Taylor Sheridan signs a free agent deal with NBCU, Warner Bros. Discovery might have many interested bidders, and we answer your letters! (Downstream+ subscribers also get: Google/Disney carriage, Dancing With the Stars, Apple/F1, and Disney/Doctor Who.)
Apple has another great quarter and is on track to deliver the thing that it previously failed to deliver. The company is also set to deliver something no one wanted.
All the trillions
The work is mysterious and important and the numbers continue to be almost meaninglessly large.
Remember when Nvidia just made chips for shoot ‘em up games? Well, now we can thank the company for being such a big part of the advancement of vital technologies like crypto, NFTs and, um, uh, AI.
Four times a year, Tim Cook gets powered up to talk to financial analysts about the Apple’s quarterly results. It’s a rare opportunity to get some insight into the company’s business and operations, and those analysts always make the most of it, whether it’s asking about headwinds or congratulating the executives on all the money they’ve made.
But what you may not know is that there’s more than what you hear on the public conference call. Apple Quarterly Financials+ subscribers gets a whole additional opportunity to ask Tim questions and have him answer for their ears only. (I wonder where they got that idea).
We here at Six Colors have obtained access to the most recent quarter’s private call and are providing a full transcript as just one of the many features we offer to our subscribers. So without further ado, here’s what happened after the public call drew to a close.…
On the day that Apple announces its quarterly fiscal results, as it did on Thursday, there’s a little ritual that happens down in Cupertino: Financial journalists get a pre-briefing about the results from Tim Cook, and they rush to their live shots to breathlessly report the news on CNBC or Bloomberg Business or Fox Business from atop the Apple Park Visitors Center just as the announcement is posted publicly.
Sometimes I imagine that Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh say goodbye to them, jump in a car and just joyride all around Apple Park, doing donuts and singing out loud until they have to calm it down and get on the phone with financial analysts about half an hour later.
Thursday was one of those “doing donuts” days. Not only did Apple announce an all-time record for revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter, which also wrapped up an all-time record for Apple revenue in a fiscal year, and it wasn’t even close. And to top it all off, Cook dropped the mother of all forms of “guidance,” which is what you call it when companies publicly predict their next-quarter results three months in advance: “We expect the December quarter’s revenue to be the best ever for the company and the best ever for iPhone.”
Can Tim Cook dunk? I’m imagining him dunking. It was one of those days.
Forward-looking statements
So much fiscal disclosure of public companies is regulated that everyone is very careful what they say, lest they be sued or get in trouble with the government. At the top of every single Apple phone call, Suhasini Chandramouli of Apple’s investor relations appears to point out that the future is promised to no one:
Please note that some of the information you’ll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expense, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or trends to differ materially from our forecast, including risks related to the potential impact to the company’s business and results of operations from macroeconomic conditions, tariffs and other measures, and legal and regulatory proceedings… Apple assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made.
Translation: This is what we think will happen, but who knows? Things could change.
In any event, Parekh shortly thereafter dropped the kind of statement that makes investors and analysts lean way forward in their seats:
We expect our December quarter total company revenue to grow by 10 to 12 percent year over year, which would be our best quarter ever. We expect iPhone revenue to grow double digits year-over-year, which would be our best iPhone quarter ever.
Just so we’re clear, that’s about $138B in total revenue and a minimum of $76B in iPhone revenue. (Check back in January to see if they were right.) Keep in mind that the results reported on Thursday only have a week or two of iPhone sales, while Apple now has an addition month of sales data with which to make projections. And if Apple is this confident, iPhone 17 sales data has to be really, really good.
One reason Apple is so confident is that it’s supply-constrained. In other words, for at least some iPhone models, it just can’t make enough to fulfill demand. Cook specifically called out Greater China revenue decreasing largely because the company faced iPhone supply constraints, and said that generally Apple was “constrained on several [iPhone] 17 models.”
Selling as many iPhones as you can make is a good problem to have, but it does make it tough to get an idea of how the long run of iPhone 17 sales will go. The bulk of iPhone 17 sales are yet to come, but Apple can’t actually tell how strong demand is for each model. When asked by Aaron Raker of Wells Fargo if certain iPhone categories were popping, Cook demurred:
It’s really too early to call the mix, to be honest. And we don’t like to publicly disclose that for competitive reasons. But frankly, we don’t really know what the mix will be yet, because we have constraints on both sides of the ledger at the top and at the entry, and so we’ll see what happens as we get more supply.
