Apple showed up late to the AI game and, honestly, it’s been scrambling to keep up ever since. Apple’s stock price has reflected the issue.
Sure, people were curious about the Apple Intelligence features rolled out last June, but the excitement for it has been pretty lukewarm. Case in point: iPhone revenue actually dropped in the quarter ending December, and according to IDC, iPhone unit sales took a 4.1% hit year over year during that same period. Meanwhile, Siri, their AI assistant, got handed off to a new boss after senior director Robby Walker basically called Apple’s AI progress “ugly and embarrassing.”
No surprise, then, that Apple’s stock has been lagging this year, mostly thanks to its lackluster AI game. But maybe the market just hyped it up too soon. Multiple prominent analysts believe Apple stock will soar over the next 5 years.
James Brumley for The Motley Fool:
As UBS analyst David Vogt recently penned, investors shouldn’t “expect a significant improvement to Apple Intelligence over the next 12 months even with the upcoming [iPhone] 17 series in the fall of 2025,” echoing timeline concerns voiced by Jefferies analyst Edison Lee and Wedbush’s Dan Ives.
All three analysts, however, see AI-driven growth for Apple on the horizon once the company makes Apple Intelligence more marketable. In this vein, investment research house Imarc predicts the intelligent virtual assistant market is set to grow at an annualized pace of 26% through 2033. The market’s likely to see this growth coming sooner rather than later, however, and simply sensing what awaits could be enough to (re)light a fire under this stock.
Analysts see it coming anyway. The analyst community’s current 12-month consensus price target for Apple stands at $253.71 per share, up 15% from the stock’s present price. Most of these analysts also rate Apple stock as at least a buy at this time.
MacDailyNews Take: Make it so, Mr. Market. Make it so.
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