Apple at $337.68 on 23 September 2026. Every figure below except the share price comes from Apple's own annual and quarterly filings — the income statement and the product segmentation Apple reports itself; the price is from a market data provider. Where a claim could not be checked against a filing, we say so and leave it out of the argument. Prices move in real time.
There is a story going round about consumer electronics, and it goes like this: people are buying fewer phones and laptops, but manufacturers are doing fine anyway, because the devices cost more. Memory prices are up on AI demand, everything gets passed through, and revenue keeps climbing on falling volumes. Premium, in a word.
It is a tidy story. We went to check it in the accounts, and ran into a problem on the first step.
What Apple does publish
Apple breaks revenue into five lines, and the split adds up exactly to the reported total. Four financial years, in billions of dollars:
| Line | FY2021 | FY2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone | 191.97 | 209.59 | +9.2% |
| Mac | 35.19 | 33.71 | −4.2% |
| iPad | 31.86 | 28.02 | −12.0% |
| Wearables, home, accessories | 38.37 | 35.69 | −7.0% |
| Services | 68.43 | 109.16 | +59.5% |
| Total | 365.82 | 416.16 | +13.8% |
Apple's revenue grew by $50.3 billion over those four years. $40.7 billion of it — 80.9% — came from Services. Everything that is a physical object grew by $9.6 billion in total, which on a hardware base of $297 billion is 3.2% over four years.
Not 3.2% a year. 3.2% in total, over four years, without adjusting for inflation. That is not a premium strategy, it is a draw.
And three of the four hardware lines are smaller in dollars than they were in 2021. The Mac has had it worst: it peaked at $40.18bn in FY2022 and now sits at $33.71bn, down 16.1% from its own best year.
The margin, which is the part that looks like the story
Gross margin — what is left of each dollar of sales after the cost of making the thing — has gone one way:
| Period | Gross margin |
|---|---|
| FY2021 | 41.8% |
| FY2023 | 44.1% |
| FY2025 | 46.9% |
| Last four quarters, to 27 June 2026 | 48.7% |
That is the number the premium story points at, and it is real: nearly seven points of margin since FY2021. But look at what it sits on top of. If rising device prices were doing this, hardware revenue would be rising too. It is flat. What did change, and by a lot, is the mix: Services went from 18.7% of revenue to 26.2%.
We should be careful here, because this is where it would be easy to overclaim. Apple reports products and services gross margin separately in its filings, and we did not have that split in front of us. So: the margin expansion is consistent with the mix shift, and the mix shift is large and documented. Calling it proof would be going further than the numbers we read.
What we could not check, and are therefore not going to assert
The story also covers memory costs rising on AI demand, PC makers pushing upmarket, longer replacement cycles, and a growing second-hand market. We could not pull filings for the other manufacturers, so all of that stays outside this article. It may well be true. It is simply not something we read in a set of accounts, and there is a meaningful difference between the two.
We would rather publish one company verified than five companies assumed. The alternative is how most market commentary gets written, and you can tell.
The binary
Either the premium thesis is right about devices, and hardware revenue starts growing again on price rather than volume — in which case it should show up as hardware dollars, not as a margin percentage, and the next few filings will say so plainly.
Or the growth engine is Services, and the device business is roughly a flat annuity that exists to keep installed base in front of the things that actually grow. In which case the interesting question about Apple is not what an iPhone costs. It is how long Services can compound at this rate, and what happens to it under regulatory pressure — which is a completely different risk from the one the premium story invites you to worry about.
Both at once, no. And four years of filings currently point at the second one.
What this is actually about, if you run a business
You are unlikely to be setting the price of a laptop this quarter. But the mistake in the premium story is one we see in management accounts every single month, and it costs real money.
Total revenue went up, so the strategy is working. That is the sentence. Apple's revenue went up 13.8% and four fifths of it came from one line that had nothing to do with the thing everyone was discussing. Strip the mix out and the headline story evaporates.
The same arithmetic runs in a company doing €4 million: total up 8%, everyone pleased, and underneath it one contract grew 40% while the core business shrank and nobody has looked at margin by line in a year. The number that tells you what to do is never the total. It is the total broken into the pieces that behave differently — which is exactly what Apple's segmentation table does, and exactly what most owner-managed businesses cannot produce on demand.
If you cannot answer "where did the growth come from, by line, and at what margin" in under a minute, you are running the business on the same number the premium story is built on.
The three things we would watch
- Hardware dollars, not gross margin. Margin can rise on mix alone. If the premium thesis is right about devices, it has to show up as growing hardware revenue, and so far it has not.
- The Mac line specifically. It is 16.1% below its own FY2022 peak. A product that is supposed to be benefiting from a price-led upgrade cycle should not be shrinking in dollars.
- Whether Services keeps compounding. It is 26.2% of revenue and provided four fifths of all growth. That concentration is the actual story, and whatever regulatory risk sits on Services is a different question from the one a gadget-pricing debate puts in front of you.
In one sentence
"Over four years Apple's entire hardware business grew 3.2% while Services grew 59.5% — so the premium device story, tested against the only filings we could read, turns out to be mostly a services story in a hardware costume."