Apple recession: Court scandals hit Apple shares hard
Apple shares have fallen in price by 22% since the beginning of the year, due to the courts due to Siri eavesdropping and the conflict with Fortnite, unfulfilled promises to introduce Apple Intelligence AI functionality and an unsuccessful experiment with the iPhone 16e. The story with the deception of users, who were promised advanced AI functions back in September, received the most resonance, but now the videos with their ads have been deleted. Russians also began to prefer the Samsung brand, experts say. For more information, see the Izvestia article.
Apple shares fall
According to the NASDAQ International Securities Exchange, Apple shares have fallen by 22% since the beginning of 2025. Numerous legal proceedings of the company could lead to this, Daniil Arzhakov, a lecturer at the Department of Esports at the Faculty of Gaming Industry and Esports at Synergy University, told Izvestia.
According to him, the organization has systematically got into several scandalous situations, and one of the most notable is cheating with an AI assistant. Back at the presentation of Apple Intelligence (a personalized artificial intelligence system integrated into iOS 18) on September 9, 2024, the company showed a number of impressive features: how Siri will understand the context, help with work, manage tasks, and even make jokes. But when users tried it all themselves, it turned out that a lot of things either didn't work or didn't work at all as promised. As a result, I had to remove the ads and change the description of the functions.
Outraged customers filed a lawsuit through Clarkson Law Firm, accusing the company of being misleading in its advertising, but Apple has not provided the promised features, Daniil Arzhakov said.
— Another serious issue is privacy issues. It turned out that Siri continues to record fragments of conversations even after disabling the "Hey Siri" function. This data was allegedly used to train AI, but users were naturally opposed to having their private lives analyzed without their consent. This caused a new round of criticism and new complaints to regulators," the expert added.
According to IT expert Ivan Kalmykov, Apple called the delays in AI functions ugly and shameful, and marketing continued to promote under-developed technologies, which led to class-action lawsuits in the United States for false advertising. Users received only basic tools like emoji generation and simplified text summarization.
The expert attributed the failure of the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset to other reasons for the stock's decline. Due to the lack of content, inconvenient design and limited functionality, demand turned out to be extremely low. By the end of 2024, production of the Vision Pro was stopped, and tens of thousands of unsold devices remained in warehouses.
Apple is showing a crisis of trust in 2025. Ivan Kalmykov is convinced that the company needs not only to accelerate development, but also to rethink its approach to customer communication in order to restore its reputation.
What's going on with Apple in the world
In April 2025, a court in the United States recognized that Apple was using its dominant position to limit competition, Daniil Arzhakov said. Against the background of all this, stocks are falling, and user trust is declining. In Thailand, many people are calling for a boycott of the company.
Sales of new iPhones, including the 16e model, went worse than planned. Many buyers began to look towards other brands, where they provide more opportunities for less money, especially in Russia, where most of the functions are unavailable, the expert noted.
According to the source of Izvestia, one of the biggest failures in the Russian Federation was the smartphone 16e— the fourth generation in the line of budget iPhone SE solutions. Its sales in the first three months after the start of sales turned out to be 43% worse than the iPhone SE of the previous third generation for the same period in 2022.
Eldar Murtazin, a leading analyst at Mobile Research Group, said that Apple's sales of the Apple Watch have been falling for the second year in a row, and this indicates a drop in interest in the iPhone as a whole.
— Statistics on the iPhone and iPad are greatly exaggerated, the real situation is somewhat different in terms of units, but they report not in units, but in money, nevertheless, this is very heavily combed data, where a lot of things are collected. The discrepancy in the estimates of research companies working with Apple and those who do not work has become critical," Eldar Murtazin added.
According to him, people in Russia have become more rational and choose the middle segment due to inflation.
— The iPhone 16e is a niche device, Apple has already had such failures. In Russia, this gadget is in low demand. It is unlikely that the Cupertinos expected that sales would be so bad globally. In our country, Apple is gradually being ousted from the market, and in China they are generally forced to make mass sales, which has never happened in the company's practice. However, the share in the same PRC is greatly decreasing. There is a trend in Russia now where one Apple smartphone sold accounts for ten Samsung smartphones in the same price category," the expert noted.
Of the entire iPhone line, the 16e model is the least popular, said David Davidyan, head of Smartphones at Wildberries. Its share does not exceed several percent of the total sales of Apple smartphones.
Denis Kuskov, CEO of TelecomDaily, suggested that the fall in Apple shares will still be corrected, since the main influx of demand for products is the period from September to January, when new lines of devices are released and old ones become cheaper.
The Cupertino company will probably remain the "pinnacle" of technology only in laptops, and it has long been without innovation in all other technology, the editor-in-chief suggested. Ferra.ru Evgeny Kharitonov. He clarified that Apple's system problems, which led to a drop in sales, do not affect all types of the company's devices, but relate to the best-selling iPhones, and in the Russian market they are further aggravated for a number of reasons: for example, in Russia, prices for the iPhone 15 are often close to 16e and there is no reason to buy the latter, he concluded.
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