarter) was the clearest case of beating expectations of the week amongst the big IT companies. Revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17% year-on-year, set a March-quarter record. EPS of $2.01 beat estimates by six cents. Gross margin expanded 220 basis points to 49.3%. Services hit a record $31.0 billion, accelerating from 14% to 16% growth. Greater China surged 28% to $20.5 billion — a major positive reversal after years of Huawei-driven erosion. iPhone grew 22% and Cook called demand 'off the charts.' June-quarter revenue guidance of +14% to +17% dwarfed the +9.5% consensus. Apple then authorised a new $100 billion buyback and confirmed that Tim Cook will hand the CEO role to John Ternus on September 1, 2026. The stock rose roughly 3.3% the following day. Apple is the only mega-cap in this earnings cohort that is not chasing GPU capacity at scale — it is instead distributing AI through partnerships, on-device inference, and a hardware upgrade cycle. Whether that strategy is visionary discipline or a strategic gap will be the defining question of the next year.
Apple is the most interesting company in this earnings cohort precisely because it is the most deliberately absent from the AI infrastructure arms race. It is generating record revenue, record margins, and record Services growth by distributing AI rather than building it. That strategy will be vindicated or challenged by a single variable over the next twelve months: whether a personalised Siri, on-device intelligence, and the iPhone 18 cycle together prove sufficient to maintain Apple's position as the defining consumer technology platform — or whether the absence of a frontier model eventually becomes a structural disadvantage that no amount of buybacks can offset.
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