Apple At The Bottom Of The Big Tech Barrel

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 8, 11:41AM EDT

Quick Read

AAPL ranked near the bottom of the WSJ's future-readiness list, trailing every megacap peer on AI readiness and strategic transparency.
Apple's $1 billion annual deal makes GOOG's Gemini the AI engine for hundreds of millions of devices, bypassing costly data center investment.
Tim Cook's legacy hinges on Apple's AI course correction after a botched Siri rollout, missed Spring update, and exodus of top AI talent.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Apple didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Apple At The Bottom Of The Big Tech Barrel — © European Data Protection Supervisor via YouTube

The Wall Street Journal publishes a widely followed list each year called “The Best Companies For the Future.” Compiled with Bendable Labs, it uses’AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience, and agility.’ The major megacap tech companies are at the very top. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) is down the list, barely above S&P Global, which is a data management and information company that uses its data to provide information and consulting services.

NVIDIA (who else) is in the No.1 position, followed by Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and Meta (NASDAQ: META). Amazon lags slightly behind.

Apple ranks lower than the others, the authors say, because it does not disclose its major plans and lags behind the megacap companies in AI advancements.

Outside the Journal list, Apple’s reputation for the world’s best tech hardware remains sterling. There also remains considerable skepticism about the lag in AI adoption. Experts on the future of AI have two opinions about Apple.

The first major evaluation of Apple is that it fell well behind other megacap tech companies when it failed to announce an AI version of Siri and Apple Intelligence at the iPhone 17 launch last September. It did not offer a major iOS upgrade and told developers this would happen in the Spring. It never did.

Media reports indicate that, internally, Apple stumbled as it tried to roll out cutting-edge AI products. In the meantime, some of its top AI experts left. Bloomberg recently ran an article titled, “Inside Apple’s Secret Meeting That Led It to Finally Take AI Seriously.” As CEO Tim Cook retires, the Bloomberg article pointed out, “Cook’s legacy will depend in part on Apple righting the ship and finding the correct course for AI.”

Investors get to decide whether Cook’s major course will be successful. Apple has decided to use Google Gemini at the heart of the AI products that will be loaded on Apple products. The deal will cost about $1 billion a year. However, it will give Gemini access to hundreds of millions of Apple products already in the field, which is unprecedented.

Apple has also dodged the need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI data centers to power the extraordinary demand for AI products. Many analysts believe these will be overbuilt, and investors will never get a financial return. Above all else, this is the decision Apple will be judged on

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.