Apple Stock Hits Record Territory as Traders Sour on AI Spending

[AdmiralKirk]

The jury is still out on this.

As of July 2026 Gemini is now way behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Grok, let alone the Chinese models which are basically distilling frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Siri couldn’t get any worse, let’s be fair, but I’m not sure Gemini will be as big a success as they need it to be, given that up to a billion people worldwide are now using better AI themselves with ChatGPT and Claude directly.

Personally I would have preferred the new Siri to be underpinned by the multimodal ChatGPT 5.6 Sol model. It’s so far ahead of what Google have it’s not even comparable.

 

[CWallace]

Investors prefer companies that spend money on them (via stock buybacks) than spending it on competitors (buying NVIDIA GPUs to stuff into Dell, HPE and Lenovo servers). Film at 11. 😛

 

[CWallace]

The jury is still out on this.

As of July 2026 Gemini is now way behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Grok, let alone the Chinese models which are basically distilling frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Siri couldn’t get any worse, let’s be fair, but I’m not sure Gemini will be as big a success as they need it to be, given that up to a billion people worldwide are now using better AI themselves with ChatGPT and Claude directly.

Personally I would have preferred the new Siri to be underpinned by the multimodal ChatGPT 5.6 Sol model. It’s so far ahead of what Google have it’s not even comparable.

On the flip side, the significant majority of people who will use Apple Intelligence / Siri will be using it for "basic tasks" and are completely ignorant (by choice) in how the models stack up against each other. As long as Siri actually does what they ask it to do, they're content.

And for the people who use these models for "real work", they can easily choose whichever model they want and run it on their Apple devices independent of Siri.

 

[hushblade]

The rally has occurred in spit of the fact

You probably mean “in spite of the fact”

 

[unkl bob]

Whether you interpret that as meaning there is a crash imminent or simply that prices are ridiculous, it's one or the other or both... but not neither.

Gotta love the double negative! 😎

 

[Fallforward]

My first Apple purchase: In 2003 during the back to school deal, I bought a 12" PowerBook G4, a 3rd generation iPod, a Canon i450 printer, and a Brenthaven case.

My life could be so much different if I had bought stock instead of that.

Interesting that based on a purchase January 2, 2003 Gemini says you would have $2,866,000 stock plus $190,000 from cash dividends but copilot which uses chatgpt says $2,300,000 stock plus $6,000 from cash dividends 🤷‍♂️. Either way, thanks for ruining my day.

 

[boswald]

You mean investors are tired of throwing their money at someone saying "We'll release something soon, promise!" Gee, who'd a thunk it?

 

[cutlub]

I’ve joked about Apple winning the AI race by not really running in it. Winning by failing, maybe? Apple is very successful at making money. AI companies are not. CNET reported only 13% of consumers would choose a phone based on its AI capabilities, which isn’t insignificant, but it doesn’t seem like a major deciding factor at the moment. It appears the average consumer doesn’t see the value quite yet. Investors seem skeptical now, too.

 

[Avatar74]

I’ve joked about Apple winning the AI race by not really running in it. Winning by failing, maybe? Apple is very successful at making money. AI companies are not. CNET reported only 13% of consumers would choose a phone based on its AI capabilities, which isn’t insignificant, but it doesn’t seem like a major deciding factor yet. It appears the average consumer doesn’t see the value just yet. Investors now seem skeptical, too.

Steve Jobs used to quote Gretzky saying, "Skate to where the puck is going to be."

But what Apple actually did was a lot closer to crashing the net.

A while ago, I talked about the path to a "killer app" for AI and VR... it's a 20-30 year play, if societal collapse doesn't accelerate. Apple then announced they were ditching Vision Pro to instead focus on smaller wearables.

The thing is, I don't think they're as machiavellian as the shrewdest play Apple ever made (acquiring Casady & Greene while licensing one-click purchasing), but with the amount of cash they're sitting on they could wait until the market collapses and buy the pieces of the puzzle and put them together.

But that still only gets them about 30 percent of the way there. Battery and GPU tech is still decades behind where it needs to be for the killer app to work.

 

[Septercius]

AI bubble has proven to not be a bubble. Data center bubble, that's a different story.

So, because it hasn't burst yet, it's not a bubble?

spillled typos, February 1837: "keep buying tulips, it's not a bubble"
spillled typos, October 1929: "stock prices aren't a bubble!"

I'm also confused why you say that AI's not a bubble, whilst calling it a bubble.

 

[HaHaRich!]

The article headline is false. AAPL target was increased to $280 by two institutions.

Data center demand remains extremely high and they all state that demand is outstripping supply until 2028. They are building out to meet the demand.

