In fact, I tried Claude before ChatGPT, and it got in the ballpark but basically said I’d need to ask again for it to do the deeper research that ChatGPT decided to do on its own. Here’s how it waffled.
Counting exact mentions across years of earnings calls is a genuinely fuzzy exercise — “headwind” and “tailwind” language shows up inconsistently in prepared remarks vs. Q&A, and Apple’s phrasing varies call to call. Let me pull what I can find on the pattern.
I can’t give you an exact count without reading through Apple’s full run of earnings calls — Cook and the CFOs (Oppenheimer, then Maestri, now Parekh) have hosted roughly 100 quarterly calls since FX started getting called out as a recurring line item around 2012, and “headwind” vs. “tailwind” language shows up in prepared remarks, Q&A, and sometimes only in the CFO commentary letter, not consistently in one place. A reliable tally would mean systematically parsing each transcript rather than sampling a few quarters, so I’d rather not give you a number I can’t stand behind.
What the sampling does show is a clear asymmetry, not a coin flip. Through most of the 2014–2023 stretch, a strong dollar made FX a near-constant headwind — Maestri was already flagging “significant headwinds from foreign exchange fluctuations” back in an October 2014 call, tied to broad dollar strength pressuring international revenue conversion. That dollar-strength regime persisted for years, so headwind mentions likely dominate tailwind mentions by a wide margin over the long run.
The current stretch is unusual in flipping quarter to quarter: foreign exchange was about a 2.5 percentage point tailwind to March quarter FY2026 revenue growth, but Apple guided that FX would swing to a 2.5 percentage point headwind for the September quarter, and Services specifically is facing an even sharper roughly 5-point year-over-year FX headwind from March to September — so within the same year Apple has cited both directions depending on the quarter and the segment. The Motley Fool + 2
Given the scope — a full transcript-by-transcript classification across a decade-plus of calls — this is a good fit for a deeper research pass rather than something I should eyeball from a handful of articles.
(BTW, since we’re discussing the responses themselves in the context of Siri’s non-answer, it’s appropriate to paste them verbatim here. I’ve just run across a good term for pasting chatbot answers: meat proxy. Ouch.)
Maybe Cook used “thrilled” with a more original meaning: “By the 1600s, it described a nervous tremor, shudder, or a physical tingling/shivering sensation caused by cold, fear, or intense excitement.”
Amusing. A few days ago, I paraphrased a question that was asked in an hours-old TidBITS thread and ran it through Perplexity. Perplexity answered the question by pointing me to the original TidBITS thread, which was still waiting for an answer.
I remember the first time I searched for a specific app by name and the top result was a competitor. “Huh. Apple values advertisers’ dollars over the convenience, trust, and safety of their users, their primary customers.”
No more illusions about the walled garden being for our protection.
Thanks for explicitly calling that out, and allowing that in TidBITS Talk (as needed, obviously).
The reason for the additional transcription, by the way, was more about accessibility: Excessively long alt text is hard to navigate in a screen reader. The usual guideline is to stay within about 150 characters. For images that require longer descriptions — especially verbatim text content within that image — including the alt text in the surrounding body copy is more user-friendly. And with that I will step down from my a11y soapbox.
I’ve been complaining about this extremely unfortunate state of affairs for years, but no one really cares what I (or any other user of Apple products) thinks about anything. Today’s Apple, like every other giant American corporation, exists solely for the purpose of enriching its investors. What a revolting development this is!
