AAPL at $300. Blow off top or a new base? A quick chart - and a big reveal about Siri, looking backwards.
A look at the one year chart, to quickly wonder why AAPL shot up to $302 intraday before settling at $298 at the close, just weeks after a drop to $243 and then a bounce like Claris the dogcow was hit with a cattleprod.
Simple post, to offer a simple explanation, to all the crazy theories I’ve seen about why AAPL is “soaring.”
(Editor’s note - apologies for all the typos - wrong version was published, but it’s 11pm in the UK so I hope you’ll forgive the jolts)
It’s May.
- WWDC is in a few weeks
- AAPL had a big short position
- Shorts are covering and getting burned.
Stock goes up, in line with the market also going up (even with inflation going up, and the Middle East blowing up).
Go Figure.
Now a simple one year chart.
This is the definition of “blow off top.”
- Way extended Upper Bollinger Band movement even while the Lower BB dips down.
- Looking back at the chart, you can see clearly, this usually leads to a correction.
- RSI show it is clearly over-bought.
But as I said a few days ago
Tommo_UK
As I wrote at the beginning of the week, this isn’t a top, for a change, to sell. AAPL is a hold until after WWDC. And I predicted it would waft upwards from $292 accordingly because the only way is up, when nobody is selling, and shorts have to cover. Nobody’s really buying either, but that’s irrelevant for the next few weeks.
There’s no point in buying or selling here - this is the confluence of too many currents - geopolitical, macro and micro economic, hopium smoke by the broader market which has an AI drip feed full of crystal meth in it.
And, WWDC 2026 looms
So next time you’re on a forum posting feverishly about buybacks or margins or iFolds or wondering if it’s “The Ternus Effect” or some unfathomable marketspeak reason..
… no, it’s just clear momentum riding on the back of a soaring market, with the usual buy the run-up into WWDC surfing the crest of the short covering wave which happens every year ….
…. And you’d better hope to hell Siri works after WWDC and we don’t get another snoozefest like 2024 and 2025 or it’ll be sell-the-news will be back to $265.
Now go back and look at that singe chart again, It tells you 99% of everything you need to know.
AAPL is a HOLD until after WWDC
Meanwhile, have fun watching what Apple should have done in 2011. This is a MUST WATCH if you haven’t seen it.
Siri and the iPad, as imagined in an Apple concept video the company produced in.. 1987.
Shame TIm Cook and Federighi lobotomised the concept, but 16 years later, they have a chance to try and catch up with real visionaries from 40 years ago.
Click to play, and weep at what could have been, a decade ago, and we still won’t see, for another few years thanks to poor strategy and decision making.
The 1987 video presentation of Apple's Knowledge Navigator. Like an iPad + Siri + Apple Intelligence right? Except.. Siri was lobotomised, and Apple Intelligence was dead on arrival. Insted, Apple blew a 40-year vision, handed it to Google, and is now renting that future back, for $1B a year. "Greek tragedy" doesn't begin to describe this. Thanks for nothing, Federighi and Cook. You pooped on the party.
And now for some added extra content. Surprise!
If you have a strong stomach, read on, and don’t wince. It’s the categorical proof of Cook’s Apple failure to deliver on any vision - 20 years earlier, or 16 years later. Ignore it if you enjoy ignorance, or read it and just accept that Apple simply blew it And is now relying on rented brains from Google - hell, from anyone it seems now, to provide any Intelligence at all - let alone “Apple Intelligence.” RIP.
The Knowledge Navigator 1987 concept embodied capabilities that were astonishingly prescient.
- A portable tablet-like device with a touchscreen? ✅ Check – the video basically depicted an early iPad with a foldable design .
- Built-in wireless networking and a front camera for video calls? ✅ Check.
- A voice-driven assistant that could understand context and multi-step commands? ✅ That was the real star of the show.
