Apple (AAPL) Price on Solana

Bank of America reiterated its buy rating on Apple on Friday, October 2, according to CNBC's roundup of the day's biggest analyst calls. The bank pointed to continued year-over-year growth in App Store revenue and put App Store revenue for Apple's fiscal fourth quarter of 2026 at $8.8 billion.

The note puts the focus back on Apple's services business, the same area where Bank of America flagged a separate risk earlier in the week: AI agents such as Meta's Muse that could route spending around the App Store. Friday's call indicates the bank still sees the App Store growing ahead of Apple's fiscal fourth-quarter results.

Meta's Muse AI agent — which can browse the web, fill forms, and complete purchases on behalf of users — topped the US App Store free-apps chart within 10 days of launch, surpassing ChatGPT and accumulating over 3.4 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower data cited by Bank of America. By integrating directly with Shopify, Shop Pay, Expedia, and PayPal, Muse enables end-to-end commerce transactions without routing through Apple's App Store, bypassing the 30% commission Apple typically collects on in-app purchases and sidestepping the discovery and referral layer that underpins Apple's Services segment.

Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan warned that "Apple can keep every handset sale and still lose discovery, referral, and transaction initiation" to AI agents, while Needham analysts estimated that if 20% of App Store revenue — roughly 40% of Apple's projected $123 billion in FY2026 services revenue — shifted to Meta's zero-fee Muse Connectors platform, Apple could lose $10 billion in annual revenue and $7.5 billion in EBITDA. Muse Connectors drew more than 1,500 developer applications within 168 hours of launch, raising the prospect of developer pull toward Meta's platform. BofA maintained a Buy rating at a $370 price target but said Apple must accelerate integration across Siri, payments, and its services stack to compete for what Mohan called "the economics of user intent."

Apple was the only tech megacap not represented when President Donald Trump hosted technology executives at the White House on September 29 to discuss artificial intelligence, CNBC reported. Neither Apple chairman Tim Cook nor his successor as CEO, John Ternus, attended. The guest list included Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

Apple has not said why it was absent. On social media, some speculated that the company was left out because it trails rivals on AI. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner called the absence a "nothing burger."

John Ternus, Apple's former hardware engineering chief who recently succeeded Tim Cook as CEO, is reshaping the company to run faster and leaner, according to a Bloomberg report published September 29 and carried by Yahoo Finance. His early moves include removing management layers between engineers and senior executives, and spreading product launches across the year instead of concentrating them in a few annual events. The restructuring has come with job cuts in several divisions, including hardware engineering program management, Siri, Vision Pro, AI-related software engineering and Fitness+.

The report points to Apple's smart glasses project, reportedly in development since 2024 and not expected until late 2027, as an example of the pace Ternus wants to change, given that Meta's Ray-Ban glasses are already in their third generation. Products said to be in the pipeline include a touchscreen MacBook, camera-equipped AirPods and a smart home hub, while an AI pendant project has been postponed. CNBC's Investing Club also covered the shift and called it a sensible response to Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI and others building dedicated AI hardware.

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Apple to pay Taction Technology $5,721,961,750 after finding that the Taptic Engine used in the Apple Watch and iPhone infringes two Taction haptics patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 10,659,885 and 10,820,117), which cover vibration-based tactile transducer designs. The jury found infringement on three claims across the two patents and rejected all of Apple's arguments that the patents were invalid. It did not find the infringement willful, a finding that would have allowed the court to increase the award. Reports describe the verdict, returned on September 26, as the largest U.S. patent verdict to date.

Taction first sued in 2021, alleging that Apple bought and reverse-engineered its Kannon headset hardware. A district judge ruled for Apple in 2023, but the Federal Circuit revived the case in 2025. Apple said it "strongly disagree[s]" with the verdict and the damages, maintains that its Taptic Engine "is fundamentally different from Taction's technology," and plans to appeal on both infringement and the size of the award. The damages are not final until post-trial motions and any appeal are resolved.

Bernstein reiterated its outperform rating on Apple on Friday, September 25, according to CNBC's daily roundup of Wall Street analyst calls. The firm is keeping its buy-equivalent rating, but it pointed to a specific risk to profitability: "Apple's recent product release didn't disappoint but given rising memory costs, concerns linger on what this means for gross margins in the December quarter."

The note leaves Bernstein's view unchanged, but the firm is now watching component costs more closely after the latest hardware launch. The roundup did not report a new price target. Apple's December quarter covers the holiday selling season, so how memory pricing affects gross margin will be one of the main things analysts look for when Apple reports those results.

According to CNBC's Inside India newsletter, Apple's share of India's smartphone market is set to reach double digits for the first time, helped by the iPhone 18 Pro launch. India is the world's second-largest smartphone market by volume. Chinese brands and Samsung have long led it, which has made India an exception among Asian markets where Apple already ranks with the major brands. Buyers queued outside Apple's Indian stores on launch day, some overnight, for the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. CNBC reports that demand has been stronger than it was for the iPhone 17, even with the higher price.

The timing helps Apple. CNBC says many of the Chinese brands that dominate India are struggling to sell. The outlet's August newsletter linked that pressure to a chip squeeze that hit Chinese smartphone makers in India and gave Apple and Samsung an edge.

Bloomberg reported on September 22 that Apple is in the early stages of investigating a screenless health and fitness tracker, a fabric band with a sensor module and no display, that would compete directly with Whoop and Oura. The project is described as a technology investigation rather than a committed product, and Apple is not expected to release anything before 2028, if it ships at all. Senior Vice President Eddy Cue and executive chairman Tim Cook are said to be backing the effort, with Cue pushing teams to match and exceed competitor features.

The device would carry health sensors comparable to those in the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, but strip out the screen, notifications, and app ecosystem that define the Watch. That positions it as a lower-cost, lower-friction health-tracking option for users who want body metrics without a connected smartwatch experience, broadening Apple's addressable market in wearables at a time when rivals like Whoop have grown aggressively in the subscription-based fitness segment.