Tim Cook’s opening remarks on Apple’s fiscal Q1 2026 earnings call touched on how customers are using Apple Intelligence. Here’s what he said.
Carefully crafted non-specific details
If you’ve ever listened to one of Apple’s quarterly earnings calls, you know Tim Cook opens with a high-level overview of how each part of the business is performing.
That includes iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, retail, services, and beyond.
Over the past few quarters, that rundown has also come to include Apple Intelligence. And while neither Tim Cook, nor CFO Kevan Parekh after him, tends to be very specific, Cook did offer a sliver of insight into its rate of adoption in today’s fiscal Q1 2026 earnings call:
“During the quarter, we were excited to see that the majority of users on enabled iPhones are actively leveraging the power of Apple Intelligence.”
Obviously, it is hard to gauge the real scale of adoption, since Apple doesn’t provide a breakdown of how many Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhones are out there. He did bring this up right after celebrating that Apple had crossed the mark of 2.5 billion active devices around the world, but that’s neither here nor there.
What’s more, Cook also didn’t specify what exactly Apple counts as an “active leveraging” of Apple Intelligence. He did list features like Writing Tools and Clean Up, but he didn’t quite clarify what qualified as “active leveraging” of Apple Intelligence.
He did, however, single out Visual Intelligence as a hit among Apple Intelligence users. Here’s what he said:
One of our most popular features is Visual Intelligence, which helps users learn and do more than ever with the content on their iPhone screen, making it faster to search, take action, and answer questions across their apps.
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