Recent Comments

  • Robert Paul Leitao on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Just looking at Thursday’s numbers (as we prepare for today) and the jump in the NASDAQ Composite of 1.57% followed by a gain of 0.72% in the S&P 500 and 0.20% move higher in the DJIA. On the S&P 500, and although nearly 70% of components finished in the red on the day, Salesforce moved higher by 22.58% to finish at $252.05 followed by CrowdStrike which finished up 20.50%. NVIDIA, as reported, had a very strong share price performance, gaining 8.74% to finish the day at $227.98, on very strong quarterly results. Adobe finished up $15.68 or 5.73% in sympathy with Salesforce. Among other gainers on the day Broadcom added $15.95 or 4.49% to $371.54 and Microsoft rose $8.79 to $505.06.'
  • Gregg Thurman on Premarket: Apple is red - '” Apple closed on Wednesday at $313.45, up $3.55 on the day only to fall overnight and leading to a price this morning at the open of $310.55.” The entirety of AAPL’s trading since July earnings has been in a well defined channel. Like I’ve said repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, the market isn’t going to change its sentiment towards AAPL until after the new iPhone is announced along with greater SIRI AI capabilities, followed by FQ1/27 GUIDANCE at the end of October. Based a lot on what I’ve read here, on Apple 3.0 (smart group), I think Apple has pretty much mitigated the industry’s memory shortage, IN THE NEAR TERM. That coupled with higher prices (blamed on memory shortages) will result in industry leading GM% and increased EPS, not to mention higher revenue. Based solely on Apple’s July Guidance I’m forecasting FQ4 revenue at $116.150 Billion, generating $2.06 EPS.'
  • Robert Paul Leitao on Premarket: Apple is red - 'Rodney: To answer you r question. it didn’t happen. The share price drifted down over night last night (please see my post below) from a closing price of $313.45 on Wednesday to an opening price this morning of $310.55 a difference of $2.90 or 0.925%. That’s less than a 1% decline in the share price. Apple closed in the green on the day at $314.48, up $1.13 or 0.36% today and is currently trading overnight at $315.14, up $0.56.'
  • Robert Paul Leitao on Premarket: Apple is red - 'Apple closed on Wednesday at $313.45, up $3.55 on the day only to fall overnight and leading to a price this morning at the open of $310.55. The shares fell to a low of $309.40 just before 10:30am before recovering and turning green at the top of the 11am hour. The shares closed up $1.13 at $314.58. The share price is modestly in the green as we approach 10pm in the east and just traded at $315.05 per share. A lot of up and down in the share price since yesterday’s AH session, but in the end a good day for shareholders.'
  • Rick Povich on Rotating out of Apple - '@Greg, I’m sure if you check with Siri you’ll get a very concise report /s'
  • Gregg Thurman on Rotating out of Apple - 'I’ve done some rudimentary searches trying to suss out answers to these questions with poor results. Capacity is generally expressed as Gigawatts of power consumed with a very broad estimate of number of users per Gigawatt. I can’t make out heads nor tails of what all these reports are saying.'
  • Gregg Thurman on Rotating out of Apple - 'I’d like to see an aggregate subscriber capacity metric for each Nvidia server. How many Nvidia servers are in place, and how many are on order. I’d then like to see revenue generation numbers at specific average Token rates and compare those to capital expenditures. There has to be a point where capacity exceeds subscriber TAM. My gut tells me the industry will have exceeded that point this year. I say gut because I have no idea what the TAM is for data center vs on premise AI. Whatever that capacity is, it is getting smaller with each iteration of Mac mini and Mac Studio Apple releases. And what will the impact be when Apple’s Baltic powered network be on on premise AI. I have additional questions along these lines. My point is to determine at what point of subscriber usage does Mac mini and Mac Studio stop having an economical advantage. Then I’d like to know what the cost comparison (implementation and operation) is between equal sized Nvidia and Apple solutions. Poorly written questions but I think you can see where I’m going with this. Bart?'
