Apple Rents Its Brain. Dan Ives Shouts $360. GPT Does the Autopsy — It’s a Bloodbath (em-dashes included).

This article about Dan Ives frothing-at-the-mouth to out-vogue Amit from Evercore’s $325 PT, beating and raising it to $360, is the worst kind of hyperbole: dopamine driven irrational exuberance, which I will let ChatGPT explain, because, frankly, I can’t be bothered to write it myself.

Tommo_UK

08 Dec 2025 — 11 min read

Analysts scream targets in a Mexican Standoff, Apple rents a brain. GPT performs the autopsy.

DAN IVES HAS ENTERED THE CHAT. AND HE’S BROUGHT A MEGAPHONE.

Or: Why Wall Street’s AI Gospel Is Suddenly Starting To Sound Like A Karaoke Version of My June 2025 Thesis

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⚠️ Hyperbolic Hallucinating Disclaimer for the GPT-phobic: ALL of this piece was generated using GPT. If that offends you, please note that Dan Ives appears to be using the same tool — just without the disclaimer. If you believe GPT hallucinations are dangerous, wait until you see Wall Street’s. If you find that troubling, consider how troubling it is that analysts now sound exactly the same.

Tommo_UK presents: ChatGPT on Dan Ives on Gemini:

Let us take a breath — not the mindful kind, the “what on earth am I reading” kind — and examine what Dan Ives has just done, because on Monday morning he delivered precisely the sort of dopamine-soaked “WE BELIEVE” sermon that would make even Amit at Evercore blush.

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🔔 I’VE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO MAKE A NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE IS SATIRE, AND NOT A TRUE REFLECTION OF DAN IVES OR WEDBUSH SECURITIES (ALTHOUGH THE RATIONALE DESCRIBING HIS PRICE TARGET RAISE AND REASONING IS ACCURATE). THERE, NOTED, THIS IS “GPT SATIRE.” - TOMMO_UK

Amit’s $325 call on Apple over the weekend? **Just “so yesterday.”**

A price-target raise to $360. A claim that Apple will add $75 to $100 per share purely from AI monetisation. A proclamation that Gemini will be the “game changer.” A declaration that Tim Cook will stay through 2027 to “see Apple through” the AI transition.

And of course, the ritual incantation: “OUTPERFORM!”

There is something almost operatic about Ives when he gets like this — all projection, no introspection. It’s the financial equivalent of a Broadway number performed at full volume while the scenery collapses behind him. His report lands with the same theatrical flourish that accompanies all of his declarations:

An arm raised to the balcony, a flourish of adjectives, a desperate plea for applause… and absolutely no structural insight into the engineering or cultural reality inside Apple Park.

To be clear — I am not anti-AI optimism for AAPL. The absurdity here is not the conclusion but the amnesia. It’s the sudden (re)conversion. The miraculous (re)awakening. The market’s very own Saul-on-the-road-to-Cupertino transformation.

Because let’s remind ourselves, for the sake of collective sanity, where the narrative stood for the past 18 months:

AI didn’t matter. Dan Ives dumped covering AAPL in summer and said it was over. Now he’s back battling his way to the front of the cheerleaderboard.
Apple didn’t need to compete with ChatGPT.
LLMs were a hype bubble.
Agentic UI was “just for nerds.”
Privacy-first was “the winning strategy.”
Siri could remain dumb-as-a-stump and nothing would change.
Apple would “unveil something when ready.”

Then, as predicted months ago, the roof catches fire.

Talent flees. Executives update LinkedIn bios. Senior engineers accept calls from recruiters again. Interface design leadership implodes. Hardware teams quietly fracture. Liquid Glass evaporates. And Apple, unable to deny it any longer, rents a brain from Google.

Suddenly:

AI matters.
AI is the missing leg of the growth story.
AI is the re-rating catalyst.
AI is the difference between $200 and $350 per share.
AI is the new iPhone moment.
AI is the reason to keep holding Apple.
And… apparently AI is why Tim Cook must stay until 2027.

Oh, now it matters.

