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Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, bade an emotional farewell to analysts and shareholders on Thursday as the company announced a record June quarter. His successor, John Ternus, takes over at the beginning of September with the company seemingly in solid shape.
The results were impressive, though some worrying challenges were confirmed. Apple managed to set a new June quarter record, but acknowledged slowing services growth and an unexpected mishap in forecasting future demand. Mac sales jumped an absolutely astonishing 28.7%, as the MacBook Neo grabbed consumer imagination, and overall the company saw growth everywhere except the iPad.
Apple's fiscal Q3 2026 results saw the company generate $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% year-over-year for a net quarterly profit of $29.8 billion. Gross margin for the quarter was 50.1%, compared to 46.5% in the year-ago quarter (though two points of this was attributed to tariff returns).
More specifically:
iPhone sales were up 21.7%, an unusually high number for what is traditionally a slower quarter.
Wearables increased 6.5%.
Services revenue increased 12%.
And the iPad declined 5.9%.
The Mac is out the bottle
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 This year's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max could be $250-$300 more expensive than existing iPhone 17 Pro models due to higher silicon and memory costs, an analyst claimed today.
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 The iPad Air has looked the same since 2020, making it the longest-running design in Apple's tablet lineup. There is a reasonable case that 2027 could be when that comes to an end.
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It's a sign of the times: Security conference DefCon has added smart glasses to its list of banned audio- or video-recording devices.
The organizers have said that, with no consistent way to understand whether smart glasses are recording or not, they have taken the step to ban them in their entirety on the grounds that they erode trust and invade people's privacy.
Putting corrective lenses in the smart glasses will be no excuse: DefCon insists that visitors bring a pair of glasses without the smarts instead.
The smart glasses ban has been added to DefCon's already strict rules on photography, which among other things ask visitors not to take group shots and to use "portrait" mode (or a low F-stop for those with old-fashioned cameras) to focus on the foreground, so that people in the background appear blurred.
The smart glasses market has gone up a notch lately. Google and Samsung have both announced Gemini powered eyewear running on Android. Apple is looking to launch its new generation of smart glasses next June, citing privacy concerns as the reason for the delay.
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OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna API prices by 80% and Terra prices by 20% after model and inference gains lowered serving costs for high-volume AI work.
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