John Ternus will preside over his first earnings call as Apple‘s chief executive on Monday, and the occasion carries more weight than the usual quarterly ritual. Investors are looking closely at the company’s forecast to judge whether a rush of new products can help offset rising costs for memory chips, and the answers he gives will shape how the market views his leadership in the months ahead. Ternus, who succeeded Tim Cook in September, has already overseen the introduction of Apple’s first foldable phone, a smart home hub and the company’s first touch-screen laptops. All of those products began shipping during the company’s current fiscal first quarter, a period shaped by what Cook had described as a hundred-year flood of rising memory costs. That phrase lingers because it captures the pressure Apple now faces: a company that built its reputation on premium pricing is being forced to navigate a supply chain squeeze that touches nearly every device it sells.
Analysts expect July-to-September revenue to rise nearly eleven percent to $113.39 billion, according to LSEG data, while net profit is expected to climb about six percent to $29.04 billion amid the higher memory-chip expenses. Those numbers look healthy on the surface, but the underlying story is more complicated. Profit growth at that pace would be the weakest Apple has posted in six quarters, a signal that the cost of components is beginning to bite even for a company with Apple’s pricing power. Memory prices have climbed sharply as demand from AI data centers soaks up supply, and Apple has already raised prices on some MacBooks and iPads in response. For a business that has spent years cultivating an image of seamless affordability across its ecosystem, that shift matters, because it tests how much consumers are willing to absorb before they start delaying upgrades.
Three issues will dominate the call. The first is Apple’s holiday-quarter outlook, which will indicate whether the new product lineup is generating the kind of momentum the company needs heading into its most important selling season. New iPhone Duo sales will show up in that forecast, and the early read on the foldable will tell investors whether Apple has found a fresh growth vector or simply entered a niche that remains expensive and relatively small. The second is Ternus’s commentary on artificial intelligence and the revamped Siri, a subject that has become something of a sore point. Apple has been trying to position its AI offerings differently from rivals such as Meta Platforms, whose Muse agent took App Store rankings by storm in recent weeks. Where Meta has leaned into agentic capability and aggressive feature rollouts, Apple has framed its approach around privacy and trust, pitching its systems toward everyday people rather than Silicon Valley insiders who gravitate toward frontier models from the likes of OpenAI.
That positioning is defensible, but it has left Apple looking like a follower rather than a leader in the AI conversation. Dan Morgan, a portfolio manager at Synovus Trust, which owns Apple shares, put the tension plainly when he observed that recent agentic innovation far outpaces the firm’s experience with Siri AI, though he acknowledged that Apple has been deliberate about focusing on trust and privacy. The question investors keep returning to is whether that deliberate pace is prudence or inertia. Apple is also suing OpenAI over alleged trade-secret theft, a dispute that adds a layer of friction to a relationship that was already complicated, and OpenAI is among the rivals developing devices aimed at displacing the iPhone as the central device in people’s lives. How Apple embraces AI therefore carries implications well beyond Siri itself, extending to the future of its services business, whose slowing growth has worried investors after years of rapid expansion. If third-party AI agents become the primary way people interact with software, Apple’s position as the gateway to those experiences becomes the real battleground.
Morgan added that investors want to know whether Apple could profit by distributing third-party AI agents through its App Store and taking a cut of the business they generate. It is a reasonable question, and it hints at the strategic puzzle at the heart of Apple’s moment. The company has always made its money by controlling the point of contact between users and technology, and AI agents threaten to insert themselves into that space. Whether Apple can tax that layer, or whether it gets relegated to selling hardware while others capture the value, is the unresolved issue that no earnings call can fully settle. Ternus inherits a business that remains enormously profitable and fiercely loyal, but also one facing a cost environment it cannot fully control and a technological shift it did not lead. The forecast he delivers will be read as a first signal of how he intends to steer through both.