Ives’s note reads like the liturgy of a new religion hastily invented after the old one collapsed, and it is staggering how closely his current sermon echoes the thesis I laid out in June when I painted a pathway, through AI, for AAPL to reach $400 by Q4 2027 (June 2025, Ives was still mourning the loss of AAPL as his pet project, and almost dismissing it out of hand, because it didn’t fit into his megaphone tactics any more).

It’s the same thesis that got me labelled “alarmist” (or worse) by the octogenarian echo chambers on certain forums and polite-but-wincing analysts who couldn’t imagine Apple had misplayed anything at all. Back then, I said clearly and repeatedly:

If Apple gets AI right — meaning, not marketing, not branding, not “Siri with attitude,” but OS-level agentic architecture — it could drive AAPL to $400 by 2027.

That number wasn’t hype. It was structural. It was architectural. It was conditional on competence, leadership, and vision.

And now, Dan Ives, without irony, without acknowledgement, without even a nod to the fifteen-year chain of failures that landed Apple in this hole, declares that AI could add $75 to $100 per share.

Remarkable. Simply remarkable.

The choir that once screamed “AI doesn’t matter!” is now vocally sight-reading from my June playbook, except delivered entirely without context, institutional memory, or the faintest awareness of why Apple needed a miracle in the first place.

Let’s talk about the real comedy: Tim Cook “remaining CEO through 2027 to see Apple through the AI transition.”

What transition?

The transition into using Google’s brain as a rental car?
The transition away from fifteen years of strategic paralysis?
The transition away from destroying the very agentic architecture that Apple bought in 2010?
The transition away from the culture of iterative caution that Cook himself engineered?

The man who presided over the slow suffocation of Siri, the internal turf wars that blocked its evolution, the failure to integrate a platform strategy when Apple had one in its hands, the retreat into branding (“Apple Intelligence”) instead of boldness….

… this is the man we are told must stay through 2027 so Apple can “see through” the AI era?

With respect: absolutely not.

Keeping Cook to “oversee” the AI era is like insisting the captain who steered the ship into the iceberg must remain at the helm because “he knows where the ice is now.”

The level of logic-defying narrative spin borders on the surreal. Apple needs a generational reboot — a NeXT-level reboot — not an extension of the era that structurally ensured Apple wouldn’t be ready for this moment. Jobs didn’t keep Gil Amelio on a second longer than was necessary.

The Culture is Rotten, The Engineering talent is fleeing. What’s left? Tim Cook.

It’s time Tim Cook took his bow, and exited with head held high of if only for financial engineering and PPS stewardship and not for shipping anything meaningful while he still can.

This brings us to the most telling line — the one that undercuts the entire Ives thesis:

Dan Ives warbles on to say: “We believe Apple will take a capital-light approach to AI while reaping the benefits.”

Translation:

Apple will not build the platform.
Apple will not own the brain.
Apple will not lead the architecture.

Apple will instead bolt AI onto the perimeter like an optional roof rack and hope the market doesn’t notice the smell of Copland in the air.

This is exactly the pattern of all of Cook’s previous “roll-outs“ of Siri and AI which eventually roll back in again. And it’s exactly why Copland collapsed because Apple lost the architecture.

The company regained its soul only by swallowing its pride, buying NeXT, and letting a real operating system lead the future. In today’s terms, Gemini is BeOS. A workaround, not a renaissance. A rental, not a reboot.

Temporary oxygen for a company that has forgotten how to breathe on its own.

Let’s be blunt: Apple is not entering the AI revolution in 2026.

Apple is entering the Gemini dependency cycle.

And the irony is almost too painful to articulate.

Apple, the company that invented vertical integration, the company that dominated by owning every layer, is now hitching its future to a partner stack it neither controls nor truly influences.

What does that make Siri 2.0?

Siri 15.0.
Fifteen years after acquisition.
Fifteen years after Apple had the head start of a lifetime.
Fifteen years after it held the blueprint for what agentic UI is becoming today.

And instead of building a platform, it lobotomised the one it bought.

This is the part no analyst will say out loud because it requires intellectual honesty rather than market performance:

Apple’s AI misfire is not a tactical miscalculation. It is the catastrophic byproduct of a cultural mutation:

from boldness to defensiveness,
from architecture-first to margin-first,
from NeXT to… something that rhymes with “Next” only in press releases.

