Apple beats estimates in new CEO John Ternus's first quarter, iPhone revenue up 17 percent while iPad sales fall 10 percent, foldable iPhone Duo vanishes to bots and backlogged pre-orders within weeks

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John Ternus gave his first earnings report as Apple CEO on Monday. Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images businessinsider.com

Apple's first earnings report under new chief executive John Ternus beat Wall Street on both profit and revenue, but the cracks showed elsewhere: China sales missed, iPad revenue fell 10 percent, and the foldable iPhone Duo is being bought up by bots within a minute of hitting Apple's reservation portal.

The quarter, which ended September 30, was mostly Tim Cook's work; Ternus took over as CEO on September 1, weeks into the fiscal period, and Cook now sits as executive chairman. The quarter delivered EPS of $2.10 against estimates of $2.00, on revenue of $114.48 billion, up 12 percent year over year and ahead of the $113.47 billion analysts expected. iPhone revenue rose 17 percent to $57.58 billion, and Mac jumped 24 percent to $10.79 billion — a figure that sits awkwardly alongside the panic around PC sales elsewhere in the market. Intel's stock collapsed 25 percent this week on warnings that memory prices inflated by AI datacenter demand are strangling personal computer buyers, yet Apple just sold a quarter more Macs than a year ago at the high end of the market.

The soft spots are real, though. iPad revenue fell 10 percent to $6.23 billion against a $6.89 billion estimate, and wearables, home and accessories dropped 7.9 percent to $8.30 billion. China missed expectations. None of the fall product launches besides the iPhone — the M6 iMac, the touchscreen MacBook Pro, the OLED iPad mini, the new Apple TV box — is a major seller on its own, and several only go on sale deep into the holiday quarter.

What markets will actually be watching on the call is the iPhone Duo. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports there is no regular iPhone 18 and no new iPhone Air this cycle, meaning next year's comparables rest almost entirely on a foldable that cannot be kept in stock. Pre-orders placed soon after launch are not arriving until the end of January, and Bloomberg Intelligence's Anurag Rana has raised his first-year estimate to 14–16 million units from 10–14 million — while noting that if supply constraints persist, the holiday quarter's consensus iPhone growth of 6 percent merely shifts the revenue into later quarters rather than disappearing.

The quieter question for Ternus is capital allocation. Apple continues its buybacks while rivals burn hundreds of billions on datacenters, and the market has so far read that restraint as either discipline or a company with no AI story to spend on. Ternus's opening statement on the call was his first extended appearance before Wall Street as chief executive — the first impression came from numbers he largely inherited.