In other words, there’s a general sense that people are buying loads of iPhones, but the company can’t yet tell which models are the biggest hits. (But just to be clear, if it knew, it probably wouldn’t tell you.)
Dodging the Services question
It was a good quarter critically for Apple’s Services category, what on account of all those Emmy wins for Apple TV’s “The Studio” and “Severance.” But enough about art—let’s talk filthy lucre. It was an all-time record Services quarter, with the category posting its ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year growth. (Apple said that it was an all-time record everywhere but Greater China, which only managed to set a fourth-quarter record.)
That’s impressive, but I think maybe I can top it: The Services category has broken its own all-time record for 13 straight quarters. There’s not a lot of seasonality in Services, I’ll grant you—that’s kind of the point. The credit cards just keep getting charged, month after month, off into the future. But it’s a remarkable growth path given the relative seasonality of all of Apple’s other businesses.
In the post-results call with financial analysts, Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America asked Cook for a little more detail about Apple’s search revenue, given its lucrative deal with Google, and whether that revenue growth might decelerate if Google’s search traffic were to be impacted by the growth of AI. Cook’s response was, if I do say so myself, an all-timer for these calls:
Cook: This is Tim. The advertising category, which is a combination of third-party and first-party, did set a record during the quarter.
Mohan: Okay, and sorry, just to be clear, both Apple’s own internal advertising and within the licensing individually set records?
Cook: I actually I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the combination of the two set a record. We don’t divulge—I’m dodging the question intentionally because we don’t split it at that level.
Look, these calls are almost entirely Apple execs dodging the questions of fiscal analysts. At least Tim Cook admitted it this time. You want to know how much Google is paying us and if that’s growing or shrinking? Well, I’m not gonna tell you!
The Mac and the grasshopper
Mac revenue was a real highlight this quarter, with revenue up 13% over the year-ago quarter. That’s eight straight quarters of year-over-year growth, so it’s been two very strong years for the Mac after a year where it fell a bit off the heights of improved sales due to COVID and the advent of Apple silicon.
However, Apple warned that despite the rosy outlook for its next quarter, the Mac was going to not be a top performer. The reason, you may not be surprised to discover, is a “tough compare.” In other words, this holiday quarter, the only fresh, new Mac is the M5 MacBook Pro, a perfectly nice computer. The problem is what was available last year, as Cook pointed out:
From a Mac point of view, the challenge is that last year was sort of the mother of all Mac launches. All of these, from Mac Mini to iMac, to all the MacBook Pros, all launched literally at same time. And this year, that compares to launching the 14-inch MacBook Pro. And so there’s a very difficult compare. Of course, in the long run, I’m very bullish on them. You can see that the Mac again last quarter outgrew the market. And so we feel really well about how Mac is positioned, but this certain quarter is an extremely difficult compare.
So: Pretty good news for the Mac, but maybe put a note in Reminders not to freak out in late January when Apple reports disastrous Mac revenue growth, okay?
Apple’s Values
At the end of Cook’s opening statements in his call with analysts, he tries to include an optimistic look at ways that Apple is acting to follow its own corporate values and leave the world better than it found it. Here’s what he said Thursday:
Everywhere we operate, and in everything we do, we strive to give the best to our users while living by our values. Whether that’s building new accessibility features into our most recent software releases, or advancing our environmental work by using even more recycled materials in our latest lineup, or providing free educational programming to train and support American businesses with our new Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit.
And we’re continuing to invest in innovation and user experiences that will transform our future. A great example is the work we’re doing in the U.S. where we’re committed to invest six hundred billion dollars over the next four years with a focus on innovation and strategic areas like advanced manufacturing, silicon engineering, and artificial intelligence. These commitments build on our long-standing investments in America while supporting more than 450,000 jobs with thousands of suppliers across all 50 states. We built a new factory in Houston for advanced AI servers, for example, which just started shipping its first products off the line. And we’re leading the creation of end-to-end silicon supply chain across the country.
That feels like a pretty accurate depiction of the cards Apple is interested in showing in 2025: accessibility, recycling, education, and investing in the American economy. That’s absolutely what the company is focusing on today. Just for a contrast, here is the opening portion of Cook’s much longer statement from three years ago:
At Apple, we’re proud of the ways we are able to help customers be productive, get healthy, stay safe, and unlock their creative potential. We also understand we have an important responsibility to the communities we serve. That’s why we continue to invest in education, racial equity and justice, and the environment, and we are making important progress toward a more inclusive and diverse workforce.
