Shares of Apple Inc NASDAQ: AAPL they have been setting record highs in recent sessions, and are currently sitting around $310. It’s been a solid few weeks for the tech giant, as it looks to have extended performance by more than 25% in less than two months.
Yes, the stock’s relative strength index (RSI) is entering extended territory, and its price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is at one of its highest levels in more than a decade—both are worth watching. But in the context of a company whose AI ambitions are still gaining traction in the market, literacy is the reason for the backlash.
The most important questions right now are how strong the upside is and how much room would be needed for the stock to work. There are several reasons to think the bulls will be happy with the response of both. Let’s take a closer look below.
Bullish Analyst Updates
The market has been heavily dependent on Apple’s AI plans for the past few months. This is a shift that continues to gain momentum, at least based on this week’s update from Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan.
In a note to clients, Mohan raised his price target for Apple to $380 from $330, reiterated his buy rating and laid out a double-double thesis on Apple’s AI capabilities. The general perception, at least at the end of Q1, is that Apple was an AI laggard, slow to respond to the AI wave and without an in-house model to show for it. The stock had a sluggish start to the year, trading back to December 2024 levels by early April.
And yet, the market has clearly begun to change its mind. The stock’s 25% rally since then suggests investors are waking up to the idea that AI laggard design has always been too easy, and Mohan’s note this week makes the case that there’s still a long way to go.
Apple’s Starting Point Is Ahead of the Competition
The bottom line is that in the agency AI world, value doesn’t accrue to whoever builds the best model—it accrues to whoever owns a trusted platform where users interact with those models. Mohan makes a valid point that Apple’s iPhones already control user identity, personal context, app access, payments, and privacy in ways that no AI lab can replicate from scratch.
If AI assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping, become the new front door for searching, shopping, planning, and daily activities in general. Apple sits in the perfect chokepoint to extract the most value from that change. That’s a compelling take, and Bank of America’s $380 price, not to mention Wedbush’s $400 target, shows just how realistic it can be.
Siri Redesign Is a Catalyst for Visualization
The next big update on this should be at Apple’s WWDC event on June 8, where the company is expected to unveil a completely redesigned Siri. Investors will be hoping for an updated redesign that delivers something completely different from what Siri has been. Just making it a smart voice assistant is less likely to cut it. The step towards becoming a real agent that can understand intent, personal context and complete multi-step workflows automatically can be a strong step.
If Apple pulls that off, the revenue implications are significant. There is a growing consensus that Siri’s agent could significantly increase Apple’s revenue in the coming years, with even more if users truly adopt it as the main interface for everyday tasks.
The Broader Ecosystem Argument
What makes this AI thesis particularly interesting is the broader argument that sits beneath it. Increasingly, Apple is no longer seen as an expensive hardware business. It’s a consumer ecosystem business with cult-like retention, growing revenue for highly profitable software, and a financial engine that keeps rewarding long-term shareholders even in quiet times.
Each iPhone sold effectively represents multi-year revenue, given subscriptions, storage, payments, and the incremental exposure to AI the consumer has with the device. That flywheel becomes even more powerful when agent AI deepens the switch costs that have made Apple’s installed base so strong.
That’s an important pillar in the bull thesis for years to come, especially when you consider the stock’s current valuation. At 37 times earnings, investors are being asked to pay more per dollar of earnings than at any time in the past decade. That’s a little scary. Still, if this AI agent opportunity plays out as expected, Apple’s earnings trajectory could make it look like a profit.
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