Apple ended its fiscal year holding $14.54 billion of inventory, up 31% from $11.09 billion in the June quarter and 154% from $5.72 billion a year earlier — the clearest financial fingerprint yet of a company buying memory chips ahead of a price curve it expects to keep climbing.
The numbers came with Apple's fiscal fourth-quarter results on Monday, and executives spent much of the call on the same subject: memory. Apple guided to a 45% to 46% gross margin for the December quarter, down from 47.9% in the September quarter, and attributed the compression largely to component costs. "What we're seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented," CEO John Ternus told analysts, adding that the company expects "even higher memory costs" in the holiday quarter and continued increases beyond it.
Apple is fighting the squeeze from both ends. On one side it is stockpiling: manufacturing purchase obligations rose by $33 billion between the June and September quarters, a commitment that will show up in the annual filing. On the other it is charging more, having raised prices on Macs and iPads at the end of June and on iPhones in September. Ternus said those increases partly offset the damage; COO Sabih Khan, brought on the call to answer memory questions, declined to rule out further ones.
The pressure is already visible in the product mix. iPad revenue came in at $6.2 billion against analyst expectations of $6.7 billion, down 10% year over year, which Apple blamed on supply constraints rather than demand. iPhone revenue, by contrast, set a record at $57.58 billion — with no standard iPhone 18 in the lineup this year.
Then there is the iPhone Duo. In a Reuters interview alongside the earnings, Ternus was asked when the $1,999 foldable would be broadly available. "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," he said. The device launched last month with a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner screen; preorders sold out quickly, some shipments now point at 2027, and in-store stock was deliberately limited.
Ternus also addressed reports of cracked displays, saying "a very small percentage" of units had been returned over the issue and that Apple is replacing them.
Read together, the quarter describes a company that has stopped treating memory as a line item and started treating it as a strategic constraint: stockpile what you can, raise prices where you can, and admit — at least about the Duo — that you cannot yet say when the queue ends.
