Richard Gayle on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'To my mind, Apple is using the new Macbook as both a premium niche product and as a test. The new screen is beautiful and will be appreciated by content creators who can afford the laptop. It is not a mass market device, IMHO, because of the price, just as the Studio is not for the masses. Yet. Apple is still selling regular MacBook Pros. By adding touch to this device, Apple can now easily gauge just how excited people will be if touch does come to their mainstream devices. Having their cake and eating it too. So Apple.'
on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'I was interested in upgrading my new powerhouse MacBook Pro with M5 Max Chip, 48GB Ram & 2TB drive but the trade in is only $1,475!!!!! WTF?!? I still owe $2,391!!! Chat GPT says its worth $3,600 privately'
on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'Morning, Neal, David. Nobody does self-cannibalizing better than Apple. It’s one of their superpowers.'
on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'Yeah, maybe. But having a more expensive product cannibalize a cheaper product is not a “problem” (no matter what Gurman may claim…)'
on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'Does anyone think that it will eat into iPad sales?'
on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Half of the decline in profits at GOOG this last quarter was because of losses on their big stock holding of SpaceX. They also own 14% of Anthropic, so if/when that house of cards built on the head of a pin starts to fall apart, GOOG’s exposure will be very significant. And if Musk forces the ingestion of Tesla by SpaceX, the financials of SpaceX will become even more ridiculous and GOOG’s exposure on that front will rocket like a Falcon booster. GOOG spent $51 billion on capex this quarter, >2x YOY and mostly for AI datacenters, sold ~$29 billion of bonds, bought back no stock and instead sold $12 billion of new shares, reported negative $9 billion in free cash flow, and nearly tripled long-term debt for the year to about $125 billion. All apparently to show a $31 billion revenue increase in Google Cloud, an entirely uncertain amount of which was because of anything to do with AI because GOOG (like MSFT, META et al) doesn’t report AI revenue separately so nobody can figure out what their business or AI spending is doing. Yet at least some analysts have described this as “the payoff”. As for MSFT, although the market seems not to have noticed, 11% quarterly booked revenue was AI compute “rent” that was “paid” by OpenAI. However, of that $10 billion in “paid” rent, OpenAI actually only paid $3 billion, and the previous quarter the unpaid OpenAI rent was $6 billion. But MSFT owns 24% of OpenAI, so it is literally moving money from one pocket to a different pocket and both of them pretending OpenAI isn’t bleeding cash and unable to pay their bills. At some point, the write-downs of OpenAI debt are going to be massive for MSFT, and just has a different brand name of GOOG’s exposure to an Anthropic implosion.'
on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'Any time I’ve needed my wife to do something on my MacBook Pro she’s immediately gone for the screen as Gregg alluded to. She’s all-in on doing everything on her iphone even though I bought her an iPad Air. But the idea of Apple iOS/iPadOS users trying to touch the screen is a thing. This new MacBook could have some legs as well'
on Apple's John Ternus talks touchscreen Mac (with product video) - 'Here’s your foldable iPad with the size, the inputs, the power, and connections you could ever want, and light too. I may have to get one when Apple introduces the 6G model.'
on Nvidia and Apple are the only Mag 7s outperforming the S&P 500 - 'I am following my ‘half a lifetime’ trend allocation. I made my trend decision in 1998. Acted on it in 2006 and am unlikely to change it until I depart this mortal coil. That’s sophisticated investing for you! So far, so good.'
on Daniel Ives: The Ternus cadence continues - 'There is also the case of pro users running their own models on one or more Mac Studios on-site. Apple skipped the chance to make the M6 Pro, Max or Ultra and is jumping directly to the M7. Considering how much a leap the M6 is I’m really curious to see the M7. I’ve worked most of my life with really slow computers. My first computer back in the day didn’t even have a CPU chip. The CPU was built from 7400 logic DIPs and had iron core doughnut memory. What an amazing run we’ve had.'
on Evercore is sticking with its $380 Apple target - 'Assuming a 3% drop in AAPL shares outstanding to 14.16B shares by end of 2027, if AAPL reaches $454, it would have a market cap of over $6.4 Trilliion. Wonder if NVDA keeps up or the AI bubble begins to deflate going into 2028?'