  • Bill Donahue on Apple dominated June quarter smartphone sales - 'Not having a Counterpoint subscription, does anyone have any idea what sort of turnover in smartphones there is, in terms % of total that are replaced annually?'
  • David Emery on Rotating out of Apple - 'fighting over .. internet search ad revenue And so far, no one has come up with an alternate way to pay for AI ‘tokens’ or otherwise pay back that gigabuck investments in AI facilities. Eventually, if there is a true value proposition (and I suspect there is), someone will figure this out. And Apple will be able to capitalize on it, adapt to it, or ‘tax it’ by connecting users to background AI.'
  • Hap Allen on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'This AI focus angling towards the enterprise reminds me of what Errol Brandt says in his YouTube videos. On a Zoom meeting with him and others recently, I asked, “Since you’ve said Apple has been in touch with you, why wouldn’t they buy you? Or are they working on their own AI engine?” Errol replied that Apple didn’t seem interested in the enterprise, nor had they “waved a check at him.”'
  • Bill Donahue on Rotating out of Apple - 'That’s the first mistake, continuing to insist that Apple’s an “anti-AI” trade. It’s not. It’s the “alternative-AI” trade, and in that field it’s got a gigantic lead and moat, unlike all the megacap AI plays who are spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting to the death with each other over what substantially remains the same pie of internet search ad revenue.'
  • David Emery on Rotating out of Apple - 'Skating to where the puck was.'
  • Fred Stein on Apple dominated June quarter smartphone sales - 'Upvoted. You’re not wrong, Joseph. They also don’t report sales of used iPhones. Competitors, forced to raise prices due to memory, resulted in deferred sales and switchers to iPhone. Maybe some iPhone buyers jumped the gun assuming price increases are coming.'
  • Rodney Avilla on Premarket: Apple is red - 'a 10% swing overnight 10% is $31 swing? Not sure when that happened.'
  • Jim Fonda on Apple event: Found in translation - 'On Apple.com, Mac Studio shows “Brawn of a new age.”.'
  • Robert Stack on Apple investors: Mark your calendars for 9/9/26 - 'Seth: I have to disagree with your request to Bart to “stop with the AI slop.” I find the thinking in his posts to be Bart’s, not Gemini’s, as the thought resides in the nature of the specific questions (and follow-up questions) that he poses to the AI agent. I think everyone here, especially Bart, knows not to take the answers too seriously. And yes, Gemini’s replies are often verbose, as are many of the comments made by others here…yet I for one find value in them. Not all of them, but some of them. YMMV…'
  • Neal Guttenberg on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'Joseph, Thanks for posting. It comes down to one main thing. You are the product.'
  • Joseph Bland on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'Regarding that last paragraph, it’s a footnote, and I just noticed that the copy-paste dropped off the link number, which is 1, and refers to the statement “There are 22 billion active accounts across the top 20 “platforms”1. The ranking is shown below.”, found just before the first chart. Also, my apologies for saying “Part 1 of 2” twice, instead of “Part 2 of 2” in the second half of the quoted material.'
  • Joseph Bland on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'Also, Nvidia has to try to match (1) Apple’s installed base, (2) Apple’s loyalty, (3) Apple’s laser focus on protecting personal information, (4) Apple’s massive high quality production capacity, and last but not least, (5) Apple’s ecosystem. And probably even more advantages…. Good luck with that!'
  • Joseph Bland on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - '“Nvidia fights back with RTX Spark.” Maybe, Fred. They are definitely rolling in dough, but so is Apple, and they aren’t sitting on their unified memory laurels. If I had to guess, I’d say that the new Mac Mini and Mac Studio are going to blow the doors off of the Spark….'
  • Joseph Bland on Apple dominated June quarter smartphone sales - 'Impressive, but this is just market share, not installed base, which is what really counts, and which is never really mentioned by these “surveys”, which are always of questionable statistics. Or am I wrong? Are they now reporting installed base somewhere that I’m not aware of?'
  • David Emery on Premarket: Apple is red - 'It appears the market thinks “good for NVIDIA, bad for Apple”, figuring that NVIDIA sales indicate continued AI demand for memory.'
