It’s been quite a bad week for Apple. Following the slide in its stock price that opened in 2024, it ceded the title of the world’s most valuable company to Microsoft late last week. The Supreme Court chose not to hear Apple’s appeal of an antitrust ruling forcing it to allow alternative in-app payment options, which could cut Apple’s 30% App Store commission. A federal appeals court ruled the company could not import Apple Watches with pulse oximeters built in as patent litigation with health tech company Masimo plays out in court.
While some of these issues are just flukes of timing, analysts say it could symbolize a shift in where business is going. Apple is largely a device company. While it has a robust services arm, Apple’s key business is selling iPhones, Apple Watches, MacBooks and iPads—a business that analysts say has been slowing. Microsoft has some devices, but it’s more of a services company today. Microsoft has made itself a leader in the nascent AI sector, owning a 49% stake in AI chatbot titan OpenAI. Microsoft also launched Copilot, an AI-powered assistant. But its non-AI business arms are also flourishing. Its Azure cloud unit helped drive revenue in its Intelligent Cloud unit to $24.3 billion in the most recent quarter, a 19% increase compared to a year prior.
However, Apple has had some good news in the last week as well. While iPhone sales have been lackluster—especially in China, where it faces significant competition from local companies—Apple now dominates the smartphone market. For the first time, Apple has unseated Samsung, shipping the most phones of any manufacturer in the world and capturing a 20.1% market share. According to Brand Finance’s annual rankings, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, with 74% growth in its brand value in just one year.
Both Apple and Microsoft are slated to report their new set of quarterly earnings in the coming weeks. The picture of how each company is performing—and what is becoming more valuable to forward-looking investors—will come into sharper focus then.
As the year begins, it’s also a time to take stock of security threats. I talked to Omkhar Arasaratnam, general manager of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) in the Linux Institute, about some of the threats that will present themselves in 2024, as well as how AI might be used to make systems and the code behind them more secure.
While Apple may now have the title of the world’s top cell phone manufacturer, the more-than-decade-long champion Samsung is nipping at Apple’s heels with a new launch that has AI at its core. The Galaxy S24, unveiled this week, brings AI to consumers by marrying some of the potentially most helpful features for everyday users with a popular smartphone interface. The Galaxy AI feature has a new translation function, which performs real-time translations of phone calls, texting, and in-person conversations across 13 languages. Users can circle anything that appears on their screen to perform a Google search. AI-enabled transcription and note-taking features can help users organize their conversations and thoughts. AI photo editing features can help fill in backgrounds, move subjects in the frame, and erase items.
Forbes senior contributor Ewan Spence talked to Samsung U.K. Vice President and Head of MX James Kitto about the company’s vision for Galaxy AI. “We can change the rules,” Kitto said. “We can leverage Samsung’s scale, with over a billion users. We can present the world’s first mobile AI use case to [a massive] market.”
AI capabilities are not just coming to smartphones. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, many manufacturers showed off their forthcoming “AI PCs,” which are essentially PCs with built-in GPU or NPU units to be able to handle the sophisticated processing needed to operate artificial intelligence. Forbes senior contributor Barry Collins spoke to several of the manufacturers of these new AI PCs, who all said the new processors would add much more power to their machines. There weren’t many concrete examples of what they would do, but when it comes to upgrading enterprise systems, the promise of more power and greater efficiency could be enough to seal a business deal.
Forbes.com