There are market manipulators and anarchists cosplaying as Dune characters trying to make you hate datacenters. It’s an old anti science and anti industry trick. Make you believe in the Garden of Eden perfection and everything else is evil.

They even call them “AI datacenters” to make you believe it is SkyNet, but they don’t exist. All datacenters are multi-purpose datacenters.

Well if datacenters are evil delete all your email accounts, never stream or download anything, only use borked 1995 applications and systems, don’t play multiplayer games, and enjoy global economic crash so hard you’ll be eating tarmac for dinner.

To clarify, I don't consider data centers to be evil. I'm looking at the mass scramble to build out, which seems unsustainable economically; it feels like a gold rush. Either the growth/build out of data centers will slow to meet demand, which would be ideal, or the amount of revenue from AI will not match the real world cost of investing in the rapid build out of data centers, which will cause the economic model to collapse, popping the bubble. That will leave a lot of obsolete, task specific infrastructure on the ground, which I'm mostly interested in. Cheers! 🍻

 

[Avatar74]

So, because it hasn't burst yet, it's not a bubble?

spillled typos, February 1837: "keep buying tulips, it's not a bubble"
spillled typos, October 1929: "stock prices aren't a bubble!"

I'm also confused why you say that AI's not a bubble, whilst calling it a bubble.

They're saying that datacenters encompass more than AI which is true. So their argument is that while AI is (according to them) not a bubble, datacenter expansion is. I suppose the primary evidence for this is that financing of datacenter expansion is halting while VC investment into AI is not. But these are two different sources of capital... with two very different risk tolerances.

Furthermore, as I've noted above, the real problem is that the rate of hardware availability that's been factored into these hyper inflated securities pricings is not sustainable. That more than anything poses a problem for companies that are betting the farm on their access to tools like Claude, ChatGPT, etc.

 

[svish]

Good for Apple and investors. Not at all surprising to see the stock rebound.

 

[Jemorama]

The technology of Ai is not in of itself a bubble, but the rush to get various versions and the data centers are. A corporation I work for are now trying to force all the employees to use Ai in emails, daily business, other avenues which not necessarily make sense. I know the company paid some good money to use/have Ai, but some point, sooner rather than later, there will be a maturation/saturation point.

 

[attohs]

Slow and steady wins the race.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Investors getting nervous could be the beginning of the end. OpenAI has been losing money for a long time, and there have been some suspect hires and purchases (like buying the 55 employee company io for 6.5B). Now they are getting sued by Apple. I don't know about the financial health of the others, but anything put forth by MS is by no means a sure thing or a financially good result. MS is cleaning out its gaming division right now, which might have nothing to do with AI, but it suggests the belt tightening is coming for the tech sector.

 

[now i see it]

It’s just speculators trying to game the system: buy/sell. It’s pretty neurotic actually.

 

[McScooby]

My first Apple purchase: In 2003 during the back to school deal, I bought a 12" PowerBook G4, a 3rd generation iPod, a Canon i450 printer, and a Brenthaven case.

My life could be so much different if I had bought stock instead of that.

Don't beat yourself up, console yourself in the knowledge that you would've since spent it & wouldn't have had a cracking computer for the time.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I'm pretty sure is somehow resembles the .COM bust and the Telcom bubble of the late 90's early 2000's. Lots of money will be raised through stock speculation and aggressive investing. The bubble will burst leaving massive amounts of unused infrastructure behind that will end up being the basis of the next tech build out.

This unused infrastructure that was build on the folly of overly aggressive investors will be acquired for pennies on the dollar and eventually make someone else rich and promote countless innovations.

You know, like Global Crossing, MCI, WorldCom. It's all a swirling pit of Monopoly money to the Finance Bro's. They get rich of the buying and the selling, so winners and losers don't matter. Just keeping the money moving back and forth until the next crash.

Every crash has am Arthur Anderson, Bear Sterns, or Lehman Brothers. So some "too big to fail" company will eventually fail in all of this.

Given Apple's lack of investment on this front and willingness to use someone else's technology to ride it out, I would say Apple is actually well positioned going into the impending AI crash. When the crash comes they can use cash reserves to scoop up whatever company is the best ROI.

As a reporter on the tech beat back in the '90s and into the early 2000s, I witnessed firsthand how the Internet "bubble" developed. One of the last major events I covered was the Internet World 2000 Expo in Los Angeles. This was peak optimism, or the top of the bubble, if you will.

The expo was so immense that the exhibits spilled out into the parking garages of the LA Exposition Center. The exhibitors threw tchotchkes at you left and right. I still have some of them.

