Apple has released its latest quarterly financial report, and it's clear that the company remains incredibly strong—both revenue and net profit hit record highs for the year.

Notably, even amid rising memory costs, iPhone and Mac sales continued to grow robustly.

Data shows that Apple's revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter reached $114.477 billion, up 11.7% year-over-year, while net profit came in at $30.711 billion, up 11.8% year-over-year.

However, Apple's gross margin declined this quarter. The company's overall gross margin for the fourth fiscal quarter was 47.9%, with product gross margin at 37.2% and services gross margin reaching 76%.

By comparison, in the previous quarter, overall gross margin was 50.1%, product gross margin was 40.1%, and services gross margin was 75.6%. From this perspective, both overall and product gross margins have declined.

Why the decline? The reason is rising memory prices, which force Apple to spend more on memory procurement. This extra cost is what everyone jokingly refers to as the "memory tax."

Let's do some math. If this quarter's gross margin had remained unchanged from the previous quarter, Apple's profit might have been about $2.5 billion higher (roughly 16.7 billion yuan)—and that figure essentially represents the memory tax Apple paid this quarter.

Of course, $2.5 billion is by no means an exact figure. It's only a rough estimate for reference.

Moreover, Apple expects that next quarter, due to the impact of memory costs, its gross margin may fall further to the 45%–46% range—down another 1–2 percentage points compared with this quarter—which could bring another impact of over 15 billion yuan.

In fact, Apple has already raised prices on some of its products this quarter, but even those increases cannot offset the impact of rising memory chip prices. Ultimately, the extra money added to the prices of phones, computers, and tablets isn't enough to cover payments to memory manufacturers—Apple still has to pay more out of pocket, which has also contributed to the decline in its gross margin.

Actually, it's not just Apple. Nearly all consumer electronics manufacturers are now paying the memory tax to memory chip makers—phone brands like Xiaomi, Huawei, and OPPO; PC makers like Lenovo, HP, and DELL; and automakers like AITO, BYD, Xiaomi, and Li Auto. Everyone is in the same boat.

At present, memory chip prices have become a critical variable across the entire consumer electronics industry chain. All downstream manufacturers, including Apple, are hoping memory prices will collapse as soon as possible—because everyone really can't hold on much longer.