Apple Inc. shares fell 7.3% in pre-open trading to $309.17 following the release of the company’s fiscal third-quarter 2026 earnings late Thursday. Although Apple delivered a record revenue beat for the quarter, investors focused on a fourth-quarter revenue outlook that came in well under the analyst consensus.
Management guided to Q4 revenue growth of 9% to 11%, implying a midpoint roughly near $113 billion, while the street’s consensus stood at about $115 billion. The company said that severe shortages of advanced chip manufacturing capacity risked limiting shipments of iPhone, Mac and iPad devices during the September quarter.
Outgoing CEO Tim Cook, speaking on the earnings call ahead of a planned leadership handoff to hardware chief John Ternus on September 1, characterized the shortage as largely self-inflicted. "The root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do," he said.
CFO Kevan Parekh warned that margins could face additional pressure next quarter, pointing to a 2.5 percentage point foreign exchange headwind and higher memory costs. Those factors, he said, would weigh on the company’s profitability in the coming period.
Beyond the headline guidance miss, several business-line results disappointed relative to expectations. Services revenue came in at $30.74 billion, and sales in Greater China totaled $18.8 billion; both figures underperformed analyst forecasts. Meanwhile, of the $2.02 in reported earnings per share, $0.11 was attributed to one-time tariff refunds, a disclosure that reduced the perceived quality of the EPS beat.
In the immediate market reaction, some analysts revised their targets. JP Morgan lowered its Apple price target following the report, though analysts at that firm noted their view that the production constraints were likely to defer sales rather than permanently eliminate them.
The selloff in Apple was not mirrored by the broader market, which moved higher. The S&P 500 gained 0.58%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.58% and the Nasdaq climbed 1.28% during the same trading session, underscoring that the weakness in Apple was largely company-specific. Amazon, which reported its own results, jumped sharply as investors rotated toward AI-infrastructure winners and away from Apple’s more constrained near-term outlook; in the market data cited, Amazon advanced roughly 3.9%.
Taken together, a conservative Q4 revenue guide, supply-chain bottlenecks tied to advanced chip scarcity, margin pressure from foreign exchange and memory cost inflation, segment-level shortfalls in Services and Greater China, and the impending leadership transition combined to push Apple shares down to $309.17 from a 52-week high of $344.57.
Readouts and next steps
Investors will likely watch upcoming shipment and supply updates closely, along with any further commentary from management on how the company plans to address the forecast and component-capacity mismatch. For now, the market priced in a materially more cautious near-term outlook for device sales despite a record quarterly revenue result.