John Ternus faces his first earnings call tonight as Apple reports with Wall Street expecting $113.4 billion in sales
Apple's fiscal fourth-quarter results land after Monday's close, the first under its new CEO. Analysts expect revenue up about 11% and earnings of $1.99 a share, with iPhone demand and memory costs at the center of the call.
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The last megacap report of the earnings season arrives tonight, and it comes with a new face. Apple publishes its fiscal fourth-quarter results after the closing bell on Monday, the first set of numbers presented by John Ternus since he took over as chief executive from Tim Cook, who stayed on as executive chairman.
The timing is awkward. Over the past week investors punished Alphabet, Amazon and Intel for how much cash their AI ambitions consume, and the Nasdaq Composite closed out October with its worst month since March 2025. Apple, which has spent far less on AI infrastructure than its peers, now gets its turn in front of the same skeptical audience.
What Wall Street expects
Analysts expect revenue of about $113.4 billion for the September quarter, according to consensus figures compiled by TipRanks and cited by FXStreet and finanzen.net. That would be growth of roughly 10.6% to 10.7% from a year earlier. Earnings are forecast at $1.99 a share, up from $1.85 in the same quarter last year.
That consensus sits at the top of Apple's own guidance. When it reported its fiscal third quarter in late July, the company forecast revenue growth of 9% to 11% for the September quarter, below the roughly 12% analysts had been modeling at the time, AppleInsider and finanzen.net reported. Apple pointed to currency effects and supply constraints on iPhone, Mac and iPad. Revenue in the June quarter had grown 16%.
The iPhone remains the number that moves the stock. Apple said iPhone revenue should rise by a mid-teens percentage in the quarter, and analysts cited by FXStreet are looking for growth of about 15%. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max went on sale on Sept. 18, according to AppleInsider, so only the first days of their sales fall inside this quarter. The bigger read on the new phones will come from the holiday-quarter outlook.
The memory problem
The issue that could overshadow the headline numbers is memory. The AI buildout has sent prices for memory chips sharply higher, and that cost lands on every company that builds phones, laptops and tablets. Apple has already warned that rising memory costs would weigh on its gross margin, and analysts at FXStreet and TipRanks both flagged memory prices as the main pressure on profitability this quarter.
That theme hit the market hard last week. When Intel guided its fourth-quarter revenue below estimates on Thursday night, Reuters tied part of the weakness to soaring memory prices that raise costs and soften demand for consumer devices. Intel closed down 28.6% on Friday, its worst day on record.
For Apple, the questions on the call are likely to be about how much of that cost it can absorb, how much it passes on through pricing, and whether supply constraints that Cook flagged in July have eased.
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A new CEO's first test
Ternus spent most of his Apple career running hardware engineering. As CEO, he now has to explain the company's AI strategy to investors who have watched rivals commit hundreds of billions of dollars to data centers. Apple has taken a more selective approach to spending, and FXStreet noted that the company does not need to match Microsoft or Google dollar for dollar, but it does need to show that the approach can still produce growth.
Apple shares closed Friday at $344.63, down 1.23%, according to Yahoo Finance data, a milder decline than the Nasdaq's 2.86% drop.
The rest of Monday's setup
Futures pointed to a rebound after Friday's sell-off. Nasdaq 100 contracts were up about 0.8% to 0.9% before dawn, and S&P 500 futures gained roughly 0.4% to 0.5%, according to TipRanks, Investing.com and Bloomberg data. A sharp drop in oil prices on hopes for U.S.-Iran diplomacy helped the mood.
Before Apple, the October ISM manufacturing index lands at 10 a.m. ET, with economists expecting a reading of 54.7 after 54.5 in September. Palantir also reports after the close, and Tuesday brings the midterm elections and results from AMD. Friday's October jobs report caps the week.
Apple's numbers will be read on two levels: as a verdict on the iPhone 18 cycle, and as a test of whether investors will reward a big tech company that has kept its AI spending in check while its peers have not.