It was quite a scene, and it happened only this once. The venture capital driving this so-called bubble dried up within the year. Most of the tchotchke-throwers went out of business.

But not all, and this is the point. The fact that a lot of the wagers made during the run-up to the "bursting" is not evidence of folly, it is evidence of capitalism at its messiest. Anyone who believes the Internet "bubble" did not leave the world fundamentally altered in its wake is missing the point by two country miles.

The AI boom is following a very similar trajectory. Some AI bets will turn out to be good ones; many more of them will be bad. But never lose sight of the fact that no matter who survives and who fails, the world economy will never be quite the same afterwards. We are at that kind of inflection point.

Exactly how it will change is anyone's guess, which is why so much capital is being thrown around -- some of which will doubtless look foolish, but only in retrospect. Because everybody can predict the future after it happens.

 

[IJ Reilly]

You probably mean “in spite of the fact”

The irony of this typo made me chuckle as well, because it could have been caught by the AI proofreading tools built into every Mac app.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

There will undoubtedly be a crash, where some big players die out and get bought up by a survivor for cheap. The current pace of growth is unsustainable, especially once hardware is priced at a premium. AI as a concept will probably remain, but it's going to become what the market will actually use in some sustainable (profitable) way.

 

[BGrifter]

I’ve joked about Apple winning the AI race by not really running in it. Winning by failing, maybe? Apple is very successful at making money. AI companies are not. CNET reported only 13% of consumers would choose a phone based on its AI capabilities, which isn’t insignificant, but it doesn’t seem like a major deciding factor at the moment. It appears the average consumer doesn’t see the value quite yet. Investors seem skeptical now, too.

Apple’s AI strategy is Luigi.

 

[wilhoitm]

The jury is still out on this.

As of July 2026 Gemini is now way behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and even Grok, let alone the Chinese models which are basically distilling frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Siri couldn’t get any worse, let’s be fair, but I’m not sure Gemini will be as big a success as they need it to be, given that up to a billion people worldwide are now using better AI themselves with ChatGPT and Claude directly.

Personally I would have preferred the new Siri to be underpinned by the multimodal ChatGPT 5.6 Sol model. It’s so far ahead of what Google have it’s not even comparable.

The smartest LLM models like Anthropic's Fable and OpenAI's Sol are being gatekept and banned now by the Government so the term behind does not mean what it used to! Also a lot of prompts sent to the Fable and Sol LLMs are being intercepted and guard railed and sent to the older less smart models. I do not think Gemini is that far behind, there all leapfrog each other every 3 months!

Remember there were a lot of smart phones and tablets before the iPhones and iPads came that do not exist now! The "Apple Way" might not look like it is working but it does work!

 

[RottenSpam]

Tech/telecom veteran and investor here. Not to put my confidence behind AI (because it's not), but the difference between these bubbles is that the companies involved in the current bubble are not massively leveraged. So the damage may be localized to the sector, or across industries, but the lenders are already putting distance between themselves and expansion projects so it's a little less likely that there'll be a systemic financial collapse. Of course that is assuming everything is above board.

HOWEVER, that should be irrelevant to you as an investor because prices are hyper inflated regardless... Market to GDP has skyrocketed to 238%.... for reference, it was 138% just prior to the market crash of 2000. The velocity with which market price has gotten away from fair market value is alarming.

Whether you interpret that as meaning there is a crash imminent or simply that prices are ridiculous, it's one or the other or both... but not neither.

"Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." - Warren Buffett

When people cite the "Buffett Indicator" (Willshire 5000 market cap / US GDP) to claim tech stocks are in a bubble, they are ignoring a massive denominator mismatch.

First, information technology companies derive roughly 59% of their revenue and profits overseas. Using US GDP as the baseline completely ignores their global economic exposure. You cannot accurately measure a multinational growth company's value against a single country's domestic output.

Second, GDP is a backward-looking metric; it reflects what happened last quarter, whereas the stock market prices in future growth and earnings potential.

Finally, when Warren Buffett popularized this metric over 25 years ago, was dominated by capital-intensive, asset-heavy value companies. Today’s asset-light (for now) tech giants dominate the index, meaning the structural makeup of the market has fundamentally changed. High valuations for global growth companies do not automatically signal an imminent crash.

I'd perfer the metric Blended GDP = (domestic revenue %) × US GDP + (foreign revenue %) × Rest-of-World GDP

Using goldman sacks data would indicate that we are at about 132-%150% on the modified buffit indicator which indicates we are nearing over-valued > 150% ratio.

 

[spazzcat]

And people thought Apple was late to the game ... they never learn ...