This paper considers the existence of positive solutions of four-point boundary value problems for fourth-order ordinary differential equations with deviating arguments and p-Laplacian. We discuss such problems in the cases when the deviating arguments are delayed or advanced, what may concern optimization issues related to some technical problems. To obtain the existence results, a fixed point theorem for cones due to Avery and Peterson is applied. According to the Author’s knowledge, the results are new. It is a first paper where a fixed point theorem for cones is applied to fourth-order differential equations with deviating arguments and p-Laplacian. An example is included to verify the theoretical results.