Richard Gayle on Rothschild's analyst justifies his $400 Apple target (video) - 'Gregg hits on what, to my mind, is the biggest fallacy of the AI-driven datacenters built by the hyperscalers: they run totally against the Personal Era that has been driving society since the mid-70s. The direction of much of the tech industry (and consequently many other industries) has been from the authoritarian center to the distributed edges. Mainframe to Mini to Personal Computer to Smartphone. Centralized shopping malls are disappearing, as consumer spending moves to the distributed web. We have seen computation devices not only shrink but also bring more of our daily lives under our control. Mostly thanks to Apple. With Apple, I own my data, I secure my own data, and I decide who has access to it. Huge centralized datacenters run by a few mega-corporations try to reverse this. Only Apple is following the true, underlying economic drives of today’s world, fully moving AI to personal devices. Sure, datacenters will still be used (as are mainframes); Apple has many of its own. But I suspect that many of the current and planned ones from the hyperscalers will either never be built or be mostly empty. Apple Silicon (especially upcoming designs) will allow ML- and AI-driven processes, that the vast majority of people will use, to be done almost totally on the user’s devices, with little need to go outside for most purposes.'
on Rothschild's analyst justifies his $400 Apple target (video) - 'A macOS 27 beta, forum commenter’s observation: Turns out, macOS 27 also allows third-party apps to replace Siri’s model. In the video, Siri runs through OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Terra model. With the new Inference Providing protocol, an app can replace Siri’s agentic planner with a third-party model. The external model receives Apple’s native Siri planner prompt and 20 tool definitions. It can make tool calls that perform system actions, and receive tool call results with personal data. Finally, it can return a response through Siri AI’s UI and voice, including interactive elements. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/you-can-swap-siris-model-in-macos-27-heres-siri-ai-running-on-gpt-5-6.2487099/ “Will this ship in macOS 27? Only time will tell, but the building blocks are already there.”'
on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Apple is due for a bounce up, they have been pulling the beachball down for too long.'
on Rothschild's analyst justifies his $400 Apple target (video) - 'As I understand it, we can divide AI research into two parts. One very expensive aspect is the model training which involves digesting huge amounts of data so that the models can adapt to. The other part is the model which consumes the data and then generates answers. Apple can develop their models (and read the research to see what others are doing) without spending oceans of money. At some point, when they are ready to ship, they will need training.'
on Premarket: Apple is green - 'In late morning trading Apple is up $4.74 or 1.55% at $310.33. All four major indexes are in the red as we approach noon in New York. The NASDAQ Composite is off 1.20% with about 57% of traded equities on the red side of the line. Let’s see how the day progresses…'
on Rothschild's analyst justifies his $400 Apple target (video) - 'Apple loathes Nvidia (due to bad parts a long time ago) and while they will use Nvidia bits when it’s at Google or elsewhere, they absolutely won’t be buying anything directly from them.'
on Rothschild catapults its Apple target $140 to $400 - '” plus promotions driven sales trying to clear out old Z7 Foldables in anticipation of the new Z8 Foldables in July 2026” Strategies to clear out unsold inventory is not what you would expect from a product with excess demand. Apple Foldables? Possibly, but not probable.'
on Rothschild's analyst justifies his $400 Apple target (video) - 'I disagree with the idea of Apple cutting deals with NVIDIA, because -someone- would have to invest the Gigabucks in data centers to hold those chips. Much better to let someone else do that, it’s not a business that Apple could contribute its special sauce to.'
on Rothschild's analyst justifies his $400 Apple target (video) - 'Wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is exploring AI on multiple fronts..'
on Rothschild catapults its Apple target $140 to $400 - 'With newer information from Gemini, I found I was underestimating Samsung’s smartphones portion of MX revenues. Whereas I thought other segments like Tablets, Wearables & Accessories (SmartWatches, Rings, tracker tags), and computers (Notebooks, Chromebooks and PC computers), plus Services had to make up at least 23-25% of total MX revenues, I was mistaken. Gemini estimates Samsung smartphones contribute 85% to 90% of MX revenues, while tablets only contribute 5-7%, Computers 2-4%, Wearables 4-6%, and Services 2-3%. So let’s call Samsung Smartphones the revenue driver at 87%. Using Samsung’s numbers, Smartphones brought in $22.9B x 87% = $19.9B USD. Given Omdia’s sales figures of 60.5M sales, Samsung’s ASP = $324. In contrast, Apple’s Q2 CY2026 iPhone revenue was $54.25B, 2.7X more revenue than Samsung, while selling 55.1M iPhones, 5M fewer. iPhone ASP = $985, >3.0x Samsung’s ASP. To put that in even starker perspective, here’s an excerpt from Xiaomi’s Q2 Earnings report: “According to Omdia, global smartphone shipments were down 6% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026. Facing these headwinds, we proactively optimized our product mix and pricing strategy, while actively adjusting shipment cadence. Our global smartphone shipments reached 31.2 million units in this quarter, and our smartphone revenue reached RMB42.1 billion, with a gross profit margin of 8.5%. ((That’s just $6.24B in sales revenue, with a profit margin of $531M USD.)) We continued to advance our premiumization strategy and proactively improve our product mix. In the second quarter of 2026, the average selling price (“ASP”) of our smartphones reached a record high, up 25.9% year-over-year to RMB1,351. ((That’s $200, up from prior quarters’ $165)). According to third-party data, in the second quarter of 2026, our smartphone units with retail prices at or above RMB3,000 sold in the Chinese Mainland accounted for 32.1% of our total smartphone units sold, reaching a record high and up 4.5 percentage points year-over-year. In the RMB3,000-4,000 ($445-$600) segment in the Chinese Mainland, our market share reached 16.2%, up 3.3 percentage points year-over-year.” Smartphones make up 39% of total Xiaomi revenues. Xiaomi EV’a still sell and they made 17% more revenue while still losing $386M USD in that division. So the third largest smartphone maker Xiaomi has an ASP of $200, record high for them, but -7.5% revenue YoY. Apple’s ASP is almost 5.0x more than Xiaomi’s and its revenue is 8.7x higher than Xiaomi’s revenues. Such is the sales, revenue, and ASP disparities of Apple vs Android.'
on Rothschild catapults its Apple target $140 to $400 - 'I watched the interview live. CNBC buried the “lead” before the interview by saying the analyst was a big fan of the foldable phone and barely mentioned his upgrade for the stock. And of course the stock price for today didn’t react with any excitement. So the downgrade of Apple Stock by Jeffries was big news but this upgrade barely gets mentioned in comparison. By the way isn’t that price target familiar? Several other analysts have talked about 400 per share. At least before the pullback after earnings a couple of weeks ago. So maybe the story for the stock is intact. Just needs repeating.'
on Rothschild catapults its Apple target $140 to $400 - 'Someone at Rothschild got a subscription to PED 3.0'