Through our community education initiative, we’re working alongside more than 150 partners to help students around the world learn new science and technology skills. This summer, we joined with community partners to support coding academies across the United States from Code Academy in Nashville to One Summer Chicago to the Coding 5K Camp for Girls right next door in San Jose. We’ve also just expanded our racial equity and justice initiative into the UK for the first time. Alongside the South Bank Center, we’re helping aspiring creatives develop their own voices and position themselves for long lasting careers. Back in the US, we welcomed a new class of Black, Latino, and indigenous entrepreneurs to Apple’s second impact accelerator. This group of innovators is focused on using green technology to mitigate the effects of climate change and serve communities most affected by it.
Hmm. Some things never change when it comes to these Apple results. Other things do.
Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and creatively avoid answering any pointed questions from analysts. This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call.
Apple announced the results of its fiscal fourth quarter on Thursday. The company generated $102.5B, a Q4 record which also closed its biggest fiscal year in terms of revenue ever. The fast-growing Services category also set an all-time high. Mac and iPhone revenue were also up, with wearables and iPad revenue more or less flat.
Apple also provided guidance that it expects to break records in its holiday quarter, including in iPhone sales. Read more about that here.
Dan Moren and I also did a YouTube Stream discussing all these results in detail:
If there’s a company that’s not shy about experimenting with video possibilities on the Vision Pro, it’s Sandwich. Adam Lisagor and his crew have built two apps, Television and Theater, and have streamed John Gruber’s live Talk Show event in 3-D for the last two years.
On Thursday, they take another step forward with what could be argued as the world’s first immersive commercial. Sandwich and director Seth Worley made a conventional ad for Robot.com recently, but just before leaving for the shoot, Lisagor took ownership of a new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera and couldn’t resist taking it with him.
We’ve passed through another new iPhone season, that glorious time of year when everyone gets a new phone. Right? If you read enough Apple news or hang out with enough tech podcasters, it would seem to be so.
But just as science fiction offers us the possibility of parallel universes, time spent talking to people who don’t even know when preorders open up each year is bound to alter the way you experience the most iPhone time of the year. And as someone who isn’t personally in the new-phone-a-year club, I’ve felt for a while that we enthusiast writers and talkers collectively overestimate, or over-sample, at any rate, those who are always up-to-date with their Apple gear.
But is it as black-and-white (er, midnight and starlight) as all that? Do Apple nerds always trade up from last year’s phone, determined to rock the best camera and the most dynamic of islands, while regular folks struggle on until the screen shatters and the charger port rattles?
In the public radio newsroom where I work, phones are mighty important. We track down sources who won’t return our emails. We text our favorite news analyzers at 7:30 a.m. to see if they’ll please talk to us for today’s 10 a.m. show. We ask those same guests if they have an iPhone for the segment taping, because FaceTime Audio calls sound best. But no one I spoke to between iPhone event day and order arrival day had preordered a new phone, or could even tell me what new things Apple had put on offer. (Well, someone asked about the “thin one,” but that was about it.)
On the other hand, I imagine a “typical” Six Colors reader soaking up Jason’s event recaps and studying the presentation video for clues about this year’s color choices. Next comes the trip to apple.com to get that Pro Max preordered, and sharing the happy news with a family member that last year’s super phone is coming their way. Finally, there’s a trip to the Apple Store to claim the phone, or impatient refreshing of the old phone’s browser to track that package from Apple.
Survey says!
To find out whether iPhone users live in vastly different worlds from one another, I decided to put together a survey of the non-enthusiast iPhone users in my life (“Civilians”). To my newsroom cohort, I added other staff from KUT and KUTX Radio in Austin, plus a smattering from my Facebook feed – social media home base for cousins, high school acquaintances, and people I worked with back before the iPod was Apple’s flagship handheld device.
When I brought the idea to Jason, he suggested giving the same survey to Six Colors members. Okay then. Instead of just proving my assumptions about iPhone civilians, we could find out how well they matched, or clashed, with the enthusiast readership.
I asked ten questions, all focused on how long people hold onto their phones, and what factors influence them when they think about getting a new one. I also wanted to know how people acquire their phones. I didn’t ask for demographic information. We sent the same survey to Six Colors members via Discord. Though the questions were identical, I collected results separately. My survey of civilians netted 49 responses, while 204 Six Colors members took the survey. There is nothing scientific about this survey, and the larger number of members in the pool does give a more granular look at the numbers than the civilian results do. Even so, I’m happy with the response from both audiences.
What model, how often?
