AAPL

Apple Co was actually the last mega cap tech leader, which stubbornly refused to join other flagships' trend of a sharp take-off in stock prices to update their historical highs. Trillion-dollar corporations like Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Oracle and Broadcom, and then Google and Tesla have performed this job in a pretty good manner, one after another, but IPhone maker has remained largely untouched so far by the overall upward momentum on Wall Street. Each of those great companies was soaring sharply at certain time points during the year, to be swept away by a wave of profit taking. All these remarkable climbs, however, contributed much to the gradual rise of broader Wall Street indicators to higher peaks, step by step. And now it's probably Apple's turn to become the next playmaker.

Insufficient new sales in the reshaping of the Chinese gadget environment, which is growingly divided between local manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung and Oppo, has been the major problem preventing the investment community from adding more Apple to their investment portfolios. Official presentations of the latest iPhone models are more as a basis for jokes about the lack of real innovative solutions and gathering dust, not going far beyond device's thinness, barely noticeable improvements in display and camera resolution or some superior materials. Many consumers were rather reluctant to upgrade their former models to new ones. This month's event was no exception, with Apple's stock price sliding pessimistically from above $240 to around $225 in three days, from September 8 to September 10. Experts and the crowd did not immediately gain faith in the sales capacity of Apple's newest line-up.

The price performed a clearly bullish somersault after Reuters' reports that Apple has asked at least two of its Asian suppliers, Luxshare Precision and Foxconn, to boost the entry-level production of the iPhone 17 model by as much as 30% to 40% due to "strong pre-orders", citing "people familiar with the matter". More consumers than Apple initially anticipated chose the cheaper $799 iPhone 17 over the premium Pro models, which started at $1,099. This probably happened because the standard iPhone 17 is narrowing the gap with previous higher-priced versions. The company now has a higher chance to defend its market share thanks to features including simultaneous language interpretation. Its all-day battery life with faster charging plus modified AI features also matter.

As a result, Apple's price first bounced back to above $240, and then added up to 7% more to hit1 the $257.3 mark intraday, which was less than $3 per share below the all-time high for Apple stock. The iPhone maker's shares are retreating to nearly $250 from there and could even pierce the support area below that round figure, but this could unlikely prevent the new-baked positive sentiment. Medium-term targets like $280 or even $300 could be in play, riding the wave of general enthusiasm concerning other tech stocks.