Apple’s Stock Hits $3 Trillion Amid AI iPhone Buzz

Apple’s share price hit an all-time high this year, thanks in large part to Wall Street’s excitement about the Silicon Valley giant’s AI potential. This comes ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, which some see as the next big event that will bring back falling iPhone sales.

On Wednesday, Apple’s stock price went up as much as 1% to $196.42, which was the highest share price since mid-December and the first time since January that the company’s market capitalization went over $3 trillion. This is because Apple has been buying back shares for billions of dollars.

People who bet on AI sold Apple stock and bought other stocks that they thought were better bets. This made up for Apple’s 15% loss from January to April.This week, many analysts wrote notes to clients gushing about Apple’s annual event, which helped the stock price. Samik Chatterjee, an analyst at JPMorgan, said that the conference starting on Monday would show if Apple has caught up with the rest of the industry, even though it seems to be taking longer than expected to invest in AI.

Talking about the WWDC event, Chatterjee said he thinks it will successfully start an upgrade cycle for the iPhone. This will be very helpful for Apple, since iPhone sales are expected to be the lowest since 2020 this quarter, according to a collection of analyst predictions put together by FactSet.

Additionally, Chatterjee thinks that the upgrade cycle, in which the estimated 1.5 billion iPhone users trade in their old phones for the newest model, will start this year and speed up in 2025 as the economy gets better and people want AI-heavy smartphones more. Chatterjee says that the most important thing to “watch” at WWDC is whether Apple says it will be ready to launch generative AI in iPhone apps like Siri and iMessage by September.