47%–48% Margin Guided, Inventory Doubled to $11.1bn (Apple Earnings Preview, 2 November 2026): What to Expect From Q4 — and Why Memory Costs and the December Guide Decide the Read

Apple reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after the US close on Monday 2 November 2026, with the call at 5 p.m. Eastern (22:00 UTC, after the clocks change). It guided revenue growth of 9% to 11% — about $111.7bn to $113.7bn — and a gross margin of 47% to 48%, and published consensus sits near $113.3bn of revenue and $1.99 of EPS. The September quarter is largely spoken for; what the market will trade is how far memory costs pull the margin down from here, and what John Ternus's first outlook says about a December quarter launched without a standard iPhone.

When the report lands, and why the timing is unusual

Apple confirmed on its investor relations site that it will discuss fiscal fourth-quarter results on Monday 2 November at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. US daylight saving ends on Sunday 1 November, so the call starts at 22:00 UTC rather than the 21:00 UTC of Apple's July call — a small detail that matters to anyone watching futures from Europe or Asia.

The date itself is later than usual. Apple reported the equivalent quarter last year on 30 October, but this year it sits after the cluster of mega-cap reports — Microsoft and Alphabet on 28 October, Amazon on 29 October — and after the Federal Reserve's 28 October decision. By the time Apple publishes, the market will already have the cloud providers' spending plans and the Fed's signal on the rate path. That gives the report an unusual job: it is the cleanest read on what the AI build-out is doing to a company that buys the components rather than sells them.

It is also the first earnings call led by John Ternus. Apple announced on 20 April that Ternus, then head of hardware engineering, would succeed Tim Cook as chief executive on 1 September, with Cook becoming executive chairman. A leadership change reaches prices through guidance and capital allocation, not through who speaks first, so the call is the first occasion on which the new management's financial framing can be judged.

What the guidance and the consensus imply

Year-ago figures from Apple's fiscal Q4 2025 results; guidance from the 30 July call accompanying its fiscal Q3 2026 results. Consensus from published analyst tallies, which differ slightly by compiler.

Two points sit inside that table. First, consensus revenue of about $113.3bn implies growth of roughly 10.6%, close to the top of the range. Apple has beaten consensus EPS in each of its last eight reports on published tallies, and the market has priced that habit in — a result at the midpoint would meet Apple's forecast and still read as a miss.

Second, the EPS consensus of $1.99 implies growth of about 7.6% on revenue growth of about 10.6%. That gap is the margin story in one line. Earnings are expected to grow more slowly than sales because each dollar of revenue is costing more to produce.

The memory squeeze, and why it reaches Apple

The mechanism runs through a market most consumers never see. DRAM and NAND flash are made by a small number of producers, and the same factories now supply AI data centres, where high-bandwidth memory and server-grade DRAM earn far more per wafer. When hyperscalers bid for capacity, producers shift output towards them, and the price of the commodity memory that goes into phones and laptops rises with it.

Apple sits on the receiving end. On the July call, Cook compared the memory price environment to a once-in-a-century flood, said costs had risen in the March and June quarters and would rise again in September, and said Apple had reluctantly raised some iPad and Mac prices as a result. CFO Kevan Parekh went further: the memory cost increase was larger than the entire fall in gross margin from the June quarter to the September guide, meaning other factors partly offset it.

This is the same capex wave that has driven chip stocks and dominated the Microsoft, Meta and Amazon reports, seen from the other side of the trade. For the companies spending the money, the question is return on capital. For Apple, it is input cost — which is why the 22 October sell-off in chip names and an Apple margin squeeze are two faces of one story, not separate ones. Our analysis of that session covers the spending side.

The inventory cushion — and why it is temporary

Apple's own balance sheet shows how it has been managing the squeeze. Inventories stood at $11.09bn on 27 June 2026, against $5.72bn at the end of the previous fiscal year — an increase of about 94% in nine months, for a company that has historically run very lean stocks. The filing does not break that figure down, but management said on the call that carry-in inventory would partly offset memory costs in the September quarter, which is consistent with buying components before prices rose further.

The same commentary carried the caveat that matters for the outlook: Apple expects the inventory benefit to decline after September as memory prices continue to rise. In plain terms, components bought earlier at lower prices are being used up, and their replacements cost more. That makes the September margin a partly cushioned number and the December guide the first that has to absorb more of the current price.

There is a second constraint on the supply side. Parekh said supply limits would increase significantly in the September quarter, and Cook tied them to the availability of the advanced chipmaking processes used for Apple's own processors rather than to any supplier failure. Demand for iPhone and Mac had run ahead of what those processes could produce. A supply-limited quarter is a different signal from a demand-limited one: it caps revenue in the period but says little about appetite.

Why the December guide matters more than the September result

The quarter being reported contains only a sliver of the new product cycle. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max went on sale on 18 September, eight days before the quarter closed on 26 September, and the foldable iPhone Duo did not ship until 23 October — inside the December quarter. As covered in our analysis of the September event, Apple launched only the Pro tier and the Duo this autumn, with no standard iPhone 18, at prices $100 higher than the equivalent iPhone 17 models.

That leaves the December quarter with an unusual task. A year ago it produced $143.8bn of revenue, $85.3bn of it from iPhone. This year it has to approach that with a narrower, more expensive lineup, while memory costs rise and the inventory cushion fades. Apple discloses neither units nor average selling prices, so its revenue and margin guidance for that quarter will be the only hard evidence of how the higher-price, fewer-models strategy is working.

China is the region to watch inside that guide. Greater China revenue grew 22% to $18.8bn in the June quarter, from a year-ago September quarter that had fallen 4% to $14.5bn — a low base. Cook also said Apple had recently received approval to ship its original Apple Intelligence features in China. Both would support the region; supply limits and the narrower lineup work against it.

Scenarios for the report

The second row is the one with a recent precedent. Apple's July report set June-quarter records for revenue and EPS, yet the shares fell the next day as the September guide and the memory commentary took over the reading. Whether that repeats depends less on the September figures than on the December margin guide.

What it touches beyond the stock

NAS100 and US500. Apple is roughly 6% of the S&P 500 and roughly 11% of the Nasdaq 100 on published weightings, so its after-hours move feeds straight into index futures. Because it reports after the other mega-caps, its result will also be read against theirs.

The memory and chip supply chain. Apple's commentary is a direct read on component pricing from one of the largest buyers of memory in the world. A comment that costs are peaking, or still rising, can move memory producers as much as Apple.

The dollar. The results do not move the US dollar in any dependable way. The link runs the other way: most of Apple's revenue comes from outside the Americas and is translated into dollars, so a stronger dollar reduces reported growth, and Apple built a sequential currency headwind of about 2.5 percentage points into its September guide. The rate path that sets the dollar and the valuation of long-duration growth stocks came from the Fed on 28 October — see our Fed preview. Rates are one of the five factors the meter scores across eight currencies; more on how it works on the about page.

Educational macro context only — not investment advice.