teeth apple (AAPL +2.19%) Are they “AI stocks” or just tech stocks? Until recently, many investors worried that Apple wasn’t doing enough to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) products to win the AI race. The company appears to be struggling to develop new AI tools, and announced a delay in the AI upgrade of its voice assistant Siri to 2025.
But instead of getting distracted by AI or investing hundreds of billions of dollars in it like other big tech companies, Apple continues to focus on its core business of selling iPhones and laptops. Apple may be benefiting from the AI boom in surprising ways, according to its latest quarterly earnings report on April 30th. In other words, it will become an AI pick-and-shovel stock.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why Apple could emerge victorious in the AI race by simply putting its best foot forward.
Image source: Getty Images.
Apple — AI tools platform
Most of the discussion around AI focuses on data centers and utilities, stocks that stand to benefit from building AI infrastructure and spending billions of dollars in capital expenditures (capex). Unlike other big tech companies, Apple doesn’t build data centers or sell semiconductors.
But Apple could benefit from AI in indirect ways. It’s about becoming the platform of choice for how people interact with and use AI tools. Apple’s laptops and iPhones may sell better if people start thinking of them as “the best hardware for AI.”
Corporate executives are leaning toward this story. “Macs are the best platform for AI, and Apple Silicon offers exceptional performance, industry-leading efficiency, and the ability to run advanced models locally in ways never before possible,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during a recent earnings call with analysts. “It’s very exciting to see how strongly users are embracing AI capabilities on the Mac.”
Today’s changes
(2.19%) $6.31
current price
$293.75
Key data points
Market capitalization
$4.2 trillion
daily range
$290.01 – $294.75
52 week range
$193.46 – $294.75
volume
1.1M
average volume
44M
gross profit
47.86%
dividend yield
0.36%
Strong sales for AI companies
If Apple wants to be known as the best way to leverage AI tools, it needs to sell more laptops. The company’s revenue still comes from its flagship iPhone, which generated $56.9 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter, accounting for about 51% of the company’s total.
However, laptop sales were a big bright spot in the company’s latest earnings. The Mac category is the company’s second-largest contributor to sales, with sales of $8.4 billion in the quarter, up about 6% year-over-year. Apple executives say there is strong demand from companies that want to use Apple laptops specifically for AI work.
During the company’s latest earnings call on April 30, CFO Kevan Parekh said that more enterprise customers, including major AI developers like Perplexity, are “choosing the Mac as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants.” Parekh also shared the example of Freshworks, India’s leading enterprise software provider. The company recently deployed more than 5,000 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops for AI development purposes.
AAPL data by YCharts.
Apple shares have risen 4.5% since the beginning of the year, slightly underperforming tech stocks. Nasdaq-100 Index for the past year. If AI-enabled laptops prove to be the next big thing in the AI industry, this tech stock could have great potential for continued growth through the rest of 2026 and beyond.
