(Angela Weiss/Getty Images)

Apple’s smartphone market share jumped to a world-leading 20% in 2025

Here’s what Dan Ives says the iPhone maker has to do to reach Wedbush’s $350 price target this year.

1/12/26 8:42AM

2025 was a great one for Apple, whose global smartphone market share jumped to 20%, besting Samsung and making it the top-selling brand in the world by shipments, new data from Counterpoint Research shows.

2026 could be a great one for Apple, too, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives — if the company focuses on four things the analyst laid out in a note Monday morning.

To reach Wedbush’s $350 price target, a 35% premium to where Apple is currently trading, Ives said the company must:

1) Make Google Gemini the “exclusive” partner for Apple’s AI strategy, which has heretofore languished using the company’s own models. Bloomberg previously reported that Apple plans to pay Google $1 billion a year to use its Gemini AI model to power Siri.

2) Release an actually good revamped Siri on time. That means the updated Siri, expected this spring, must finally deliver the personalized features and deep system integration Apple promised two years ago. Ives also expects Apple to launch an “AI subscription service” this summer that would function as an additional revenue stream for the company’s growing and lucrative Services segment.

3) Continue its iPhone 17 success with the iPhone 18. Ives thinks 2026 iPhone unit sales will “handily exceed current Street estimates,” which FactSet’s analyst consensus currently pegs at around 245 million, compared with about 233 million last year. Driving the success of the iPhone 18, Ives said, will be the foldable option as well as average selling prices, which he expects to rise $100 on Pro models.

4) Announce that CEO Tim Cook is staying on. Lately, news reports and prediction markets have rallied around Apple hardware chief John Ternus as Apple’s next CEO, saying the company has accelerated its CEO succession plans. Ives said that Apple must say otherwise and put a stop to that chatter since the company is in an “integral period for Cupertino to design and execute on its broader AI Revolution strategy.” Ives expects Cook to continue as CEO “at least through the end of 2027.”

Taken together, Ives sees 2026 as a long-awaited “prove-it” year for Apple — one where AI ambition, iPhone execution, and leadership stability all need to line up to justify the stock’s next leg higher.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5