Recent Comments

  • David Drinkwater on 2027 will be a big year for foldables, led by Apple - '“Apple is not just gonna walk in here and transform the cell phone market.” 2007'
  • David Drinkwater on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - 'The yield on AAPL was one of the standouts on a recent portfolio review. It is what it is, and I did ask about the buyback with my broker, but I’d still like to see it more like 2% and a controllable option for DRIP. Even at 1% it would be meaningful “I’m just gonna retire” money.'
  • Steven Philips on Trump wants Cook at Nvidia - 'I love it when a good panel comes together! 🙂'
  • Joseph Bland on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - 'Which means the Apple split is going to be soon and will be 2 to 3:1, or when Apple gets up around $500 to $550/share and the split will be 4 or 5:1. IMO.'
  • Robert Paul Leitao on Gene Munster: Like Apple after Jobs, Nvidia has an urgency problem - 'Richard: The new CEO of NVIDIA and the new members of senior management that will need to be appointed as well as, perhaps, new members of the Board of Directors that also may need to be appointed, will all be very busy in the aftermath of this unfolding scandal. This is the reason Tim Cook and Johnny Srouji are not likely to consider the position of CEO if offered or attempts made to recruit either of the two gentlemen. The work involved at the start may have less to do with moving the company forward and more to do with cleaning up the company’s recent past. The corporate culture needs to change and mentoring a new culture takes much time, effort and patience.'
  • Joseph Bland on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - 'Not sure about splits or dividends going forward. We do have a new CEO, after all. It’s all about how the free cash flow gusher is seen to grow the company’s value. Buying back stock with a tiny tax hit is still making sense, especially if Apple keeps growing at it’s present rate. But dividends are a distant second use case, IMO, from the POV of Apple Inc. Recall that it’s employees are also AAPL owners, and part of the attraction is the growing value over time of holding AAPL, Splits, OTOH, add no real intrinsic value, but do add a kind of attractiveness to some. It used to be, as others here have pointed out, that you had to buy a whole share of AAPL, which would make it harder to buy APPL for some folks, but that is no longer true. Also, inflation has dropped the dollar’s buying power, so that needs to be factored in. I’m inclined to go along with you, Fred. I think the split would probably like to go to about $125/share.'
  • Joseph Bland on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Which brings me to Nvidia and their recent decision to approve $150 B in buybacks. Clearly, they see what I see as how it truly juiced Apple’s valuation over the last 13 years (i.e., it was NOT a gimmick!). If you look at a complete view of AAPL’s cash value in split adjusted shares on Apple’s stock app, you see the true impact of buybacks on volume plus the volume leading up to the Great Recession when institutions bailed on AAPL. The volumes dropped to about half, and stayed there, even after the iPhone hit the market. It wasn’t until buybacks started in 2013 that you saw volumes begin to shrink, and then volume percentage shrank far faster than the percentage of stocks that were taken out of the float. Nvidia’s plan is clearly to emulate Apple’s buyback strategy. But here’s the point, as the valuation behind AI and Nvidia has begun to be recalibrated: Apple’s valuation took a real hit following the G.R., but it’s actual value was always growing underneath the perceived value. But nothing says that is going to be the case with Nvidia, at least not yet. If there’s a huge amount of fluff in Nvidia’s valuation versus it’s real value, then yes, the price per existing share goes down – but only because it deserves to. That was NOT the case with Apple – quite the opposite, in fact. Apple began buybacks because management perceived it’s true potential value, and realized that they had a gusher of cash to buy it back with that they literally couldn’t find a decent use for. Yes, Nvidia has a gusher of cash. But how has it used that gusher? It has bought up a bunch of startups. And it has given money to fund its CUSTOMER’S purchasing of data centers that are then populated with it’s product. That’s not a great business plan, as no less than Horace Dediu has recently pointed out.'
  • Joseph Bland on Premarket: Apple is green - 'One other point about that 10 year chart: Check out the volume at the bottom of the chart. it’s very clear that split-adjusted volume of trades has been decreasing over time. It’s even more dramatic if you look at the lifetime chart. What happened? Back in the era of the Great Recession, Apple’s split-adjusted volume was HUGE compared to now. Note that the insitutions effectively bailed on AAPL following the G.R., but even so, adjusted volume was high – until buybacks started up. That is not a coincidence. That is a direct result of buybacks.'
