Apple’s 108% Run Up

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 16, 10:46AM EDT

Quick Read

Apple Isn’t In AI
The iPhone Continues To Win
Staying Away From AI Is Good Business

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Apple’s 108% Run Up — © IPhone 5 Unboxing, 10-10-12 (CC BY 2.0) by Brett Jordan

Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock is up 108% in the last five years. The S&P is 69% over the same period. It should surprise most people that Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) is up only 35% over the same period, given that it is driven by its AWS business and its early foothold in AI. Meta’s (NASDAQ: META) stock is up 111% over the same period. What happened to the world’s largest social network and its early beachhead in AI? What about Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT), which has performed only as well as the market over the last five years, despite its strength in the cloud business and its early AI move? What about Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), which is up 79%?

What about them?

What about the fact that Apple has the second-largest market cap of any public company at $3.8 trillion, behind Nvidia’s $4.4 trillion. Apple’s is slightly higher than Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOG), and it controls the global search business. It started controlling US streaming, and it is another early company at the leading edge of AI development.

The answer, in a word, is “iPhone,” which by many measures is an old consumer electronics product. The current generation of the iPhone is 17. Five years ago, it was the iPhone 14. Over the entire period, people have continued upgrading, even though the core features have remained the same.

And, if anything, the iPhone has become more important to Apple. In the most recent quarter, iPhone sales accounted for $85 billion, or 60% of Apple’s revenue. And iPhone revenue was up 23% year over year. Total revenue for the period rose only 16% to $143.8 billion.

Apple does not have an AI product, and the market has been waiting for one since September. Apple was “weak” to have to turn to Alphabet’s Gemini. Of course, Apple is avoiding the hundreds of billions of dollars that other megatech companies are investing in AI development and massive data centers.

When it comes right down to it, are investors betting on an old hardware product or the expensive future of AI?

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.