Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple Just Reported Earnings. I Think This Was the Best Report of Them All. | The Motley Fool

This week, five “Magnificent Seven” members — Amazon (AMZN +1.25%), Alphabet (GOOGL +0.20%)(GOOG +0.27%), Microsoft, Meta Platforms (META 0.55%), and Apple (AAPL +3.24%) — reported quarterly results, and the headlines all looked great. Calling out some of the highlights, Meta’s revenue jumped 33%, Alphabet’s Google Cloud revenue soared 63% year over year, and Amazon’s cloud computing business grew at its highest rate in 15 quarters.

But four of these five companies have been spending huge sums of cash to produce this kind of growth. And some of them even used their latest quarterly updates as opportunities to raise their already massive 2026 capital expenditure budgets.

One of these companies’ earnings reports, however, looked much different from the rest: Apple’s. The iPhone maker posted accelerating growth without committing enormous spending on AI infrastructure — and it did this while seeing accelerating growth in its high-margin services business, too.

Here are four reasons…