Top analyst resets Apple stock price target ahead of earnings
Top analyst resets Apple stock price target ahead of earnings.
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The stock was up 23% on the year, the product pipeline was looking unusually stacked, and most of the analyst community already had a Buy on it.
Then, on July 17, one of the banks that had been sitting on the sidelines decided it had seen enough.
HSBC analyst Nicolas Cote-Colisson upgraded Apple from Hold to Buy and raised his price target from $260 to $366 . He said Apple is now at "an operational turning point."
The upgrade came with a detailed explanation of why he had been cautious before and what changed his mind.
Cote-Colisson had spent most of 2026 preferring other parts of the AI trade over Apple. His firm had been more focused on hyperscalers and memory chip manufacturers, which it saw as better positioned to capture the immediate AI infrastructure boom. Apple was on Hold while those names were the preferred call.
The switch comes from a different read on where Apple sits in the AI economy. Most AI infrastructure plays are spending enormous amounts on capital expenditure, CNBC reported .
Apple is not. The firm invests roughly 2.5% of its 2026 estimated sales in capex. Hyperscalers are running at 39%. That gap is a big part of what Cote-Colisson is highlighting.
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"Apple is now at an operational turning point: not only can the company stay away from the (too) high capex debate... it is also well placed to leverage its 2.5 billion installed device base with its forthcoming revamped Apple Intelligence," Cote-Colisson wrote in his note.
In other words, Apple gets AI exposure without the capital spending burden that comes with building data centers. That's a different kind of bet from a hyperscaler, and HSBC thinks the market hasn't fully priced it in yet.
The upgrade isn't just an AI call. A lot of it is about what Apple is planning to release. Cote-Colisson described the upcoming product lineup as one of Apple's most innovative in years, Investing.com reported .
The pipeline he's pointing to includes the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max coming this fall, an iPhone Air expected in April 2027, and a book-style foldable iPhone that HSBC flagged as the most significant new device in the lineup.
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Beyond phones, the bank also sees smart glasses and a special 20th-anniversary iPhone edition landing in 2027.
On the software side, Apple is rolling out its agentic Siri AI this year. It includes visual intelligence, cross-app information access, and context-aware conversations, running on foundation models that work on-device rather than in the cloud.
"This AI boost comes at the right moment, when we think Apple has one of its most innovative product pipelines in place," Cote-Colisson wrote.
His argument is that consumers who are still on iPhone 15 and 16 models from 2023 and 2024 now have a real reason to upgrade.
