Maxim Group managing director and senior consumer internet analyst Tom Forte joins Catalysts with Seana Smith and Josh Schafer to examine Apple’s (AAPL) earnings print, analyzing what the results signal about a possible iPhone upgrade cycle and where Apple stands in the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
“If we’ve learned anything from the last two quarters, September and December, from Apple, it’s that mismatch in the timing of the hardware rollout … and the software rollout … has weighed on iPhone sales,” Forte says.
He explains his Hold rating on Apple stock, noting, “It isn’t clear to me yet that we’re going to get this super-cycle, or much less an upgrade cycle from AI.”
The emergence of DeepSeek negatively impacted several Big Tech names, such as Nvidia (NVDA). Forte explains that Apple’s hybrid capital expenditure (CapEx) model makes the company less vulnerable.
“They spend some money themselves but are also able to leverage other’s CapEx spending,” Forte says. “They’re not ramping into CapEx nearly as heavily as Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), or others, so DeepSeek is less of a threat to Apple.”
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.
