dpApple’s (AAPL) third quarter earnings are on deck Thursday, setting up a potential reprieve from the week’s chip and AI stock sell-off.
Shares of the iPhone maker have benefited from their general lack of exposure to the AI trade, with investors flocking to the stock as a safety play and briefly sending the company’s market capitalization to around the $5 trillion mark on Tuesday.
Apple stock is up some 24% year to date, easily outpacing the rest of the “Magnificent Seven” stocks. Goog (GOOG, GOOGL) is the second-best performer of the lot in the period, climbing roughly 7%.
For the third quarter, Apple is expected to report earnings per share (EPS) of $1.89 on revenue of $108.8 billion. That would mark a jump from the EPS of $1.57 and $94 billion in revenue the company saw in the same period last year.
Apple’s iPhone revenue is projected to hit $53.5 billion, a 20% increase from the $44.5 billion the company brought in in Q3 2025.
Services, Apple’s second-largest business, is anticipated to see revenue of $31.3 billion, up 14%. Revenue out of China is expected to grow 27% to $19.5 billion.
While Apple’s stock has outperformed its Big Tech peers, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company is still facing its own AI-induced headache: rising memory and storage costs, thanks to the global AI build-out.
That has driven the company to increase the price of its Macs and iPads, though the iPhone has been spared at least for now. Apple is widely expected to boost the price of its next-generation iPhones when it unveils the products at its annual showcase in September.
According to Jefferies analyst Edison Lee, the increases in memory prices could pressure Apple’s iPhone margins going forward.
“We estimate the memory cost would rise further in [the second half of 2026], and assuming similar price hikes with iPad (except the 512GB version, where we assume a US$300 price hike vs 200 for iPad), the incremental [gross margins] would only be 21%. That could reduce the overall iPhone GM from 38% to 34.5%,” Lee wrote in an investor note.
But Brandon Nispel of KeyBank Capital Markets sees a potential iPhone price increase as a far larger issue for Apple than simply an impact on gross margins.
“With [Apple] providing a safe haven to the sell-off in semis, we think they are missing the bigger picture, which squarely fits our thesis: as [Apple] raises iPhone prices, unit growth will slow, and as unit growth slows, so will user growth, which we think ultimately will slow Services growth,” Nispel wrote in a note to investors.