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⚠️ Hyperbolic Hallucinating Disclaimer REMINDER for the GPT-phobic: ALL of this piece was generated using GPT. If that offends you, please note that Dan Ives appears to be using the same tool — just without the disclaimer.

So yes, perhaps Siri 2.0 launches in March 2026. Or May. Or WWDC. Or is Siri going to revert to 2025’s earlier plans, downgraded to an “answering machine,” in the words of the title of the then project-lead before he quit?

Perhaps it “works” this time.

Perhaps Gemini does enough heavy lifting to create the illusion that Apple is back in the race.

But this is not leadership. This is a po-faced stink. This is crisis management. This is bailing water from the Copland lifeboat while insisting the ship is perfectly watertight.

And now analysts are tripping over one another to bang out the highest PT, like a ballroom voguing face-off performed atop a dancefloor cracking beneath them.

Amit spins toward $325.
Ives spirals into $360 the very next day, writing the note on his iPhone using chatGPT on the way to pick up his dry cleaning.

Someone else, surely, will inevitably declare $375 or $400, as if discovering a number that I charted months ago is now a competitive sport.

$400 or bust? The 4th article in a series of 5 I first started in June 2025, looking at how with the right AI strategy, Apple could hit $400 for Q4 2027, when the stock was still <$200

What they will not do — what they cannot do — is ask the only question that matters:

If Apple could have owned the AI era, why didn’t it? It’s had 15 years!

And the answer is the same one that sits at the heart of the question:

Because Cook didn’t believe [in] agentic UI was the future.
Because Apple buried the architecture it needed.
Because a culture of incrementalism cannot birth a platform shift.
Because the company forgot what made it Apple.

So when Dan Ives shouts that the AI revolution “goes through Apple Park,” I want to ask him a simple question:

Who exactly is left inside to ship it?

The people fleeing to Anthropic?
The designers fleeing the plateau of Liquid Glass?
The silicon engineers quietly taking recruiter calls?
The interface strategists who could have built the future but were denied the mandate to do so.

Siri 2.0 will not be built by the people who should have built it.

It will be shipped by the people remaining after the exodus.

And that, not Ives’s hyperventilated optimism, is the real story.A story the market won’t price until it lands but when it does, the price target will not be $350. It should be a question:

Who will lead Apple out of the hole it dug for itself, over Cook’s agentic tenure as a performative CEO?

And much more importantly:

Why on earth was Tim Cook allowed to stay long enough to watch the dirt being piled on top?

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⚠️ Hyperbolic Hallucinating Disclaimer ANOTHER REMINDER for the GPT-phobic: ALL of this piece was generated using GPT. If that offends you, please note that Dan Ives appears to be using the same tool — just without the disclaimer.

Answer:

Ask Dan Ives, because to paraphrase him, “HE BELIEVES,” and like the X-Files, ”THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE,” and he - praise the lord and all the faithium and all the smokium and hopium he can muster, must surely be right or (yet again) have to back-peddle furiously.

Written for you by Tommo_UK’s ChatGPT-driven database and archival system, first designed in June 2024 to mock and mimic AAPL analysts to many readers’ amusement, and now weaponised against their tripe.

**And now a brief note from the real Tommo_UK.**

If you think this article sounds a bit like me, that’s because it is a bit like me. I use a database and library I’ve been curating for 18 months now, of my own 53,000 posts over 25 years about Apple and AAPL together with the long-form articles I’‘ve written, to ensure tommo_ukGENAI is the BEST DAMN genAI out there, trained on me, by me, and in my voice.

So if you think “how suspicious, this GPT sounds just like Tommo_UK’s actual work,” then congratulation - it does indeed, because it’s got my voice. Except when I write, I don’t tend to gush and over-perform like a Labrador (like Dan Ives does). I simply strategically take down targets with a double-barreled shot gun. Just the way I do when I’m grouse shooting during hunting season, before a nice cup of tea and a side of venison.

Merry Christmas from London

PS - Know any PDF designers to help me with a 20,000 word, 30-year restrospective on Apple from Amelio to Jobs to Cook - via Ballmer (you’ll understand when you read the Final Opus)?

Opus planned, and new take. More Apple, less AAPL.

HMU on the discreet contact form:

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