Apple Q4 2026 Earnings: $114.5B Revenue, Mac Sales Up 24%, 47.9% Margin

Apple's fiscal Q4 2026 earnings, reported on Nov. 2, showed Mac revenue of $10.79 billion in the quarter that ended Sept. 26, up from $8.73 billion a year earlier, while company gross margin came in at 47.9 percent.

Apple's own release put total revenue at $114.5 billion, up 12 percent, and said the gross margin included a favorable impact of about 1 percentage point from tariff refunds. Diluted earnings per share were $2.10, up 14 percent, including $0.05 from the refunds. Reuters, citing LSEG data, said Mac sales beat an analyst estimate of $9.61 billion and described Macs as a popular platform for hosting AI agents among tech enthusiasts.

The release was the first quarterly report under CEO John Ternus. Apple's consolidated financial statements, published with the release, show that Mac grew about 24 percent, faster than the total company. iPhone rose about 17 percent to $57.58 billion from $49.03 billion. Apple's release does not say which Mac chips drove the gain, so no part of it can be assigned to a specific M-series generation.

Apple Gross Margin: Tariff Refunds and Memory Costs

Apple's tables give the pieces. Products gross margin works out to 37.2 percent this quarter against 36.2 percent a year ago, and company gross margin was 47.9 percent against 47.2 percent. Both ratios are Voltgrid's arithmetic from Apple's cost-of-sales lines. Stripping out the roughly 1 point from tariff refunds that Apple disclosed leaves a margin near 46.9 percent, which would be below the year-ago level.

Memory is the cost pressure. According to Reuters, Ternus said memory costs were higher than in the June quarter, partly offset by the benefit of carrying inventory and lower costs on certain non-memory components. Reuters also reported that Apple raised iPhone 17 prices by $100 and increased some MacBook prices. Apple's balance sheet shows inventories of $14.54 billion at quarter end against $5.72 billion a year earlier, which is consistent with a buffer being built, though Apple's release does not give a reason for the increase.

R&D, Capex and What Apple Did Not Say

Research and development spending was $11.73 billion for the quarter, up from $8.87 billion a year earlier, a rise of 32 percent. Apple does not attribute that increase to silicon or AI in the release. For the full fiscal year, the cash-flow statement shows $9.04 billion in payments for property, plant and equipment, down from $12.72 billion in fiscal 2025. Apple gave no quarterly capital-spending figure and no forward guidance in the release or the tables. Reuters likewise reported no guidance in its account.

Apple's chief executive said the lineup now includes iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone Duo, and that Apple brought touch to the Mac for the first time. The Mac launches that Voltgrid has covered, including the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 at $1,999, ship on Nov. 6, after the quarter closed, so they do not appear in these figures. The September-quarter Mac result therefore reflects the earlier lineup.

What to Watch Next for Mac and Apple Silicon

The next test is the December quarter, the first with the M6 MacBook Pro on sale, and the one in which the higher memory costs Ternus described will show. Apple has not yet quantified how much memory adds to its cost of sales, and the 47.9 percent figure leans on a one-time refund. Local-AI demand is a second thread: Voltgrid's review coverage of the Mac Studio M5 Ultra measured the 256GB configuration for local language models, and the 512GB model is due Dec. 3.