- 2018-2024? ❌ Apple dismisses ChatGPT and GenAI and LLMs as "useless and stupid and unnecessary for Apple."
- Giannandra - Apple’s first AI flunk from Google, says “nobody will want to talk to an chatbot. And the New Siri - Project Blackbird, - was binned in favour of the dumb Siri we’ve suffered for the last 8 years.
- Until 2024, when Apple attempted to volte face, and fell flat on its face with “Apple Intelligence.”
Cognitive dissonance reaches its peak.
In the concept, the professor’s digital assistant could:
- Fetch a paper, then answer follow-up questions about its content without needing the title repeated .
- It could coordinate his calendar – even schedule a meeting with a colleague autonomously while the professor stepped away .
It was a grand vision of technology as a truly smart helper.
Crucially, this vision carried an implicit promise: Apple would build this future.
Sculley (Apple’s 1987 CEO) and his team, with input from luminaries like computer scientist Alan Kay - a father of Artificial Intellligence), had sketched out a roadmap for personal assistants long before most of the world had even dial-up internet. Apple’s 1987 dream was that in ~25 years, such an AI-powered agent would be reality and importantly, that Apple itself would deliver it.
It was an audacious promise, even hubristic but it set the bar for Apple’s aspirations and the irony is that after almost getting it with the Newton, and missing, it got it right with building the iPad and acquiring Siri 24 years later in 2011 ...
... and then totally blew it.
Fast-forward to the target era (the 2010s),
You’d expect Apple of all companies to have led the world into that very future.
And indeed, come 2011, Apple did introduce something that looked on paper a lot like the Knowledge Navigator’s progeny: a voice-controlled assistant named Siri on the iPhone, and then the iPad.
The stage was set for Apple to fulfill its own 1987 prophecy. Arguably, a promise greater than 1984's Macintosh launch.
So, what happened?
Steve Jobs died, and Apple Maps, arguably, killed his only spiritual successor with the vision and discipline to hold Apple's heritage togetether, Scott Forstall.
Cook elevated Federighi, cast out Siri, cleared the decks of any legacy homage or heritage to Steve Jobs who had only just died, and self-destructed the entire project, painfully and on full public display, from 2011 to 2025.
Sadly, then the knifework begins. A lobotomy of Siri, worthy of a horror movie franchise, ensues.
Almost immediately, Apple starts trimming the bits of Siri that offend its sensibilities. The promiscuous pre-acquisition integrations are corralled into a narrow, whitelisted, Apple-blessed set of partners. Capabilities that might generate awkward headlines in the current political environment—Siri finding abortion clinics or escort agencies, for example—are quietly disabled. Siri is recast as a cautious concierge, not a street-wise fixer.
Internally, Siri Becomes a Hot Potato
Different executives champion different visions and then move on. Plans to give Siri a proper "brain"—combining cloud-based and on-device models under codenames like Mighty Mouse and Mini Mouse—are floated, half-implemented, then scrapped. The AI and machine-learning group is so directionless that staff dub it "AIMLess."
Engineers complain about chronic under-investment in cloud infrastructure. Training modern-scale models in an organisation that still thinks in iPhone release cycles becomes a bureaucratic slalom.
At the cultural level, Apple doubles down on a particular brand of privacy and polish that makes modern AI extremely hard.
Whilst Google and Amazon quietly hoover up user data and interactions to make their assistants better, Apple decided that Siri must not learn from you very much at all. In fact, you should almost be anonymous to it, barring your voice.
The company even vetoed a simple mechanism for users to flag Siri's mistakes, on the basis that the assistant must never admit error. Apparently, Apple's top brass prefer a "smooth imbecile" to a slightly messy genius.
So this is the deeper truth that underpins the entire modern Apple AI story:
- Siri did not fail because AI was too hard.
- Siri did not fail because Apple was too cautious.
- Siri did not fail because of privacy.
