Apple Pitches New Macs for On-Device AI as Shares Slip 0.7%

Dell Technologies launched its $999 XPS Googlebook with Gemini at the center of the experience, taking its premium laptop brand into Google's push for AI-powered PCs. Shares rose about 1.4% to $556.55 Wednesday, based on Tuesday's $548.92 close. The 13-inch machine pairs a Snapdragon X Elite processor with up to 32GB of memory and an on-device AI processor, and brings Android phone files, messages and apps onto the laptop. Dell says the battery can last up to 16 hours of streaming under its test conditions, and according to Reuters' report on the wider Googlebook launch, Dell is one of several PC makers joining Google's premium laptop effort. Dell has offered no sales or margin target for the new XPS, and the picture puts Dell's $556.55 share price 140.89% above its $231.04 GF Value estimate.

Qualcomm unveiled two 2-nanometer Snapdragon platforms aimed at putting more AI work directly on smartphones, sending its shares down about 1.0% to $196.265 Wednesday morning. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 sits at the top of the lineup, while the 8 Elite Gen 6 brings many of the same AI, camera and connectivity features to a broader range of premium phones. Qualcomm named nine participating brands, including Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi, and Motorola has announced a phone using the Extreme chip, giving the launch its first concrete device example. The investor question is whether two flagship chips can turn more premium phone launches into more sales for Qualcomm, with device volumes and the appeal of on-device AI mattering next. At $196.265, the shares sit 11.87% above the displayed GF Value of $175.44.

Apple is making an unusually aggressive push into enterprise artificial intelligence, pitching its newest high-end Macs as an alternative to the expensive cloud infrastructure that has helped Nvidia and Microsoft dominate the AI boom. Apple says businesses can run increasingly sophisticated AI workloads locally on Macs instead of continually paying cloud providers or AI developers for computing capacity measured in tokens, with upgraded Mac mini and Mac Studio systems aimed at tasks including software development and complex business workflows, and some configurations approaching $20,000. At its latest launch event, the company connected four Mac Studios and used them to run a trillion-parameter AI model that identified and fixed a graphics coding problem, a workload that would ordinarily require data-center infrastructure, with the four-machine setup operating from a single wall outlet. Apple believes its unified-memory architecture and focus on power efficiency give Macs an advantage for running large models locally, and the same architecture can allow developers to move workloads across devices ranging from high-end Mac Studios to iPhones and iPads. But Apple is attacking from far behind: IDC estimates Macs hold only about 4.6% of the enterprise desktop market, compared with 91.3% for Microsoft Windows, while Nvidia remains dominant in data-center AI and is working with PC manufacturers to expand AI capabilities on Windows machines.