This Magnificent 7 Stock Will Plunge This Year

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 20, 9:15AM EST

24/7 Wall St. Key Points

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is certain to underperform the other Magnificent 7 stocks this year.
Investors have been walking away from Apple stock for some time, and ongoing AI challenges will accelerate that process.

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This Magnificent 7 Stock Will Plunge This Year — © Angela Kotsell / Shutterstock.com

In the next year, one Magnificent 7 stock will sharply underperform the rest of the group by far, no matter in which direction the value of the overall group goes. That exception is Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction).

The Wall Street Journal reports that only two Magnificent 7 stocks outperformed the S&P 500 last year. These were Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL). After strong performances in earlier years, the rest of the group delivered disappointing market results in 2025.

Apple’s stock price has depended on a single thing. iPhone sales have continued to be remarkably successful. According to Counterpoint, Apple led the global smartphone market in 2025 with 20% share and 10% annual shipment growth. That was the highest among the top five brands. It topped rival Samsung, which had a market share of 19% and rose only 5% year over year. Counterpoint credits sales of the new iPhone 17 for Apple’s success.

The appeal of the iPhone 18 will be weaker when it is released in September (the usual release schedule), and iPhone 17 sales will slow. That is because, despite a new relationship with Alphabet to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to the smartphone, it will be too little too late. Apple promised the AI product in a release of iOS early this year. It was unable to build this in-house, so it turned to Alphabet’s Google to use its Gemini AI product, which is currently considered better, in some circles, than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 5 series.

The integration faces two hurdles. First, it will not happen overnight. This means Apple’s AI capacity will come later, and later than planned. The second challenge is that the integration will be with Apple’s Siri, which has a mixed reputation.

Apple also cannot overcome the fact that other AI products are among the most downloaded on the iPhone. ChatGPT and Gemini are in the top four “Total App Downloads.” Grok is in 10th place. Tens of millions of iPhone owners (perhaps more) already have devices that can be AI-powered.

There have been signs for some time that Wall Street has turned its back on Apple. Last year, the stock was up 11% while the S&P 500 was 16% higher. A look at the five-year chart is even more depressing for Apple shareholders. What was once the hottest megacap stock in the world is up 83% in the past five years, while the S&P 500 is 81% higher.

Investors started to walk away from Apple before 2025. Its AI failure means that in 2026, that process will accelerate.

Apple Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2025–2030

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.