Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. is an American consumer-technology company that designs, manufactures and markets smartphones, personal computers, tablets, wearables and accessories, and sells a range of related services, reporting $416.2 billion of net sales in fiscal 2025 with roughly 166,000 full-time equivalent employees. It is managed on a geographic basis through five reportable segments — Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific — and took 60% of fiscal 2025 net sales through indirect channels such as carriers and resellers.

Three things are moving at once, and they do not obviously agree with each other. The services business, which carries a 75.4% gross margin and sits on an installed base management puts above 2.5 billion active devices, keeps compounding in the low-to-mid teens. The hardware business is selling as well as it has in a decade — iPhone net sales rose 22% in the June 2026 quarter — while being capped by supply rather than demand. And the cost of the memory inside every one of those devices is rising at a rate management itself describes as "a 100-year flood," with the company's own bridge attributing more than 100% of the last two quarters of sequential gross-margin decline to memory alone.

The file turns on a single question: whether Apple's gross margin, which reached 50.1% in the June 2026 quarter, is a plateau or a peak. Management has guided the September quarter to 47%–48% including roughly a point of tariff-refund benefit — about 46.5% underlying — and has declined to give any colour beyond it. Everything else, from the Services attach rate to the pace of the buyback to the incoming chief executive's first year, is downstream of how that resolves.