Apple reported a gross profit margin of 50.1% in the quarter ended 27 June 2026 — its highest quarterly margin ever. But the company itself said that about two percentage points of this figure came from a tariff refund, while its CFO gave a completely different ladder on the same call: 49.3% in March, then 48.1% in June, followed by guidance of 46.5% for September. Three consecutive quarters down, with memory the stated reason. On 1 September, the company’s hardware engineer took the helm at precisely this point on the ladder.
On 1 September 2026, “John Ternus (John Ternus)” became chief executive of Apple, succeeding Tim Cook, following an announcement made on 20 April 2026. Ternus is a hardware engineer who spent twenty-five years at the company and led hardware engineering for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods product lines. The news was read by the market as an orderly, pre-planned transition, and it was indeed so.
But what warrants attention is not the handover itself, but the condition of what was handed over. Apple reported a record gross margin of 50.1%, and said in its statement that this figure included a positive impact of roughly two percentage points from tariff refunds. On the same earnings call, CFO “Kevan Parekh (Kevan Parekh)” gave the same series excluding that impact: 49.3% in the March quarter, 48.1% in the June quarter, and implied guidance of 46.5% for the September quarter. The underlying trend has been downward for three quarters, for one stated reason.
An analyst asked about the 120 basis point decline between March and June, and Parekh replied that “more than 100%” of it was explained by changing memory costs. When one factor exceeds the entire decline, it means the other factors were pushing the margin higher, while memory alone absorbed their gains and more.
Behind this figure lies a sharp commodity cycle: DRAM industry revenue in the first quarter of 2026 reached roughly 97 billion dollars, up 81% quarter on quarter, while contract prices for conventional memory rose between 93% and 98% in the same quarter. Tim Cook described this on his latest call as a “once-in-a-century flood” in memory prices, noting that the DRAM market has only three suppliers.
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