  • Joseph Bland on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'Part 1 of 2 “And this is the clue: “the algorithm” determines what people see. It’s what creators live and die on. It’s what determines virality. This algorithmic distribution has spread to YouTube and back to X, both of which offered, by default, followed content first and “suggestions” only as an option. Today followers don’t matter because users are no longer given what they follow by default. The odds of a follower seeing what a creator posts are insignificant. This is all in pursuit of “engagement” or screen time. It works. Usage is up, addiction is up and dopamine is up. However it’s also corrosive. For all the new type of scrolling induced, the sense of satisfaction with the medium is dropping. It results in a sense of loss at the end and regret. It exhausts and irritates and preys on what we used to call vices. More than a decade ago I posited that each social media is positioned on one of the seven deadly sins. In the standard list, the seven deadly sins according to the Catholic Church are pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed. Which media went with which sin is left as a fun exercise. It was a tongue-in-cheek post but over time it became reality. The media seemed to be designed to “trigger” rather than inform or relax the user. Even if not intentional, an algorithm “learns” that negative emotions are more valuable than positive. This is a biological necessity: threats are more important than comforts and we evolved to pay more attention to them. I believe that as the rush to maximally trigger users, the corrosion will ultimately undermine the businesses. For this reason Meta is finding itself is a difficult business proposition. The ads are working but the audience is exhausted and the regulators and lawsuits keep pouncing. Meta today trades at a P/E of 20 and a 50% return over five years (compare with e.g. Google at 144% or Apple at 110%). What comes next? The algorithm is likely to move beyond heuristics. If we look at the methods uses so far, starting with TikTok, it seems that the rules were very basic: dwell time, categorization, engagement triggers such as like, comment and subscribe indicate what the user likes. Provide more and more of the signals that resonate. These were the result of trials and errors with a simple optimization in mind. This is a slippery slope to a glut of stimulus. The way this overshoots is with AI. More and more study of what people respond to leads to a perfect picture of the person’s psyche. But there lies the problem. This is the formulation of narcotics and how they create undesirable dependencies. It may be all right to addict billions of people but it does not last. Addiction with no lasting benefit will ultimately be regulated. This happened with alcohol and tobacco and other narcotics. Society realizes that these are to be managed if not banned. People recognize that they are being manipulated and turn to some form of authority to help them from themselves. The future of the misnamed social media may be that it becomes treated as a controlled substance. The tobacco of the current century. It has so far evolved too rapidly to be controlled but attempts to do so will continue. Turbocharging it with AI will not convince us that it is becoming more beneficial but rather the opposite. The evidence of this aversion to the model is shown in the valuation of the companies involved. They are starting to reek of malfeasance and are not particularly desirable by capital. —– I use the term loosely since, as Bill Gates once pointed out, a platform isn’t valid unless the participants “on top” of it make more profits than the platform itself. A social media platform should benefit its content creators more than it benefits itself, perhaps in a 5:1 ratio. That certainly does not seem to be the case for the typical creator platforms. This is in contrast to software platforms such as Windows and iOS where there is more economic activity that is created and not even touched by the platform.”'
