After Apple announced during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that it would be bringing a slew of new AI-powered features to its platforms under the name of Apple Intelligence, its stock price surged and led to it once again overtaking Microsoft to become the world"s most valuable company.
Microsoft last claimed the title from Apple in January 2024, hitting the $3 trillion market cap in the process, and the two have traded places over the years following different significant product announcements and financial reports, which resulted in substantial rises in their stock prices.
Apple"s stock price in the last 5 days shows the full story as seen below, with a total rise of 11.26% at the time of writing and crossing the $200 mark on Tuesday by setting an all-time high. Apple"s market cap is currently at $3.34 trillion, while Microsoft"s is currently at $3.25 trillion.
While WWDC did bring with it a lot of other announcements for what would be coming in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia and more, Apple Intelligence was the star of the show and given the attention that any generative AI feature draws from investors it comes as no surprise that this is the result.
The leading features of Apple Intelligence are the enhancements that it will bring to Siri, summarising messages, writing or rewriting emails and proofreading texts, as well as including two headliner features in Image Playground and Genmoji. Both of these involve utilising AI to generate images either as a full image using prompts or by using it to create a custom emoji just through prompts.
These new features will only be supported on iPads and Macs with M-series chips or on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, which are powered by the A17 Pro chip. It"s expected that the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will also support these features, but it"s yet to be known if the base iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will also gain this capability when they launch, which is predicted to be later this year.
Source: MacRumors