Plus, Apple just bought Israeli company Q.AI in a deal that reportedly values the start-up at nearly $2bn.
Apple’s latest financial report card passed its own expectations, the company said, after it posted a 16pc year-on-year jump in quarterly revenue, hitting $143.8bn. At the earnings call yesterday (29 January), CEO Tim Cook said that the quarter ending in December 2025 was one for the “record books”.
The iPhone had a majorly successful quarter with a revenue jump of 23pc driven by “unprecedented demand”, said Cook, breaking sales records across geographical segments.
The demand for the iPhone was “simply staggering”, Cook said, with the device helping to set all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. India and China also saw double-digit growth.
Meanwhile, Apple’s services, including iCloud, App Store and Apple Pay, grew by around 14pc. Mac computer revenue suffered a decline of around 6.7pc, and the company’s wearables segment fell by around 2.2pc.
However, not all was peachy, as the company warned that surging memory prices would have “more of an impact” on gross margins in the current period. “We do continue to see market pricing for memory increasing significantly”, said Aaron Rakers, the company’s managing director and technology analyst.
Still, Apple expects further revenue growth of around 13-16pc in the coming March quarter, which should take quarterly revenue to more than $100bn. At the time of publication, Apple shares are up by around 0.7pc since yesterday.
In the earnings call, the company also made note of its $600bn investment commitment to building manufacturing capacity in the US. Apple said that it is shipping servers to power Apple Intelligence from its new manufacturing facility in Houston, while working in Kentucky to make all of its cover glass for the iPhone and Apple Watch.
‘Second largest acquisition’
Yesterday, Apple confirmed that it acquired Q.AI, an Israeli start-up working on AI technology for audio.
The two companies did not disclose the deal value. However, the Financial Times reports that the acquisition valued the four-year-old company to close to $2bn – making it Apple’s second largest acquisition after Beats, which it bought for $3bn in 2014.
Q.AI, which was backed by the likes of Kleiner Perkins, Spark Capital, Exor and GV, works around newer applications in machine learning to help devices understand difficult audio such as whispered speech.
The company has also filed a patent for the use of “facial skin micromovements” to detect mouthed words, identity people, and assess emotions, heart rate and other readings, wrote Reuters, which was the first to report on the acquisition.
The acquisition is expected to be used to advance Apple in the AI-powered wearables race, competing with the likes of Meta and OpenAI.
Q.AI was founded in Tel Aviv in 2022 by Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya and has since operated largely in secret.
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