Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And it takes a while to get that — to get those reports in during the quarter. And so we’ve made our best guess at it. In terms of the sizing of the constraint in Q1, what we estimate, although not with precision, is that we would — I thought we believe iPhone would have grown during the quarter had it not been for the supply shortages. So hopefully, that provides you a little bit of color.

Operator: Our next question comes from Aaron Rakers of Wells Fargo.

Aaron Rakers: I have two as well, if I can. I guess the first kind of question, just going back on the gross margin line. Pretty good guidance into this March quarter. I’m curious if you unpack that a little bit specific around what you’re seeing as far as maybe benefits from component pricing in the guidance, if you’re embedding any of that at this point.

Luca Maestri: Yes. Of course, with our guidance, we try to capture every aspect of our cost structure. And obviously, components are a big portion of that. So definitely, that’s included. And keep in mind, again, that foreign exchange — I mentioned earlier, I think to Shannon, that the sequential negative on FX is 50 basis points, versus a year ago, it’s 270 basis points. Obviously, the U.S. dollar has moved a lot over the last 12 months. So obviously, we need to find offsets and more to the negative FX in order to be able to provide this kind of guidance. And so obviously, components are a big part of that.

Aaron Rakers: Yes. And then kind of from a strategic perspective, given kind of the things that we’re seeing out in some of your peer group, I’m curious, Tim, how you think about the role of AI in your strategy as far as particularly in the Services segment, whether you’re not — you see opportunities to excel monetization abilities within the paid subscriber base and whether or not AI, is it something that you’re implementing a bit more strategically there.

Timothy Cook: Yes. It is a major focus of ours. It’s incredible in terms of how it can enrich customers’ lives. And you can look no further than some of the things that we announced in the fall with crash detection and fall detection or back a ways with ECG. I mean these things have literally saved people’s lives. And so we see an enormous potential in this space to affect virtually everything we do. It’s obviously a horizontal technology, not a vertical. And so it will affect every product and every service that we have.

Operator: Our next question comes from Amit Daryanani of Evercore.

Amit Daryanani: I guess the first one I have is, Tim, I think based on your earlier comments that iPhones would have grown ex the production issue that implied that maybe it’s a $7 billion or so impact that you had in December quarter from the production challenges on the high-end models. I’m sure it’s tough to see what happens this time around. But I think historically, when you’ve had production issues or things like this happen, what has the consumer behavior being typically? Do they tend to go down towards the lower end models and get the phone they want quickly? Or do they just defer the production? Just from a historical perspective, I think do you typically recover what’s deferred out or no?

Timothy Cook: It’s very hard to estimate is the real answer because you have to know a lot of data, and it’s usually only in hindsight that you have a more reasonable view of it. And so we put our best views in the color that Luca provided. That’s kind of what I would say.