iPhone 18 Is Apple’s Most Important Product Ever

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 28, 10:16AM EDT

Quick Read

This fall, it will be iOS 27's AI capabilities that determine whether the iPhone 18 cycle wins back investors, not cameras or chips.
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iPhone 18 Is Apple’s Most Important Product Ever — © iPhone 6 (side) (CC0 1.0 Universal) by hurk

As has been the case with iPhone releases since the dawn of time, there is a swirl of rumors about hardware and software. Apparently, in September, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) will release a high-end version of the iPhone 18. Or maybe some versions of the iPhone 18 won’t be released until spring 2027. Or maybe Apple will release the expensive iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the Ultra (which will be foldable) in three months. Or something.

What the market and investors are really waiting for is not hardware. It is the AI upgrades of Siri and Apple Intelligence, with full integration with Google Gemini. Apple management says this integration will solve its problems of being slow to the AI market. It is paying Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) $1 billion a year. That seems cheap, but Google gets its AI in what may eventually be hundreds of millions of Apple products.

Based on everything Apple has said, its iOS 27, which will be in full release this fall, will be its AI superstar. If it is broadly accepted, investors can breathe a sigh of relief. Apple will finally have a horse in the AI race. With its massive hardware distribution, it will jump to a level of distribution close to, or above, the market leaders like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok.

Every iPhone generation has a better camera, a better and faster chip, a lighter and more durable case, a shorter charge time, and longer battery life. None of these will be enough for Wall St. Apple recently moved ahead of Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) as the world’s most valuable company. It only holds that spot if Apple Intelligence and Siri are consumer AI home runs.

Apple’s AI software probably cannot pull ahead of the most advanced consumer-centric AI downloads. And it does not have to. It has to be slightly better than good enough.

After Apple failed to release an AI-powered iPhone 17 and an iOS AI-powered system last year and early this year, and after many of its top AI engineers left for rivals, Apple has sat on the AI sidelines for a year. However, it still has enough fans to stay in the global lead of smartphone unit sales and, perhaps, enough to impress investors.

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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.