For the first time as CEO, John Ternus joined CFO Kevan Parekh (and a surprise guest, COO Sabih Khan!) for the company’s quarterly earnings call, where they bent the ear of a bunch of financial-industry analysts to detail the quarter gone by and give a peek at what’s to come.
First off, Jason’s quarterly transcripts are a gift. That is all.
Most of John Ternus’s first earnings call as Apple CEO was what you’d expect: breaking records here, all-new there, everyone is very proud. But a few bits were actually interesting.
It was notable to hear Apple, in this setting, openly selling the Mac as a way to cut an AI cloud bill. Kevan Parekh said retailer The Gap runs AI for loss prevention entirely on Mac minis across hundreds of stores, with no cloud token costs, and Christie’s runs local models on the Mac Studio. Apple’s pitch on this at one point would have been strictly privacy, which is a fair one. Now it’s also “stop paying absurdly high per-token fees to Anthropic and OpenAI.” It’s fun to hear Apple describe itself as the affordable option.
Of course, someone is still paying for artificial intelligence server costs. Siri AI isn’t free for Apple, either. Apple’s December margin guidance specifically blames the Siri AI ramp, along with memory prices.
And, as Jason noted: Ternus brought COO Sabih Khan onto the call to take questions alongside him and Parekh. I don’t recall Tim Cook’s COO Jeff Williams speaking on these calls. Cook didn’t need the help, since he was Apple’s supply chain guy before he took over after Steve Jobs stepped down.
Whether by necessity or for the optics or both, hardware engineer Ternus putting operations lead Khan on the call provides analysts with confidence that Ternus still takes operations seriously, especially given that Apple is supply-constrained on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, and memory prices are eating into margins.
