iPhone sales are booming — with or without Apple Intelligence

To cap off a busy week that saw the rollout of the first Apple Intelligence features and several new Macs, Apple reported its fiscal Q4 earnings this afternoon. The period included very early sales of the iPhone 16 lineup, offering a chance to gauge the momentum of the company’s latest phones. The Apple Watch Series 10 and AirPods 4 were also released during the quarter. CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that sales of the iPhone 15 were “stronger than 14 in the year-ago quarter, and 16 was stronger than 15.”

The company reported revenue of $94.9 billion, which is a new record for the September quarter and up 6 percent year over year. The strong performance was dampened somewhat by a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion that Apple paid to Ireland after a long-running tax dispute. Nearly every segment of Apple’s business was also up with the exception of the “wearables, home, and accessories” category. iPad revenues were up 8 percent after Apple finally introduced new iPad Pro and iPad Air models in the spring.

Apple’s first set of AI-powered Apple Intelligence capabilities are mostly focused on summarization, writing tools, and image cleanup. ChatGPT integration and the ability to generate images will come with iOS 18.2 in December. “We’re getting great feedback from customers and developers already and a really early stat, which is only three days worth of data: users are adopting iOS 18.1 at twice the rate that they adopted 17.1 in the year ago quarter,” Cook told CNBC. 

The iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro were all refreshed this week with Apple’s latest M4 silicon. The Mini underwent a substantial redesign and is now smaller than ever. It’s rumored that M4 editions of the MacBook Air, Mac Pro, and Mac Studio will follow sometime next year. Apple refreshed the iPad Mini earlier this month. This batch of new hardware, along with the iPhone 16 lineup and wearables, could boost Apple’s performance in the all-important holiday quarter.

Lurking in the background of all this is an antitrust suit against Apple from the US Department of Justice, plus European Union guidelines that have forced Apple to make the iPhone more open to new default apps and services.