Apple believes that two letters will drive a big hike in new iPhone sales this year

At the beginning of this month, a report from overseas said that Apple is planning on shipping 90 million to 100 million iPhone 16 series handsets and had ordered TSMC to produce an appropriate number of A18 chips using its second-gen 3nm process node (N3E). After a challenging 2023, Apple is hoping that AI is the magic that has shipments of the latest iPhone models making a nice comeback after 81 million iPhone 15 series units were delivered during the second half of last year.

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with Apple's thinking, says that the tech giant believes the launch of its Apple Intelligence AI initiative will boost iPhone demand. In addition, any bounce back in iPhone shipments during the last six months of 2024 will be magnified when compared to the rough second half of 2023 that the iPhone experienced.

Last summer in China, the world's largest smartphone market, the iPhone was blown out of the water by the surprising Phoenix-like comeback pulled off by Huawei. Several years ago the Chinese firm was the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world behind Samsung but ahead of Apple. Despite having to deal with U.S. sanctions that prevent it from obtaining cutting-edge 5G chips, the company was able to procure 7nm Kirin 9000s 5G application processors from China's largest foundry, SMIC, for the Mate 60 flagship series.

The Mate 60 was the first Huawei phone to support 5G out of the box since the 2020 Mate 40 line. Consumers in China celebrated the new phone and the new chip (despite it being two generations behind the A17 Pro application processor used on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max) and Huawei had a huge domestic hit on its hands.

Today's news sent Apple's shares soaring to a new all-time high of $232.74 giving Apple a market capitalization (share value multiplied by shares outstanding) of $3.56 trillion which puts Apple back on top of the list of the most valuable public U.S. companies ahead of recent leaders Microsoft (valued at $3.45 trillion) and NVIDIA (valued at $3.31 trillion).

Apple's new AI features will be supported on two 2023 models, the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. Those with the non-Pro iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus are out of luck unless they upgrade to one of the iPhone 15 Pro units or wait until September to buy one of the four new iPhone 16 series models. Support for Apple Intelligence is based on the amount of DRAM on each iPhone model.

iPhones that support Apple's AI have 8GB of DRAM which is why the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, with 6GB of DRAM, do not qualify. The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max feature 8GB DRAM as will all four iPhone 16 series handsets. That is why those six models will run Apple Intelligence.