According to the Sina Finance app, Jefferies issued a research report, downgrading Apple (AAPL.US) from 'buy' to 'hold' with a target price of $205 due to 'overly high' expectations for the iPhone. In pre-market trading on Monday, as of the time of writing, the stock fell by about 1%.

Analyst Edison Lee wrote in a report to clients: "We are bullish on Apple's ai in the long term because Apple is the only company capable of providing low-cost, personalized ai services through proprietary data as a software and hardware integrated enterprise. However, smart phone hardware needs to be redesigned to achieve real ai, which may not be until 2026/27. We believe the high expectations for the iPhone 16/17 are premature."

Lee added that expectations of a 5% to 10% increase in iPhone sales are 'unlikely' to be met, citing a lack of substantial new features and limited coverage of ai. Therefore, he believes the growth rate for the iPhone 16 cycle is only 2.5%.

Despite this, Apple's long-term ai capabilities are still promising, partly due to its collaboration with OpenAI, and its OpenELM large language model is believed to consume only 1.56GB of RAM. Another model, Ferret UI, focuses on understanding the user's phone screen.

Lee further stated: "We believe Apple is a leader in mobile ai technology, with its chip operating system ai integrated ecosystem far ahead of the fragmented Android competition."