Fresh off a record-breaking fiscal year, newly appointed Apple CEO John Ternus confirmed on Monday that the tech giant is prioritizing scaling production of its groundbreaking $1,999 iPhone Duo foldable device, after the highly anticipated handset sold out within hours of its late-October launch just over a week prior. Ternus, who succeeded long-time chief Tim Cook in September, expressed enthusiasm over the overwhelmingly positive early consumer reception to the company’s first foray into the foldable smartphone market, even as the firm navigates unforeseen operational hurdles.
While the premium handset, priced at £1,999 for UK customers, flew off virtual and physical shelves immediately upon release, a small subset of early adopters reported unexpected cracking along the device’s inner fold seam. Apple previously announced last week that it would offer free full unit replacements for any iPhone Duo affected by this manufacturing defect, though executives did not address the screen issue directly during their quarterly earnings call with financial analysts.
Newly installed Chief Operating Officer Sabhi Kahn noted that the company currently cannot provide a clear timeline for when iPhone Duo inventory will meet rampant global consumer demand, stating that aligning supply with the unprecedented level of market interest remains a major challenge. “At this time, it’s really hard to predict when supply and demand will be in balance,” Kahn told analysts during the earnings briefing.
Even excluding revenue from the newly launched iPhone Duo, which went on sale well after the close of the most recent fiscal quarter ending September 26, Apple posted historic performance metrics: global iPhone sales surged 17% year-over-year to hit $57 billion, marking the highest quarterly iPhone revenue in the company’s history. Mac computer sales also delivered a 27% year-over-year jump to reach a new all-time high of $10.7 billion, driving the company’s total full-year revenue up 15% to a staggering $479 billion.
Not all product lines delivered growth, however: iPad sales dipped 10% year-over-year, while revenue from Apple’s wearable portfolio including Apple Watch and AirPods fell 7% over the same 12-month period. Kahn explained that lingering, widespread supply chain bottlenecks continue to hamper output across multiple product categories, driven primarily by shortages of cutting-edge advanced-node microprocessors manufactured for Apple by Taiwanese semiconductor leader TSMC. He added that these component constraints are projected to persist well into 2025, with the iPad and Mac lines facing the most pronounced production limits, exacerbated by what Apple describes as persistently unforeseen surges in consumer demand for its hardware.
Ternus also highlighted unprecedented, industry-wide cost spikes for high-performance memory storage, a trend fueled by the explosive global expansion of generative AI platforms from developers including OpenAI and Anthropic, which has sent data center storage demand soaring and driven corresponding price hikes for memory components. Tim Cook previously characterized this sudden, historic surge in data center and memory costs earlier this year as a “thousand year flood,” a market shift that prompted Apple to implement an approximate 20% price increase across nearly its entire hardware product lineup.
Sunil Krishnan, a senior analyst at Aviva Investors, assessed Apple’s latest earnings performance during an interview with BBC’s Today programme, describing the full results as reasonably solid, with the iPhone division delivering a notably strong performance. While acknowledging lingering investor concerns over the company’s forward guidance on profit margins and sustained elevated memory component costs, Krishnan emphasized that the firm’s sustained ability to maintain operating margins well above 45% as a mature, large-cap technology leader remains a remarkably impressive market achievement.
Apple unsure when more foldable iPhones will be available after selling out
