Apple Q4 2026 Financials Preview--Guidance of 9 to 11 Percent Growth Means $111.7 to $113.7 Billion, Macs and iPhones in Short Supply, and the First Report Under John Ternus

Apple guided to 9 to 11 percent growth and a 47 to 48 percent margin

The guidance comes from the July 30 conference call, which Six Colors' transcript has in full. CFO Kevan Parekh said, "we expect our September quarter total company revenue to grow between 9% and 11% year-over-year." He named two drags: foreign exchange, worth about 2.5 percentage points of growth against the June quarter, and supply constraints that he expected "to increase significantly sequentially" across iPhone, Mac and iPad. iPhone revenue was to grow in the mid-teens. Gross margin was to be 47 to 48 percent, about one point of it from tariff refunds, on operating expenses of $19.1 billion to $19.4 billion.

The base is in Apple's press release of October 30, 2025: $102.5 billion for the quarter that ended September 27, 2025, a September-quarter record, and $1.85 a share. The statements filed with the SEC put it at $102,466 million, with the Mac at $8,726 million and the iPhone at $49,025 million. Nine to 11 percent on top of that is $111.7 billion to $113.7 billion, a record for the quarter at either end. Add the $364.4 billion of the first nine months in the June-quarter statements and, again by our arithmetic, fiscal 2026 comes to about $476 billion to $478 billion, against $416.2 billion in fiscal 2025. The year ends on the last Saturday of September, per Apple's 10-Q, which in 2026 was the 26th.

Wall Street wanted more. Analysts had expected 12 percent, according to the LSEG figure in CNBC's coverage of the call, and the stock slid more than 6 percent in extended trading that evening.

The Mac's number depends on how many Apple could build

Apple gave no Mac guidance, so the bar is that $8.7 billion, and the run-up is the June quarter's $10.4 billion, up 29 percent, the record Mac quarter of our report on the third quarter. Tim Cook told analysts the June shortages fell "primarily on the Mac" and that the cause was the advanced chip processes Apple's processors are made on: "It's a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do." Of the quarter then under way he said, "we've got a quarter that we're going to be scrambling on the supply side." Memory is the other cost. Cook called its pricing "a hundred-year flood" and said Apple expected to pay more for it again in the September quarter.

Three things inside the quarter bear on the count. It was the first full quarter at the Mac and iPad prices Apple raised at the end of June, as CNBC noted. The M6 Mac mini began arriving on September 22, by Apple's announcement, which gave the new mini five days of deliveries before the books closed. And by September 13, the day after pre-orders opened for the iPhone 18 Pro, MacRumors found select configurations on Apple's U.S. store quoting delivery in October, after the quarter's end. The iPhone Duo, which Apple says arrives October 23, belongs to the December quarter.

Cook said John Ternus will lead the call, and Apple's investor page is where the date appears

Ternus became chief executive on September 1, as Apple's April 20 announcement set out, with Cook moving to executive chairman. On July 30 Cook told analysts, "this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward." Apple reported the 2025 fourth quarter on Thursday, October 30, 2025, with the call at 2:00 p.m. Pacific. It posts each date on its investor relations page; when we looked on October 3, the newest entry there was still the July 30 report.

The wait is an old one here. On October 11, 2005, we were waiting on the 2005 fourth-quarter call, at 2 p.m. Pacific and streamed in QuickTime, with analysts expecting $0.36 or $0.37 a share. Apple posted $0.50, and our 2005 report on the record quarter has Tim Cook, then the head of sales and operations, describing a backlog of iPod nanos and a constrained part Apple would not name.

We wrote in 2005 that we expected Apple to do better than the published guesses, and with Apple's own range as the guess, we expect it again.