Apple just closed its biggest September quarter ever — and its most important product wasn't in it. The company reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $114.48 billion and earnings of $2.10 per share, both ahead of Wall Street estimates, in the first earnings report helmed by new CEO John Ternus.
The asterisk matters more than the beat. Apple's quarter ended September 26. The iPhone Duo didn't go on sale until October 23, so the record contains exactly zero Duo dollars. What drove the number instead was early demand for the iPhone 18 Pro lineup ($57.58 billion in iPhone revenue, a September-quarter record) plus deliberate price increases — Apple raised the iPhone 17 by $100 and bumped some MacBook prices to offset what former CEO Tim Cook called the AI memory-chip price spike, per Reuters.
Speaking of Cook's successor, Ternus was notably candid about the Duo in his Reuters interview. "Duo is constrained as of today," he said. "The ramp is going well, and we're working hard to get it to as many customers as quickly as possible, but at this point, we're not able to predict when supply and demand will be in balance." Apple Store shipping estimates have sat at late January since the first pre-orders sold out on October 16. On the cracked-screen reports, he repeated Apple's line: a "very small percentage" of units have been returned with display issues, and Apple is replacing them.
That's the real story of this quarter: it's a baseline. Ternus called the Duo "the most transformational iPhone since the original," and Apple's whole strategy this year has been to uncouple its launches from the old autumn boom-bust cycle — spacing iPhones out so the revenue curve smooths. The memory-chip cost pressure got absorbed; tariff refunds padded earnings by about five cents a share, a one-time gift; and the rebuilt Siri is now fielding 2.5 billion requests a day ("Now we have the Siri that we always wanted," Ternus said).
But shares still slipped about 1% after hours. Investors heard the beat — and immediately asked about the quarter Apple won't report for three months. The Duo, the touchscreen Macs, the home hardware: all of it sits in the holiday quarter, which has to carry the record this one just set. The question isn't whether the Duo sells — it's whether Apple can build it fast enough, and at a margin that survives without tariff refunds. Watch the gross margin line in January. That's where the Duo era either pays for itself or doesn't.
— via Reuters