Bank of America Raises Apple's Target Price: In the AI Era of Smart Entities, the iPhone May Become a New 'Traffic Entrance'

Bank of America upgraded its target price for Apple on Tuesday, raising it from $330 to $380 and maintaining a buy rating, citing the artificial intelligence (AI) wave as providing significant strategic benefits for Apple. Apple's stock price increased by 0.5% before the market opened.

Analyst Wamsi Mohan made a core judgment in his report: In the era of intelligent AI, value will be highly concentrated on the platforms that control user intent, personal context, app access, permissions, authentication, payment, and trust, which have long been integrated into smartphones. "If AI assistants become the new gateway for search, apps, e-commerce, schedules, payments, and task completion, Apple will have a significant bargaining advantage over model providers, app developers, merchants, advertisers, and payment networks," Mohan wrote.

On the technological level, Mohan believes Apple's advantages stem from two pillars: the first is its proprietary chips, Apple Silicon, which can directly determine the execution of AI tasks on devices with differentiated strengths in latency, reliability, privacy protection, and cost control; the second is the iOS ecosystem, which will dictate the specific form of user interaction with AI. He also pointed out that Apple will need to integrate edge-side computing, private cloud computing, and third-party computing power to provide a complete AI experience.

The redesign of Siri is seen as crucial for the success of this strategy. Mohan believes that the new version of Siri must be deeply integrated into the iPhone, capable of understanding user intent, accessing context, invoking applications, and completing full workflow processes. If this vision is realized, the intelligent agent version of Siri could contribute an additional $15 billion to $30 billion in revenue during the 2030 fiscal year; if user acceptance exceeds expectations, this figure could even reach $40 billion to $65 billion.