Bart Yee on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - '“How about the China specific AI capable market?” “China Premium AI-Capable Smartphone Sales (Millions of Units) This data directly isolates the high-end premium bracket ($600+) within Mainland China as outlined in the previous vendor breakdowns. Vendor 2025 Actuals – 2026 Est – 2027 Projections Apple 38.0M – 34.0M – 37.0M Huawei 23.5M – 26.0M – 25.5M vivo 3.8M – 3.5M – 4.2M Xiaomi 3.1M – 2.8M – 3.8M Honor 2.2M – 2.4M – 3.2M Others (Samsung/Oppo) 1.4M – 1.3M – 1.8M Total China Premium ~72.0M — ~70.0M — ~75.5M ((Apple’s portion of the China Premium market? 53% — 49% — 49% I’d say that’s still a very solid number considering the desperate moves by Chinese OEMs to expand into the premium markets to save their profitability. Whether that plays out or there will be a shakeout in 1-2-3 years remains to be seen, very dependent on memory costs helping or hurting the smaller players. Globally, Apple has similar numbers, almost half or more of AI capable smartphones sold in the next 2 years will be iPhones. The rest are split between 5-7 other vendors. The above numbers look at just current and future project sales of AI capable smartphones. What is Apple up against right now as in AI capable smartphones already operational? See the next post.))'
on Saturday Apple video: Susan Kare biography - 'Absolutely agree: a very interesting story! I wish it had been brought with more pace and enthusiasm. Good grief! This guy could make a horse-race boring.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Apple is Laura’s chew toy and she just can’t let go. Ever. LOL She reminds me of an ad I saw online somewhere There were different scenes of business people at conferences and meetings and all the dialog is the people repeating “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI …”. It was really funny. Meanwhile: https (colon) //finance.yahoo (dot) com/technology/ai/articles/ford-hires-350-gray-beard-212805272.html The AI failures cost the company “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” in recalls and warranty costs. Ford says bringing back the engineers has resulted in $1 billion in cost savings in 2026. “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Laura Martin’s Grandmother : J. D. You’re making a big mistake, not drilling for oil. You need to take out big loans and drill, drill, drill. J. D. Rockefeller : you’re not the only one telling me that. But I think I will go into distribution, and avoid the big CapEx spending. LM’s GM : if you’re wrong, you’ll never survive.'
on Saturday Apple video: Susan Kare biography - 'One of the most informative videos in a great series. There’s a lot here–the power of constraints, the perspective of designers who are not tech oriented, the value of simplicity. Thank you.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Bart, Upvoted. Thanks for looking backwards on this. I picked up that she said that some can “hide” in Apple. Like it was a bad thing to do. She did seem to say that this choice by Apple is an existential threat that will lead to Apple going out of business. She seemed to skip quickly through that part of her analysis. CNBC, unfortunately, does not have good interviewers(or maybe they are limited in what they can ask that may make their guests look bad) but that is a point that someone should have followed up on during the interview. As some have said on this thread already, Apple does appear to have a model already. They are not joining the rat race(or maybe they are running in a different race, more appropriately) at this time and are watching from the sidelines. There will be losers here and if Apple is needing to get into this business, they should be able to buy up capacity on the cheap from one of the losers(as I think Gregg said earlier). But from what people are saying about the new SIRI, it doesn’t seem like Apple will be needing to do this, at least not on the scale that others are doing. Lots of different comments that I agree with on this thread that deserve upvoting. I am thinking that Ms. Martin is becoming the outlier here and more of the analysts following Apple are taking a more positive view of their future. She survives in the media by taking a contrarian view which tends to be popular on these types of shows. I wonder what her return track record is. She may do well with her other calls that her total return is decent.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - '” That’s why she sees the “existential” bet. In AI terms, it’s hallucination.” So everybody will be accessing AI via an LLM model (whether they need it or not) hosted in a token fueled data center with no control over your own content. That’s nice.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'per Claude, regarding an important Apple-invented technique deployed in their AFM models but not in Gemini: “Instruction-Following Pruning” comes from an Apple AI/ML research paper (with UC Santa Barbara collaboration) that predates WWDC 2026 by well over a year — the original paper was submitted in January 2025. The core idea, per the paper: instead of a fixed pruning mask applied to every input, the pruning mask is input-dependent and adapts dynamically based on the user’s instruction. A sparse mask predictor takes the instruction as input and dynamically selects the most relevant model parameters for that specific task, with the predictor and the LLM jointly optimized. In the paper’s own benchmarks, a 3B “activated” model pruned this way beat a same-size dense 3B model by 5–8 points on math and coding, rivaling a 9B dense model’s performance.” . In other words, Apple Technology in Apple Foundation Models.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'I wonder what she thinks will replace phones in people’s pockets to access AI? Watches? (Apple has that covered) Earbuds? Glasses? Smart Pins? Brain implants?'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Apple has been doomed for years, and somehow it survives.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Oops. I got it wrong. It’s called over-fitting, not hallucinating. “Overfitting occurs when an AI model learns the training data too well, memorizing its exact details and random noise rather than the underlying patterns. While it achieves near-perfect accuracy during training, it fails to make accurate predictions on new, unseen data.” Psychologists call it confirmation bias, applied to humans.'
on Saturday Apple video: Susan Kare biography - 'I enjoyed the fleshing out of her background and career after having been introduced to her and her work in David Pogue’s book APPLE. I recommend the book and the time to view this article. I’ve also had the same thought about scrolling the length of previous posts.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'She’s building her case for OpenAI to buy Apple in 5 years time.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'To the list starting with Rod Hall, Tony S., Pierre Ferragu, you can now include Laura Martin. She probably still counts iPhones as part of her scintillating analytical research. All Lemmings walking off the cliff just as Apple portrayed in one of their many earlier commercials. They all went the way of the buffalo.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'She put a hold on Apple last June when it was $201. Enough said about her accuracy.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'I like Philip’s take. “My take: Martin has been wrong on Apple for years, and yet somehow she survives.” She has been one of my contra indicators of the analyst crowd. Why she survives is a mystery.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'She’s f’in wrong. First off, I am using the Public Beta on my iPad and the new Siri is a revelation. I keep finding amazing ways she can tap into my files, messages, and find and organize things for me. Whether it’s on device or in cloud, that’s what I’m looking for. And now Apple is delivering. And that’s what consumers are going to want. If Apple is delivering that at a fraction of the CapEx, and protecting my privacy, it sounds like a home run.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Laura, Laura, Laura: Maybe it’s the others who actually ARE betting the farm that they DO need their own AI models. The croupier is standing by to rake up their “chips”.'
