Morgan Stanley lowers Apple target price by $23 to $252
Apple CEO Tim Cook with the only vision he’ll ever have
Last week, Bloomberg News reported that Apple is postponing Apple Intelligence updates to its Siri digital assistant — a vital link between customers and the company’s hardware — pushing them well into the future.
These delays coincide with speculation that Apple CEO Tim Cook may finally be considering a shake-up in the leadership of the company’s AI division, which is pivotal to Apple’s growth trajectory in the years ahead.
In a note released on Wednesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring highlighted the Siri delay and reduced his stock price target by $23, lowering it to $252 per share.
Martin Baccardax for TheStreet:
Apple shares have slumped more than 15% from their record peak in mid-December, shedding nearly $600 billion in value along the way, as investors worry over the slower-than-expected demand for its new iPhone 16 and mixed reception for its new Apple Intelligence AI rollout.
“The postponement of an advanced Siri integrated into Apple Intelligence is likely to temper (next twelve month) iPhone upgrade rates vs. our prior expectations,” Woodring and his team wrote.
“[Around] 50% of iPhone owners that didn’t upgrade to an iPhone 16 acknowledged that the delayed Apple Intelligence rollout had an impact on their decision not to upgrade,” Woodring noted…
“We are [also] incorporating $2 billion of higher product input costs in 2025 to account for China tariffs,” Woodring said, noting that some of that total will be mitigated by the company itself.
A component of that mitigation was revealed last month, when Apple said it would pair with its key supplier to build an AI-focused data center in Texas as part of a broader plan to spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.
MacDailyNews Take: If you don’t want to hear the unvarnished truth about Apple Inc., stop reading now and instead go visit one of those Apple-captured websites or YouTubers.
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Tim “Mr. Myopic” Cook is approximately half a decade behind the curve. Cook should have seen the failure in the company’s AI efforts years ago and made meaningful changes to the failed the leadership of the company’s AI division. Just looking at Siri, he’s approximately a decade late. Late, late, late; he’s always late. Cook is reactive, not proactive, because he’s a competent, albeit one-note (outsource to cheap-labor Communist China) operations manager occupying role that instead requires an extraordinary, visionary leader.
For far too many years now, Tim Cook has been handicapping Apple.
Apple is suffering a crisis of leadership and the company is paying the price for having Tim Cook at the helm for far too long. – MacDailyNews, March 3, 2025
Apple pays and has been paying John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, millions upon millions of dollars for years. WTF of any import does he really do? WTF of any import has he really delivered? Have you used Siri lately? Yup, it’s still a steaming pile of dogshit.
Where’s Apple’s generative AI, John? “Too hard; too late; look for partners; gimme my paycheck and stock options.”
AAPL shareholders need to start asking real questions of these executives, especially those who are supposedly in charge of Apple’s “AI Strategy,” when the company clearly has none. How about some accountability for once? – MacDailyNews, March 18, 2024
Apple was caught flat-footed, due to a lack of vision on the part of leadership… So, the only solution is to partner with a [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.] for the real GenAI stuff while pretending (marketing) really hard that some on-device AI Apple has whipped up in a few months is “insanely great Apple innovation” that’s at the heart of Apple’s 2024’s AI announcements when it’s really just an adjunct… Watch Apple make a big show of its on-device AI at WWDC and run many ads touting it from June onwards.
Apple hopes to buy time for the data center buildouts and investments that will be required for them to someday own their own AI technology and not have to license it from the likes of [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.].
This is what happens after a decade plus with a caretaker CEO at the helm after he hits the last page of his iteration playbook, yet attempts to stay in the game for too long. – MacDailyNews, April 1, 2024
The new “AI features” for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS to be revealed at WWDC is mainly a marketing exercise. The pressure is on Apple’s marketing team to position the company as an innovator in the space (“only Apple does so much on-device AI which enhances users’ privacy to ‘stunning’ effect,” etc.) that also makes “smart partnerships” with other AI companies (OpenAI, for example; even though it’s currently forced to partner if they want to offer any real GenAI features). Now, more than ever, finding themselves so far behind, Apple needs to sell, sell, sell! – MacDailyNews, May 28, 2024
When you’re caught flat-footed like Tim Cook’s Apple, you pop into scramble mode to try to catch up. Early on, you hit it with a big marketing flourish (WWDC24) in order to buy some more time. Then you dribble out features as they get finished and actually exist. Classic vaporware. – MadDailyNews, July 31, 2024
Executing a vaporware strategy is an unfortunate necessity without a visionary CEO and it takes time to actually realize (code, test, build out datacenter infrastructure, etc.) a grand marketing vision. – MacDailyNews, September 10, 2024
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