Apple is getting back to basics

When Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at Apple’s annual developers conference, WWDC, in Cupertino today, he was obscured by the shadow of a tough era for the tech giant

Apple stock is down over 17% year to date, its highly anticipated Apple Intelligence software announced at last year’s WWDC turned out to be lacking the smarts, and the company has been on the front lines of President Trump’s trade war.

So, what futuristic tech did the company unveil this time in its signature awkward employee presentation?

Besides a celebrity cameo-filled F1 commercial for its upcoming Brad Pitt movie, not that much that would make your jaw drop. Instead of focusing on a new flashy product or feature like Apple did in 2022 with its M2 chip, 2023 with the Vision Pro, and last year with Apple Intelligence, this year’s presentation was focused on core product updates.

• New operating systems loading: Apple will now align its naming conventions with the next calendar year, starting with iOS 26, macOS 26, iPadOS 26, and tvOS26.
• Apple unveiled its “Liquid Glass” interface, which looks like, well, glass.
• AI, who? Apple kicked off the conference by admitting Apple Intelligence wasn’t quite up to its high “quality bar” while announcing a new foundation model for developers.
• The company also announced a range of new product features including adding backgrounds and polls to iMessage, a new “workout buddy,” and Visual Intelligence, an AI companion that can find similar products from a screenshot.

But investors weren’t wowed: Shares fell 1.21% after the keynote presentation at 1pm ET.

Can Apple catch up in AI?

Right now, Apple is seriously lagging in the race to become humanity’s technocratic overlord advance AI. But investors are hoping that Apple will turn out to be the tortoise, and the rest of the tech industry the hare. After all, we aren’t yet at the point where everyone and their mom is using AI every day, buying the company some time to come up with something more impactful than those iMessage notification summaries.

And Apple still has obvious advantages over competitors like Google and OpenAI: “Of course, Apple is late to AI, but they are essentially a toll collector on its unmatched global ecosystem as any AI app to consumers will ultimately go through Cupertino as we saw firsthand with DeepSeek earlier this year,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “This continues to be the major piece of the Apple AI strategy that investors are missing...it’s less about the killer app/LLM from Apple itself and more around being a foundation for consumer AI agnostic of the LLM.”

Overall, Apple has an “overweight” consensus rating from analysts covering the stock and an average price target of $228, 13% higher than the stock trades today.

But if you have more questions, you might have better luck asking ChatGPT than Siri. —LB