Siri failed because the person who inherited her did not believe in what she was meant to become. And Tim Cook let Federighi call the shots, because he’s not a leader, he’s an operations guy. Or utterly incompetent. I’ll be kind, and opt for the former. But Federighi, bears the ultimate responsibility.
By the time generative AI arrived big time in 2022 with ChatGPT 2, Apple had spent twelve years cultivating brilliance everywhere except in the domain that now mattered most, and publicly ridiculed the idea of a “chatbot,” with Apple’s first “man from Google,” Gianandrea saying in 2018 that “ users would not want to chat to Siri - AI had a more important part to play,” rather arrogantly, and rather embarasingly, in hindsifght.
The 2024 Apple Intelligence keynote, a beautifully lit illusion of capability, the spiritual descendant of Knowledge Navigator’s theatrical optimism shrouded in GenAI and Federeghi skydiving out of a plane to land in the Apple Campuse proved as far fetched as the idea that Craigs hair would survive the dive. It was merely the externalisation of a crisis that had been building internally since the day Forstall left the building in 2011.
The outcome was predictable. By the middle of the last decade, Alexa and Google Assistant are clearly ahead, not because they're especially well-designed but because they're allowed to learn.
Siri, by contrast, became the voice interface you tolerate when your hands are full and the butt of jokes when you're not.
Siri’s so-far biggest leap forward in years? To handle not multiple queries in a single command but to be able to run several concurrent timers with different names at once. So long as they were all separate instructions, of course.
Siri could suddenly time eggs, vegetables and your roast chicken all at once! Except, really, all Siri really did was either ignore you or set a timer for you. Upgraded to several timers.
Karma is a bitch, right?
And so, in 2026, the ultimate humiliation arrived: Apple, the company that perfected vertical integration, will now depends on Google’s Gemini to provide the intelligence it refused to cultivate in-house. A partnership that reads less like strategy and more like total capitulation and in a toxic echo of past mistakes 30 years old, and repeated without a lesson learned - a hardware empire borrowing its brain from a search engine. Google “do no evil,” owning the search bar of Safari, will now own the voice of Apple’s OS.
Performative bullet points in case you’re running this through Perplexity to see if the facts bear out, in case you can’t be bothered to read the entire thesis:
- Siri did not collapse. She was contained.
- Siri was not a missed opportunity. She was a suppressed threat.
- And the executive who shaped that suppression now stands at the centre of Apple’s proclaimed AI reinvention: Craig Federighi.
- This is the 1996 Copland parallel no analyst will touch.
- This is the Gassée parallel the tech press refuses to see.
The pattern that matters for Siri In 2026, after blowing it for the last fifteen years.
The Siri story is now revealed in full (to be studied in an autopsy in the next section) to hinge on one very specific sequence:
- Siri launch under Jobs/Forstall
- Forstall ousted
- Federighi given “SVP of Everything” software
- Siri demoted from paradigm to feature and forced into the annual iOS cadence.
In summary
Once you line up 2011 (Siri arrives), 2012 (Forstall out, Craig in), and the subsequent talent bleed from the original Siri team, it becomes much harder for a reader to see the current Siri/Gemini mess as bad luck; it looks like the mechanically predictable outcome of those org and cultural choices, and a pattern which has bedevilled Apple for decades.
SIRI. IS DEAD. LONG LIVE GEMINI 🫠
You can read the full Opus of how Apple 2026 became the Microsoft of 2005 here:
Tommo_UK
And before you curse my name, do remember I was the first analyst to chart a path to AAPL $400 by Q4 2027, way back in June 2025
Tommo_UK
While everyone in Summer 2025 had abandoned Apple and called it hopeless (“in the words of good time ‘gal Dan Ives) I was chewing how, with the right strategy, AAPL could hit $400 within 18 months,
Good luck for WWDC, and with Trump currently in China, “may we live in interesting times.”
Tommo_UK, London, Thursday, 14th March 2026
© 2026 Tommo_UK / tommo.fyi
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