Investing.com — Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference drew a divided response from Wall Street analysts, with bulls pointing to early monetization signals and a rebuilt Siri while bears questioned whether the updates are enough to drive an upgrade cycle.
The headline announcement was the rebranding of Siri as Siri AI, now powered by next-generation Apple Foundation Models developed in collaboration with Google’s Gemini.
The revamped assistant features a dedicated app across all platforms, conversation history synced privately via iCloud, and expanded capabilities including on-screen awareness, app actions, and image understanding.
Bernstein’s Mark Newman flagged the first signs of AI monetization, noting that some features, including image generation, carry daily usage limits, with increased access tied to iCloud+ subscriptions.
Newman, who rates Apple Outperform with a $350 price target, said the approach “aligns well with the freemium model we have previously anticipated.”
Morgan Stanley’s Erik Woodring raised his price target to $360 from $330, citing “earlier monetization opportunity than we expected,” though he noted Apple Intelligence improvements will be “a marathon, not a sprint.”
He flagged that 850 million iPhones still cannot run Apple Intelligence and 1.3 billion cannot run advanced Siri, pointing to hardware upgrades as the first monetization lever.
Bank of America’s Wamsi Mohan maintained his Buy rating and $380 target, calling the keynote “substantive” and describing Siri AI as a full reboot with an agentic architecture.
Barclays’ Tim Long was more cautious, calling updates “more evolutionary vs. revolutionary” and saying he continues to view Apple as “a laggard in AI with no killer apps and a questionable monetization strategy.”
Jefferies’ Edison Lee echoed the skepticism, adding that limited access to third-party app data remains “a big limiting factor” on how capable Siri can become.
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