  • Robert Stack on Survey finds high iPhone Duo return rate - 'And I for one would love to know more about the failure rate of the hinge and associated screen cracking. Will the failure rate increase over time and use?Has a design flaw been identified yet? Did I just miss a more detailed briefing on this whole issue?'
  • Joseph Bland on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Another point about the 10 year AAPL price chart: If you look at the overall “shape” of the chart, AAPL is accelerating its price growth. That means that the 10 year percentage increase that is presently 119.4 X (was 120 X at $360/share) is almost certainly going to increase as the years go by – until we hit mid-year 2020 and the move that led to the 1st time AAPL, in my memory, hit a 40+ valuation. Note that, when AAPL doubles from its present ATH, that will effectively double the percentage increase in price…. So not a 120 X increase, but a 240 X increase…. (Posted at 3:45 PM PST, 11/13/’26.)'
  • Fred Stein on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - 'I’d bet on 2:1, and raise the dividend by a penny/qtr each year which would be 2 cents pre-split. Or wait another year. No pressure.'
  • Michael Goldfeder on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - '@Gregg: I wasn’t an Apple holder back when it split 7 to 1. I’m hoping it can get back to those levels soon.'
  • Joseph Bland on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Hi, Bart. As I mentioned to John yesterday, the close at EOD doesn’t mean the volume has stopped going up. If you check on Apple Stocks right now, you’ll see that volume equals 39.1 M vs “Avg Vol” of 42.58, so still under average, but higher than 34 M trades. Please don’t shoot the messenger!'
  • Gregg Thurman on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - 'Historically Apple splits AAPL at around $450 +/- $25. 2:1 or 3:1. We’re close indeed.'
  • Michael Goldfeder on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - '@Adam: Banana or stock?'
  • Adam Foster on Apple soars to $356.27, its third record close this week. - 'I sure am looking for a split soon!'
  • Fred Stein on High praise for AMD's answer to the Apple Mac mini - 'Dr. Brandt really helps. But there’s more, a subtle point. Think about memory first, especially now that it’s expensive. Apple’s M4 systems get more tokens, faster from that memory because of what Dr. Brandt says about unified memory and co-optimized chip and OS. That has two implications: 1) Apple memory is worth more, and can sell for more; 2) Apple gets more new customers for life, especially for high-end compute workloads.'
  • Robert Stack on High praise for AMD's answer to the Apple Mac mini - 'An amazing bit of trivia from one of my friends from Taiwan: AMD CEO Lisa Su and Jensen Huang are cousins. Though both were born in Taiwan, they didn’t meet until after both had become established in the US tech industry.'
  • John Konopka on Premarket: Apple is green - '[Sorry if this is a double post. I got the dreaded ‘moderation’ message.] Apple was up slightly for the day on more or less normal volume. NVIDIA dropped about 2% on over 3x normal volume. That’s a lot of churn. It appears that you can listen to the NVIDIA earnings discussion here: https (colon) //investor.nvidia (dot) com/events-and-presentations/events-and-presentations/event-details/default.aspx They want you to register for this. I don’t know if there is a way to listen without registration. I’m sure we’ll get the highlights on CNBC and elsewhere. For me the two big questions are how much illegal revenue did they get from China that will be lost now that it has been exposed and what is the succession plan? As part of the plan will Jensen still be around as an advisor of some sort? One of the great things Steve did was to build Apple to be able to run independently of him. It doesn’t seem like Jensen did this. As of last May: https (colon) //247wallst (dot) com/investing/2026/05/04/50-of-nvidia-employees-are-now-worth-over-25-million-how-nvidia-created-thousands-of-millionaires/ Most of the talent at NVIDIA are independently wealthy. If they are not happy they can easily jump ship or go off and create a start-up or just go somewhere and paint landscapes. Maybe this is a chance for Apple to pick up some talent? I only focus on NVIDIA because their rise or fall would likely affect Apple.'
  • Bart Yee on Premarket: Apple is green - 'AAPL closed up $1.39 near its low of the day at $356.27, another ATCH, after rocketing up at the open to $360.83, another ATIDH. Volume was 34M shares, vs NVDA volume of 359M or 10X higher, suggesting there’s still a lot of investors out there trying to figure out their AI positions. I suspect we will now start seeing rotations in and out of tech stocks as fund managers jockey themselves around, trying to set themselves up for the last 6 weeks of the quarters. With NVDA cratering itself, many managers will be looking for something else that makes their end of year funds positions look good and cover up the losses or reduced profits they’ve recently had to take.'
