Apple earnings: Siri hits 2.5B daily requests, advanced AI may join iCloud+

On November 3, 2026, Apple reported results for its fourth fiscal quarter and full year of 2026, the first earnings call led by John Ternus since he succeeded Tim Cook as CEO on September 1. The quarter delivered revenue of $114.5 billion, up 12% year on year, net income of $30.7 billion, and diluted EPS of $2.10, up 14%, with gross margin at 47.9%, which included roughly one percentage point of uplift from a tariff rebate. For the full fiscal year, revenue reached a record $478.8 billion. By segment, iPhone revenue was $57.6 billion, up 17%, Mac revenue was $10.8 billion, up 24%, iPad revenue was $6.2 billion, down 10%, and revenue in Greater China grew 21% for the quarter, lifted by the autumn handset upgrade cycle.

Executives pointed to rising costs tied to AI as the main pressure on profitability ahead. Parekh said higher memory prices and some spending related to the ramp of Siri AI would drag down holiday-quarter margins. Ternus described memory pricing as unprecedented and said it put direct pressure on hardware pricing. Apple guided gross margin down to 45% to 46% for the next quarter, against the current quarter's 47.9%, and said research and development spending for the fiscal year rose to $45.765 billion, up 32.5%.

On Siri, Ternus reiterated that the assistant now handles more than 2.5 billion requests per day, and that work the on-device small model cannot handle, including cross-app coordination, long-form rewriting and complex reasoning, relies on Apple's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which raises cost per use. This was not the first time Apple disclosed such a figure: Lilian Rincon, Apple's vice president of AI product marketing, first cited it at the September launch event for the iPhone 18 Pro lineup and the Duo, Apple's first foldable iPhone. Compared with the 1.5 billion voice requests per day announced at WWDC in 2024, the latest figure is more than 1 billion higher, though Apple has not said whether the two measurements are comparable.

The redesigned Siri rolled out gradually with iOS 27 starting in September, able to draw on personal context, understand more complex questions, retrieve content from Messages, Mail and Photos, and carry out actions across apps. It is still in testing: eligible users must join a waiting list, and functions that depend on server-side AI models carry daily usage limits. Apple also said it is exploring folding advanced AI capabilities into an iCloud+ subscription, with capacity expansion tiers tied to server-side usage thresholds, though pricing and timing have not been announced.