So what iPhone does your average news reporter, DJ, or Shelly’s cousin carry around? I suspected this question would bring a wide array of responses, and I was right. My group listed 19 different iPhone models, and one selected “Other iPhone,” which means theirs is older than that. But if I thought new models were completely out of the realm for these folks, I was wrong: three have already picked up an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Six Colors members, meanwhile, mentioned 20 different models, one more than my cohort did. But 43% have already picked up a 17 Pro or 17 Pro Max.
Members
Civilians
iPhone 12
0%
2%
iPhone 12 Pro
0%
2%
iPhone 12 Pro Max
0%
0%
iPhone 12 mini
1%
2%
iPhone 13
0%
9%
iPhone 13 Pro
1%
4%
iPhone 13 Pro Max
2%
2%
iPhone 13 mini
5%
2%
iPhone 14
0%
11%
iPhone 14 Plus
0%
2%
iPhone 14 Pro
3%
6%
iPhone 14 Pro Max
1%
0%
iPhone 15
1%
2%
iPhone 15 Plus
1%
2%
iPhone 15 Pro
6%
9%
iPhone 15 Pro Max
6%
6%
iPhone 16
4%
6%
iPhone 16 Pro
13%
11%
iPhone 16 Pro Max
6%
13%
iPhone 17
1%
0%
iPhone 17 Pro
26%
0%
iPhone 17 Pro Max
17%
6%
iPhone Air
3%
0%
Other
0%
2%
Central to my idea about regular people and their phones is a belief that getting a new one every year is a rarified thing. Fully 38% of respondents say their new phone purchases come four years or more apart. Another 22% answered that they get a new one when the old one dies. 20% are on a one- or two-year cycle. Among members, 35% upgrade every year, with another 28% on a two-year cycle. That’s a lot of frequent upgraders, but it still leaves 40% hanging onto their phones for three years or more.
A related, but slightly different question was about how long folks have had the phone they’re using right now. It’s always possible that upgrade cycles are irregular, especially if they’re dependent on how an old phone is holding up. Here I got my first surprise. 31% of civilians have had their current phone for less than one year. So, as I wrote last year, maybe the iPhone 16 cycle was a tempting upgrade opportunity. Another 29% say their current phone is 1-2 years old. Only 6% say they’ve had their current phone for more than four years.
The feature chart
It’s hard to pick just one thing about a new product that gets you to buy it. So I let respondents pick two features they value when choosing a phone. This doesn’t address what was going on with an old phone or how long it’s been since their last upgrade. But I wondered how the things reviewers write about, and that Apple sells in those iPhone event videos, map to the things buyers value. Well, camera won the day among both survey groups; 31% for Six Colors readers and 21% for the non-readers. 21% of non-readers (tied with camera) listed price, while only 4% of Six Colors readers picked it. Next on both lists was speed/performance/specs, with a slightly larger percentage (19%) of civilians choosing that option. Coming in next for both groups – screen size. Again, percentages were similar.
Aesthetics
If any questions in this survey can be traced directly to the tech podcasts I consume, it would be those about phone color and the case versus no-case lifestyle. Color and color choice matter a lot to some people, and not a great deal to others. I gave survey-takers a choice of nine colors. I didn’t ask about their current phone’s color, but which one they would choose if they could. I didn’t bother with Apple’s ever-eclectic color names, just some basics.
Of those with a preference, blue was the top choice among both groups, though it tied with red among civilians. Six Colors members’ second-favorite was orange, with black holding down third place. Only 6% of Six Colors members said they don’t care about phone color. 22% of non-members have no preference. Have they been convinced by Apple that color isn’t a thing they should care about?
I do regret not including silver or gold as options. Perhaps that’s why “something else” earned 10% of responses, tied with black and green, among civilians. Just 4% of Six Colors members wanted a choice I didn’t offer.
I asked about cases because I thought the result might say something about the importance of phone color, or lack thereof. 92% of regular folks said their iPhone rocks a case, so the hue of those edges peeking out does matter to some. No one in this group said they are sometimes case users. Six Colors readers are far more likely to go caseless, with 33% choosing that option, and another 9% indicating they sometimes use a case.
Dollars and cents
Yearly upgraders can choose the iPhone Upgrade Program, and buyers often receive incentives to get a phone over two years from cellular carriers. 41% of my civilian responders said they have used some kind of incentive to get a better deal. I’d guess that a lot of them are paying phones off through a carrier deal, based on the lack of once-a-year upgraders. I was surprised that only 25% of Six Colors members are using some sort of upgrade/incentive program, given generally shorter upgrade cycles.
