India, May 3 -- Apple shares jumped 3.6% in early trading on Friday after the iPhone maker posted its strongest quarterly sales growth in more than four years, a show of momentum as it prepares to hand over the reins to a new CEO.

Its latest iPhone 17 Pro series and the newly launched low-cost MacBook Neo laptop are both drawing buyers at a time of low overall demand in the consumer electronics industry due to price hikes forced by the memory chip shortage.

Even though Apple's margins for the January-March quarter and its fiscal thirdquarter forecast were above Wall Street estimates, outgoing CEO Tim Cook warned that higher memory costs would increasingly weigh on the business from June.

Limited supply of the advanced processors for &#...