Apple’s AI moment is finally arriving in 2026, Wedbush says

Quartz · Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Shannon Carroll

Wed, February 18, 2026 at 3:27 AM GMT+9 4 min read

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Apple has spent a year getting graded on what it hasn’t shipped. Wedbush is telling the market to grade the company on what it’s building next, insisting that the Siri AI upgrades are still on track for summer — and that 2026 is when Apple’s AI platform stops being a promise and starts being a product.

For a company built on immaculate timing, Apple is now trading on the opposite: the fear that its biggest AI upgrade keeps sliding. A new round of Siri delay chatter — fresh reporting that “personalized Siri” capabilities keep running into testing snags — helped knock Apple’s market value down by about $202 billion in a single session, as investors treated the feature’s timing as a credibility test. Investors can’t value “Apple’s AI future” directly, so they’re using the only visible, date-stamped thing: Siri shipping — or slipping.

In a new Wedbush note, analysts led by Dan Ives tried to flip Apple’s tenuous AI script, arguing the recent sell-off is “unwarranted” and that the Siri “soap opera” is finally moving into its 2026 release phase. Wedbush is framing 2026 as “the year Apple gets into the AI game,” arguing the Street is mispricing a rollout that still looks on track, even if the company’s “much anticipated AI features” — including that revamped Siri — arrive in phases across multiple iOS updates.

That “even if” is doing a lot of work. Internal testing issues could push some “personalized Siri” capabilities targeted for iOS 26.4 — expected in March — into iOS 26.5 in May, with some features potentially slipping to iOS 27 in September. Apple has tried to keep the story inside the year: Apple told CNBC that it’s still planning to launch the smarter Siri in 2026 (although it didn’t specify exactly which month in 2026 that will be). And for now, Apple’s March 4 product event is looking like AI won’t be part of it — once again.

But every slip changes the probability of (a) an iPhone upgrade bump, and (b) a new paid-services layer. Bulls see a setup; skeptics see a pattern.

To prove his point, Ives is pointing to new outside AI leadership inside Apple Park, the strategic weight of a rebuilt Siri architecture, and a “cemented” Google partnership — a multiyear deal where the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology; the companies have said those models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including Siri.

Rather than win the model arms race on paper, Apple wants to win distribution: shipping AI through the device layer, wrapped in privacy promises, tied into the ecosystem, and paid for through Apple’s billing relationships. Investors want to know whether Apple can land the kind of AI platform — for developers and consumers — that turns the iPhone into the front door of the consumer AI era.

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There’s also evidence Apple is trying to change Siri’s shape, not just its features. Bloomberg reported in January that Apple plans to revamp Siri into its first AI chatbot, code-named Campos, embedded across iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems.

But for now, Wedbush is steering the conversation away from “Will Siri be smarter?” and toward “Will Siri be billable?” The note says “AI monetization” could add $75 to $100 per share over the coming years, and the firm expects an AI-driven subscription service to be launched by fall — aimed at an installed base it pegs at 2.5 billion iOS devices and 1.5 billion iPhones.

Other analysts are gesturing in the same direction. Bernstein has raised its Apple price target to $340 from $325 and wrote that “the bigger story will be Apple Intelligence / Siri 2.0 coming sometime this year.” A staggered rollout is survivable if Apple proves the endpoint is a durable services tailwind.

The bear case is simpler and uglier. Apple has taught consumers to wait, and it has taught investors to pay up for inevitability. If 2026 becomes another year of staged demos and sliding dates, the market will keep treating Siri as a referendum, and the stock will keep trading like it has a quarterly data release attached.

Ives warned that any major delays would be “an albatross” for the stock, and the recent trading suggests investors will keep docking points until Siri behaves itself in the wild. Wedbush says the sell-off is a mood swing, the AI platform is the point, and the payoff is subscriptions and services layered onto a gigantic installed base. For now, it seems, Apple doesn’t need to win every benchmark. But it does need to ship the ending — and make it worth the wait.

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