Given the lifespan of most iPhones, I also wanted to know if people in my newsroom/Facebook cohort were beneficiaries of a passed-down phone from a family member or friend. Even in the non-enthusiast world, lots of people have that person in their life who turns a family member’s old tech into an excuse to upgrade for themselves, I believed. Just 16% said they were rocking a hand-me-down. But that’s still a significant number in terms of iPhone longevity overall. These devices are often good for multiple owners. Only one Six Colors member said they got their current phone in this way. (This doesn’t account for those who are the passers of phones, not the recipients.)
Summing up the survey
The fun part of reading these two sets of survey answers was how often the results swung far apart, and then came back together, and how many different iPhone ownership experiences are available. The lineup, as updated, expanded, and contracted over the years, is even more flexible than I had imagined. The sheer number of models and vintages still in service gives people a lot of options. Even if they might like to get something new, there’s a way to make the older phone work. And every once in a while, a big old splurge happens, when a camera, or a new color, or something intangible, puts that option in front of someone’s face.
There are a lot of Six Colors members who go all-in on what Apple has to offer. But another large group is less predictable, and just as likely as anyone to keep an iPhone for years.
We talk about how excited we are to get ads in Maps and Apple’s thinking on cozying up to Trump and then decide to do our own electrical work because why not?
For those building custom shortcuts, some actions have been updated:
“Calculate Expression” can now evaluate expressions that include units, including real time currency conversion rates, temperature, distance, and more
“Create QR Code” can now specify colors and styling
“Date” can now specify a holiday
“Find Contacts” can now filter by relationship
“Transcribe Audio” performance has been improved
“Show Content” can now display scrollable lists of items, like calendar events, reminders, and more
Nice to see improvements and even nicer to see them written down like this. I’d like to see even more Shortcuts documentation like this, because sometimes you don’t even know what you don’t know.
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss modem quirks, new iPhone rumors, cutting-edge immersive video production, and the boring march of Apple silicon.
A friend of mine, Larry, asked for a little help with some various email and sync problems. On a Zoom call with him, I diagnosed it, helped him find the correct settings, and then we promptly deleted his email account and all his thousands of stored messages. (There’s a twist at the end.)
Apple makes Liquid Glass optional, iPhone 17 sales go through the roof, and the UK cracks down on the App Store.
This one goes to -11
When your children ask you what you did in the Great War against Liquid Glass, you can be proud to say you fought on the front lines. By which I mean complaining about it on social media.
Let us not rest on these mighty laurels, however! We must be relentless! There is still much more complaining and posting of screenshots and little videos and stuff to do to eradicate this pestilence!
Because Apple only toned it down, you see.
“Choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast,” Apple explains.
In other words, Liquid Glass and not Liquid Glass.…
My thanks to Notify! for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Notify lets you stay effortlessly up-to-date with any changes on websites or RSS feeds that matter to you. It’s free and private, runs on your Apple devices, and there’s no server, subscription, or technical setup required.
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Notify! is simple for everyone, with no coding required for RSS or website monitoring. But you can also push it to the limit, via an API for push notifications from your scripts, ChangeDetection.io integration, Zapier/Make/IFTTT automation, Apple Shortcuts compatibility, and custom webhook triggers.
Notify! is perfect for anyone wanting powerful monitoring without the complexity. Download it on the App Store and start monitoring in seconds.
It’s not quite right to say that for the first five years of its life, the iPad was an iPhone with a really big screen meant to be a lean-back consumption device. After all, the very first iPad shipped with a productivity accessory in the form of the Keyboard Dock.
But ten years ago, Apple got serious. It shipped the very first iPad Pro, and began a decade-long conversation about whether the iPad could be used for work and even whether or not it was a computer.
Today, the M5 iPad Pro and iPadOS 26 have settled a lot of old scores. But it’s been a long, strange journey from “Hey Siri” day in San Francisco to now.
One of the things that I think about from time to time is Apple’s collection of apps. Some are the crown jewels, like Apple’s pro apps, and others help an everyday consumer to tackle their iLife. All are pretty starved for attention and resources, outside of infrequent updates aligned with showing off the native power of Apple Silicon, Apple Intelligence, or demos of platform integration that never quite get all the way there.
Three things really brought this up to the surface for me recently: The neglect of Clips and iMovie, the radio silence regarding Pixelmator/Photomator, and Final Cut Pro being trotted out for demos but not shipping appropriate updates.
Voice commands we use regularly, whether robotic pets benefit society, recent tech features that surprised us, and our e-reader and page turner preferences.