  • Joseph Bland on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'GREAT analysis on Horace Dediu’s Nota Bene blog (via Asymco One) today (posted without the graphics): Part 1 of 2 ———– “The Freshman Register by Horace Dediu Social media is no longer social. What now? “In 2004, a frenzy spread across Harvard Yard in days. Four billion users later, we are only just catching up. Harvard itself had planned to publish a college-wide digital version of a student registry along the lines of The Freshman Register, the physical book handed out to all first-year students, who traditionally used it to scour each other’s high school photos for the purposes of icebreaking and dating potential. (“The Face Book” was the informal name for that book on campus.) […] on the first day, 650 users logged on; two weeks later, it was 4,300, including a few alumni and even fewer faculty members. A month later, Thefacebook had spread to other, carefully chosen, colleges—Columbia, Stanford, and Yale—and had signed up 10,000 people. Harvard’s users alone had viewed individual profiles 1.5 million times in less than a month, at a time when profile viewing was still the main activity.” Source: Harvard Magazine NB: Social Media has grown to be one of the primary activities consuming the most time on all devices, Apple’s included. A majority of news, entertainment and communications has moved to these products and therefore their impact on how advertising and content are created has been permanently altered. Social Media takes up the largest share of total screen time. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook: 3+ hours. WhatsApp, Messages, Telegram: 2+ hours. YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime: 2 hours. Thus, if we include short video and messaging, social media could take more than 4 hours per day for the average user. However, after a mere 22 years it seems that the thesis of Social Media has all but disappeared. It’s no longer “Social” but rather “Algorithmic” Media. As conceived, the content seen by social media users was generated by other users–it was peer-to-peer. Driven by curiosity about social cohorts, initially classmates, later friends and family and, later still, semi-professional creators. Today what one sees on social media rarely includes content from friends, family, classmates, or even the people you chose to follow. This transition been hard to notice mainly because the changed come gradually and subtly, but considering how people use the products, it began to change already more than seven years ago, with TikTok. At first glance, social media seems stronger than ever. There are 22 billion active accounts across the top 20 “platforms”1. The ranking is shown below. [chart 1] Ownership of these platforms is not self-evident so I also combined them into this chart. [chart 2] Meta holds about half of the monthly active user account (MAUs). The other interests are, roughly, Google, China (ByteDance and WeChat), modest-sized public companies, private companies and even individuals. Some non-profit or decentralized organizations also bring up the rear. [chart 3] If taking a market value point of view (market capitalization per MAU) the clusters show up as follows: [chart 3] A MAU is worth between $100 and $250 in net present value. Notable outliers are TikTok at $300/MAU on the upper end and the marginal players shown at below $50/MAU. The main difference in value seems to be the rate of growth. Meta however is a good proxy for the entire space. Not just because it was the “OG” or first mainstream success with Facebook but also because it has morphed itself through acquisitions and replication to get onto the trends that resonate. Messaging (buying WhatsApp), photos (copying Snap with Instagram), short video (replicating TikTok), and Threads (replicating short text Twitter) are all invented elsewhere. Thus observing Meta, one can’t help but see how the “media” usage has shifted. It’s anecdotal but one hears that Facebook demographics aged in North America and Europe, but still young in much of South Asia and Africa. FB is seen as “best for B2C with mature audiences, local businesses, and ad spend (Facebook Ads remain one of the most sophisticated targeting platforms anywhere). Organic reach for pages is low, but the platform’s reach for paid distribution is unmatched.” Meanwhile, Instagram demographics center on millennials and Gen Z with Reels now the primary growth engine. E-commerce integration via Shopping makes it best for “B2C, lifestyle brands, and personal brands with a visual aesthetic.” Threads has grown faster than expected (equaling the usage of Twitter/X after only three years, by leveraging Instagram’s social graph.) Its algorithm is still being tuned — chronological-leaning feeds with discovery boosts.”'
  • Fred Stein on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'John Ternus leads the charge. He and Srouji started building the chip architecture years ago to move up market. It remains a long battle. Nvidia fights back with RTX Spark.'
  • Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Apple event: Found in translation - 'Looked to me like a total eclipse of the sun.'
  • Raj Pandey on Premarket: Apple is red - 'Max pain and Call mountain and Put peak are ALL at 310. Quite likely, that’s the anchor then. With Nvidia reporting blowout earnings last evening with a forecast of 70% growth compared to Apple’s 10%, there will be some big money flowing out of AAPL into NVDA. I hope I’m wrong!'
  • Raj Pandey on Apple event: Found in translation - 'Also, apart from the space gray, the other rumored colors of the iPhone 18 Pro are all there in the invite image. The light blue is obvious.'
  • Jim Fonda on Apple event: Found in translation - 'Probably Apple’s thinking was “it’s a new day at Apple”.'
  • Joseph Bland on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'AND there’s more built-in unified memory to boot….'