Apple Becomes Apple Again

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 5, 8:38AM EST

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Apple’s Stock Suffered For Years
Apple Finaally Has An AI Product
The Big AI Company Face A Sell Off

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Apple Becomes Apple Again — © Apple Inc.. Paris (CC BY 2.0) by sabin paul croce

An odd thing happened on the road to AI dominance. The market became concerned about the large investments and intense competition among companies such as Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction), Meta (NASDAQ: META), and OpenAI. AI leaders were hit by investors because they were no longer attractive, even though they had been just two months ago.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which has never launched its own AI products, is doing very well in the stock market. Its shares are up 36% in the last six months. The S&P is only 9% higher in the same period. Amazon has barely kept up with the S&P by the same measurement. Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is down 42%.

Apple was criticized for not having an advanced AI-driven version of its Siri interactive iPhone features. The product was scheduled for release on an early version of iOS this year. This was delayed over and over. Apple AI engineers moved to competing firms.

Apple finally decided to use Google’s Gemini AI product to integrate into Apple Intelligence. Gemini has been well reviewed and is seen as a strong competitor to OpenAI, the market leader, which seemed impossible until the end of last year. The price tag Apple paid to Google was estimated at $1 billion a year, which appeared to be a remarkably favorable deal. However, Google got tremendous distribution of Gemini across Apple’s hardware products, which it could not have had otherwise.

In the meantime, the big AI champions proved again and again that their AI investments, which were as high as $100 billion a year, have not borne fruit. Their integration into paid products has been slow. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), in particular, was criticized for a low payback in terms of getting an AI boost to revenue. Its stock is down 23% in the last six months.

Even Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), the cornerstone of AI worldwide, has had a drop in its stock price of 3% in the last six months.

Apple was the tech stock market leader for years. It was the first company to post a $1 trillion market cap in 2018. Apple lost its mojo. Now, its mojo is back.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.