Apple on Thursday officially introduced its incoming chief executive, John Ternus, to the public.
“We have an incredible road map ahead,” Mr. Ternus said in a call with analysts and investors after the company reported quarterly financial results.
The remarks were the first public comments from Mr. Ternus since he was named last week as the next chief executive of Apple. The 50-year-old, who was most recently Apple’s head of hardware engineering, spoke on the call for just over a minute, adding that he planned to continue the financial discipline that defined the tenure of his immediate predecessor, Tim Cook.
“This is the most exciting time in my 25-year career at Apple to be building products and services,” Mr. Ternus said.
In a long-anticipated move, Mr. Cook, 65, Apple’s chief executive since 2011, said on April 20 that he would step down and become the company’s executive chairman in September. Interacting with investors will be just one of the new responsibilities for Mr. Ternus, who has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for all of his adult life.
“This moment for the transition is the right one,” Mr. Cook said during Thursday’s investor call, pointing to Apple’s business and product lineup. “Most importantly, we have the right leader ready to step into the role.”
Mr. Cook added that, as executive chairman, he would support Mr. Ternus “in any way he needs and in any way I can” and that they would work “to make sure this transition is perfectly smooth.”
The changing of the guard comes at a financial high for Apple. The company has continued to enjoy the popularity of its redesigned iPhones, which debuted in September, even as other consumer electronics companies struggle with a global shortage in memory chips.
Apple said on Thursday that revenue for the three months that ended in March rose 17 percent from a year earlier to $111.2 billion. Profit jumped 19 percent to $29.6 billion, breaking its record for the quarter, which was set in 2022.
Last year, Apple introduced new designs for the iPhone: a thin model called the iPhone Air and a model of the iPhone Pro with a raised bump across the back for cameras. It also increased the prices of some iPhones by $100. Those changes have buoyed iPhone sales, which grew 22 percent to $57 billion.
The new designs have also helped Apple rebound from years of weak sales in China, the world’s largest smartphone market. For the first three months of the year, Apple’s sales in China grew 28 percent to $20.5 billion.
Apple’s results topped expectations. Wall Street analysts had predicted quarterly revenue of $109.46 billion and profit of $28.52 billion.
The company also projected strong sales in the current quarter and announced a change to its investment strategy. Instead of returning as much cash as possible to shareholders by buying back shares and paying dividends, Apple will start holding on to cash. The change could mean further investment in its business, including in areas like artificial intelligence. Apple’s shares rose as much as 4 percent in after-hours trading.
“Apple just continues to modestly exceed expectations,” said Daniel Newman, the chief executive of Futurum Group, a technology analysis company. “Clearly, the phone is a franchise, and it’s going to continue to have strong results.”
But, Mr. Newman added, the A.I. boom has made a longstanding question even more urgent for Apple: “Is there some format, some product in the future, that’s going to come and displace the phone?”
Apple has largely stayed out of the A.I. scrum after stumbles last year. While its peers are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on developing and running the technology, Apple has slowly introduced A.I. features and worked with other companies, like Google. In January, Apple said it would use Google’s Gemini A.I. models to power its A.I. products, including the personal assistant Siri.
“We believe A.I. is a really important investment area for Apple,” Kevan Parekh, Apple’s chief financial officer, said during Thursday’s call. “We’re going to be doing that incrementally, on top of what we normally invest in our product road map.”
A.I. is complicating parts of Apple’s business. In recent months, memory chips have become scarcer and more expensive because of increased demand from A.I. chip makers like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. So far, the shortage hasn’t meaningfully cut into Apple’s margins. But in the current quarter and future ones, Mr. Cook said, the company expects “significantly higher” costs for memory chips.
“They have size and scale, and no one is turning Apple down,” said Stephanie Link, the chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, a wealth management firm. “The problem is there’s just not enough of it,” she added, referring to memory chips.
Apple’s services revenue grew 16 percent to $31 billion in the first three months of the year. The company saw more modest growth in sales of Macs, iPads and wearables, which include the Apple Watch and AirPods.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/technology/iphones-apple-sales.html
