Could Apple Be the Biggest Pick-and-Shovel AI Stock?

Is Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) an "AI stock," or just a tech stock? Until recently, many investors were worried that Apple wasn't doing enough to develop new artificial intelligence (AI) products to compete in the AI race. The company seemed to be struggling to create new AI tools, and in 2025, it announced delays for AI upgrades to its Siri voice assistant.

But instead of getting distracted by AI or investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI like other major tech companies, Apple has kept plugging away at its core business of selling iPhones and laptops. Based on its most recent quarterly earnings report on April 30, Apple might be benefiting from the AI boom in a surprising way: by becoming an AI pick-and-shovel stock.

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Let's look at a few reasons why Apple might turn out to be a come-from-behind winner of the AI race, just by doing what the company does best.

Most discussion about AI picks and shovels focuses on data centers and utility companies -- the stocks that will profit from the buildout of AI infrastructure and billions of dollars of capital expenditures (capex). Unlike other major tech companies, Apple isn't building data centers or selling semiconductors.

But Apple might benefit from AI in an indirect way: by becoming a platform of choice for how people interact with and use AI tools. Apple's laptops and iPhones might sell better if people start to think of them as "the best hardware for AI."

Company executives are leaning into this narrative. On the company's recent earnings call with analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook said: "Mac is the best platform for AI, with Apple silicon delivering exceptional performance, industry-leading efficiency, and the ability to run advanced models locally in ways that simply were not possible before. It is so exciting to see how strongly users are embracing on-Mac AI capabilities."

If Apple wants to become known as the best way to work with AI tools, it needs to sell more laptops. The company's revenue still comes primarily from its flagship line of iPhones, which generated $56.9 billion of revenue in the most recent quarter, about 51% of the company's total.

But laptop sales were a big bright spot in the company's latest earnings. The Mac category ranked as the 2nd largest contributor to the company's sales, with revenue of $8.4 billion in the quarter, up about 6% year over year. Company executives say they are seeing strong demand from companies that want to use Apple laptops specifically for AI work.

On the company's latest earnings call on April 30, CFO Kevan Parekh said that more enterprise customers, including leading AI developers like Perplexity, are "choosing Mac as their preferred platform to build enterprise-grade AI assistants." Parekh also shared the example of Freshworks, a leading enterprise software provider in India, which recently deployed more than 5,000 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops for the purposes of AI development.

Apple stock is up 4.5% year to date and has slightly underperformed the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 index for the past year. If AI-friendly laptops prove to be the next picks and shovels of the AI trade, this tech stock could have big potential to keep growing for the rest of 2026 and beyond.

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Ben Gran has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Could Apple Be the Biggest Pick-and-Shovel AI Stock? was originally published by The Motley Fool