Is this what a hit iPhone looks like? – Six Colors
Is this what a hit iPhone looks like? – Six Colors
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/01/apples-record-quarter-is-this-what-a-hit-iphone-looks-like/
Publish Date: 2026-01-29 23:08:00
Source Domain: sixcolors.com
As was foretold (in last quarter’s corporate guidance), on Thursday Apple reported its biggest quarter ever. The holiday quarters are always Apple’s biggest, and this was no exception. It offered the most revenue ($143.8B) and most iPhone revenue ($85.3B) of any financial quarter in Apple’s history.
Suffice it to say that the iPhone 17 family is a hit.
“This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had, and by far the most popular,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his conference call with analysts. As for the quarter itself? “It exceeded our expectations, to say the least.” Spoken like a man whose most popular product, the one vital to his company’s existence, grew 23% from the year-ago quarter.
Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook:
We exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand, and based on that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand. We are currently constrained, and at this point, it’s difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance. The constraints that we have are driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on, and at this time, we’re seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, partly because of our increased demand that I just spoke about.
Those details are really interesting. Back during the height of the pandemic, sales were constrained because Apple lacked access to “legacy nodes”—chips made on older processes for stuff like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That is definitely not the case now, when it’s the “advanced nodes” of 3nm chips at TSMC that are just not being built fast enough because demand was much higher than Apple expected.
This also extends a long-standing…