  • David Emery on High praise for AMD's answer to the Apple Mac mini - 'CUDA vs alternatives is a huge deal, Just as Mac OS is a major part of a lock to Apple hardware :-), CUDA is a lock to NVIDIA hardware. An alternative software infrastructure would need to provide equivalent functionality AND a migration path from existing CUDA-based applications to the alternative. And I wonder just how much using Python over a statically compiled language is costing AI Hyperscalers in compute (in)efficiency….'
  • Jim Fonda on High praise for AMD's answer to the Apple Mac mini - 'I also like Dr Errol Brandt. I’ve watched most of his videos and have invested in his company, Kiraa. He promotes the idea of running AI on one or more Mac Studios on your desktop instead of in a data center. That is much better for privacy of data. It also uses less power and water. He also talks about inefficiency of the AI world’s use of Python, and has been converting a number of standard Python libraries to Swift, which makes much better use of the hardware. He doesn’t talk about Nvidia’s CUDA, I like Apple’s approach with Swift much better. It certainly seems to me that Apple hardware and software are doing some great things that will get better with an M7 Ultra etc in a couple of years.'
  • Gregg Thurman on Survey finds high iPhone Duo return rate - 'I think the reason for the high return rate (early adopters not being impressed) will seriously subside by Summer. It is those early adopters that are creating artificially high demand and abnormally skewed supply/demand curves. Once the early adopters have been flushed out of the supply/demand curve, delivery times will shrink to almost immediate. Also, as the number of explorers decline, ASPs will increase (fewer resold returns) and margins will increase (less buying of higher cost memory to accommodate higher artificial demand and less cost attributable to the handling of those returns).'
  • Gregg Thurman on Gene Munster: Like Apple after Jobs, Nvidia has an urgency problem - '”Urgency” is a familiar problem for anyone with an over-active bladder.” You mean most men over the age of about 70.'
  • Gregg Thurman on High praise for AMD's answer to the Apple Mac mini - 'I learned something. Being a non technical person, I never understood the importance of Kiraa to Apple’s silicon, and importantly, how Apple’s CPU architecture is so far ahead of the rest. I’m going to watch this video several times to the point that I can argue, what does what, and why Apple’s architecture is so much better than competing CPUs. The Mac Studio is more expensive than X86 based systems. But if performance is important to you, the extra cost isn’t a burden, it’s an asset. Apple silicon remains several years ahead of the competition. Oh, and I hope Kiraa is successful.'
  • Joseph Bland on Survey finds high iPhone Duo return rate - 'Makes me think that there’s a real opportunity to buy a used Duo from Apple coming soon….'
  • Richard Gayle on Survey finds high iPhone Duo return rate - 'Makes one wonder how many of the 6000 in the survey just randomly voted in order to see the reslts of a poll they just skewed?'
  • Joseph Bland on Gene Munster: Like Apple after Jobs, Nvidia has an urgency problem - 'This summation from Horace’s Asymco wonderful post today, “L’État, c’est moi“: “I am the state.” – attributed to King Louise XIV “You’ll never find a spreadsheet model of culture. This is why black swans always surprise. Because they don’t have data behind the cause of failure. Nvidia faced a built-in concentration risk, and it’s not the only mega-cap that does. Prudence requires evaluation of risk beyond what is visible. I noted the concentration risk in my post The Last Consumer Company before the Nvidia scandal emerged. Concentration leads to corruption. It leads to immense risk. One could say that being subject to espionage or honeypots is just bad luck. It isn’t. It’s a consequence of concentration. If a great deal can be achieved with a single flip of a switch, a single act, a single fault it concentrates the minds of forces that want to achieve that change. It’s inevitable that temptations will be created and pressures will be applied. This is the tragedy. No matter what, Jensen Huang was going to get hung. It’s tragic that he set up the circumstances for his own demise. it is the essence of greek tragedy that the hero must fall.“'
  • Richard Gayle on NYT handicaps Jensen Huang's potential successors - 'One thing not mentioned is how many people inside Nvidia knew about the illegal scandal of Nvidia chips getting to China, likely through Singapore. They may not have had sexual affairs that we know of, but what did they know and when did they know it?'
  • Richard Gayle on Gene Munster: Like Apple after Jobs, Nvidia has an urgency problem - 'And the Nvidia scandal keeps enlarging with reports now that both Trump and Lutnick may have used inside info about the spying to dump Nvidia shares. I wonder who else may have done so, given the leaking that happens to much? I expect Congressional hearings or even criminal proceedings are going to take up alot of the time of the person who takes over Nvidia.'