Apple vs. Microsoft: This Is the Magnificent Seven Stock I’d Buy Today

Apple vs. Microsoft: This Is the Magnificent Seven Stock I’d Buy Today

Vandita Jadeja

Mon, September 14, 2026 at 4:00 PM GMT+3 5 min read

• AAPL -0.19%
• MSFT +0.31%

Quick Read

• Apple trades at 37x earnings after a 45% one-year run; Microsoft sits at 27x and is up just 3% year to date, offering a cheaper AI entry point.

• Apple's quarterly beat included tariff refunds worth 2 points of gross margin, making the underlying business performance thinner than headline numbers suggest.

• Azure crossed $100B in annual revenue growing 43%, and Microsoft's $678B commercial backlog, which is up 84%, signals compounding enterprise AI earnings power into 2028.

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Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) both closed the summer with blowout quarters.

Apple posted its strongest June quarter ever on July 30, powered by a scorching iPhone 17 cycle. Microsoft reported one day earlier, on July 29, 2026, and the story was Azure crossing a landmark. Two mega caps, two very different engines.

iPhone Supercycle Meets a $100 Billion Azure

Apple's Q3 revenue hit $109.42B, up 16.4% year over year, with iPhone alone at $54.3 billion, up 22%. Mac grew a striking 29%, and Services touched $30.74B. Tim Cook called it "the most powerful and most popular iPhone lineup we've ever had."

One caveat worth flagging: roughly 2 percentage points of gross margin and about $0.11 of EPS came from one-time tariff refunds. Strip that out and the beat is thinner than it looks.

Microsoft's quarter was arguably cleaner. Revenue reached $90.01B, up 17.8%, EPS came in at $4.74, and Azure grew 43% year over year, pushing it past $100B in annual revenue for the first time.

Satya Nadella said "Demand continues to exceed available supply." Copilot passed 30 million paid seats, and commercial RPO hit $678B, up 84%. That backlog is a rare thing at this scale.

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Q4/Q3 Signal

Apple

Microsoft

Revenue growth

16.4%

17.8%

Main engine

iPhone 17 cycle

Azure + Copilot

Backlog visibility

Short (product cycles)

$678B RPO

Consumer Hardware Flywheel vs. Enterprise AI Landgrab

The strategic split is wide. Apple is monetizing an installed base of billions through pricier iPhones and a growing Services annuity, while betting that on-device Siri AI, unveiled at WWDC26, becomes what Cook called "sort of a competitive weapon."

Memory pricing is the headache. Cook described a "100-year flood on the memory pricing" and admitted Apple "reluctantly raised prices."

Microsoft is doing the opposite. It is spending. FY26 capex ran $115.95B, up 79.6%, and management guided fiscal 2027 capex to roughly $175 billion. Free cash flow already fell 23.19% in Q4 because of it.

The upside: Foundry now has 100,000 customers, GitHub Copilot has 50 million users, and EY alone deployed the E7 suite to 400,000 employees. Concerns about overbuilding are real, but the demand signals are hard to argue with. All that capex has to be powered, cooled, and networked by somebody, and we profiled seven suppliers riding that buildout in a free report here.

Next Test: Margins vs. Backlog

I will be watching whether Apple's September quarter guide of 9% to 11% revenue growth holds once the tariff refund tailwind fades and memory costs bite harder.

You should also watch Azure's guided 45% constant-currency growth. If Microsoft can convert that $678B backlog on the current capex path, the earnings power in fiscal 2028 could be substantial.

Why Microsoft Looks Like the Standout Mag 7 Setup Right Now

Personally, I lean Microsoft here, and it is not a close call. Apple looks expensive at a 37 P/E for a business whose latest beat leaned partly on tariff refunds, and the stock has already run 44.98% over the last year.

Microsoft trades at a more digestible 27 P/E, is up just 3.14% year to date, and offers the clearest enterprise AI monetization story on the board. For investors prioritizing brand durability and buybacks, Apple screens well on those factors. For those focused on visible enterprise AI monetization, Microsoft screens as the cleaner setup on the current data.

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