Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Apple event: Found in translation - 'Looked to me like a total eclipse of the sun.'
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!'
on Evercore: 'The Little Mac That AI Can' - 'But that’s a classic book. I think AI can, I think AI can…'
on Apple event: Found in translation - 'When I first saw notice of the event, I got it as “rise and shine “ before I realized what it actually said. For the US, the reference to this other phase seems intentional. I saw it as a reference to John Ternus waking up the product line. In other countries, that other phrase wouldn’t work.'
on Apple event: Found in translation - 'I’ll tell you what I think may be up: I think the first product won’t be a foldable iPhone, but a foldable iPad mini. It makes far more sense to me to have an iPad that folds the screen inwards and protects it while simultaneously permitting a larger screen than creating a far more expensive iPhone with three screens. Think about it: If the screen’s on the outside, then the cameras are going to be on the back, so it will require 3 screens; the one on the outside with the cameras on the back, and the ones in the middle. But why not just make a foldable iPad that can also be used as a smartphone – AND keep the price down? In fact, the only reason I can think that you’d want a full screen on the outside is so that, like now, you can see what you’re photographing or videoing. But for that, you don’t really need a full-sized screen, and if you want to take a picture or video, you can just unfold the iPad Fold…. So a camera on both sides of an iPad Fold, and maybe a small viewfinder screen. Makes sense to me….'
on Apple investors: Mark your calendars for 9/9/26 - 'Thinking along similar lines, I’ve speculated that Apple priced an unannounced memory subsidy into iPhone 18 handsets. No matter emerging technologies, the iPhone is Apple’s revenue driver. It would be incumbent on Apple to maintain prior iPhone pricing during the iPhone 18/19 model years. By then the demand surge for memory may have mostly returned to historic levels, as will memory pricing. I like your extrapolation of Apple’s money management, something WS has failed to do. Apple’s Guidance, when it comes, for FQ1/27 is going to be very interesting.'
on Apple investors: Mark your calendars for 9/9/26 - 'Here’s the fun part. Remember in Q2 FY2026, Apple buy back repurchases were curtailed from roughly $25B per quarter over the past 6 quarters to just $11B for Q2, and very little or none at all was purchased in February and March of 2026, “saving” ~$14B in expenses. What are the chances that the $14B saved was then allocated (with $11B more from FCF) to make a preemptive $25B DRAM memory purchases, securing reasonably abundant supply for the entire sales year of new iPhone 18 & Ultra series, and ensuring that most if not all iPhones (save for 17e and 18e) are fully equipped to run Apple Intelligence and local Edge AI? This action would dovetail with the Earnings call statement by Kevan: “Taking a step back, we plan to continue our capital allocation philosophy of first making all the necessary investments needed to support the business, and then returning excess cash to shareholders over time. Net cash neutral has been a valuable framework for our capital structure, and since 2018, we have significantly right-sized our balance sheet and reduced net cash by over $100 billion. As we move ahead, we are no longer providing net cash neutral as a formal target and we will independently evaluate cash and debt.” And in Q&A: “We believe we’re at a stage where evaluating cash and debt independently is really the right approach for us and allows us to make more optimal economic decisions around how we best utilize our debt and cash portfolios to support the business, based on business factors and market conditions. We also believe we can manage this flexibility while also being very efficient and disciplined. So with all that being said, we remain very committed to returning excess cash to shareholders. As we talked about our investment in the business, I think as you know, we invest in the business first and foremost and then look to kind of return excess cash to shareholders. I think we have a very good track record of being disciplined. We’ve returned over a trillion dollars to shareholders from the start of the program, over 850 billion of which has been through share repurchases, and so the other piece as well that’s really important is as part of that, we also have increased our buyback authorization by another $100 billion, and that’s on top of the leftover capacity from the prior authorization. So you can see the capital return piece is something very important to us, and as we talked about in the prepared remarks, important to the overall approach to delivering long-term shareholder value.” Considering Apple is now moving away from the supply constrained 3nm processes that were used for its high demand & volume iPhones 16’s & 17’s, and M4 & M5 Macs, they’ve probably purchased sufficient (for now) supply of DRAM at least for iPhones, iPads, and Macs for one year’s worth of production, assuming no outrageous demand “problems”. By bankrolling and prepaying for over 50% of TSMC’s 2nm wafers and chip production (for A20, A20 Pro, for iPhone 18’s, M5/M6 Macs and iPad chips, and R2’s for Vision Pro, assuming they’ve ordered plenty, they should have few constraints for the 2027 fiscal sales year, again unless unprecedented demand overwhelms even the loftiest of Apple supply projections, a great problem to have.'
on Premarket: Apple was red, turned green - 'Apple ended Wednesday trading up $3.55 on the day at $313.45. The shares reached a high on the day of $315.43 in the last twenty minutes of trading. Overnight the shares have given back much of the day’s gains. At 1:45am on Thursday in New York the shares are off $2.99 at $310.46.'
on Apple investors: Mark your calendars for 9/9/26 - 'Hmm… Probably an opportune time for “One more thing…”, given it’s going to be Ternus’ first outing. Start off with a bang.'
on Apple investors: Mark your calendars for 9/9/26 - 'I appreciate that Bart is asking very interesting questions. * Thumbs up and hearts* After the initial wow factor of using these systems, I’m no longer impressed by any of them. The way I’ll know when these “AI” systems are truly intelligent is when they write with the brevity and poignancy of someone like Steve Jobs. These all read like an internal Microsoft memo, 5000+ words where 500 or less would do. When something of the quality of “Thoughts on Flash” is produced, then I’ll take notice. Or if they can answer a question about a book that they have clearly ingested, but failed to understand in a way that aids my memory about it.'
on Apple investors: Mark your calendars for 9/9/26 - 'Bart, while I highly respect you, please stop with the AI slop. I care what you think not Gemini or any other AI…'
on Apple's August bombshells (videos) - 'A Studio is overkill, agreed, from a personal purchase budget & use case POV. So far, with my M4 Pro Mac Mini, the cloud AI agents I use (Comet, Runway, Suno) are pretty good. Even better, when I choose the processing to ‘computer’, it processes faster. Both off-cloud & time-to-output speed on my Mini is helping me conserve my monthly Ai credits = $ saved.'
on Premarket: Apple was red, turned green - 'The Nvidia earnings results should boost the entire market tomorrow. $64 billion in operating income and they forecast revenue growth of 70%. They will soon be making $100 billion or more per quarter.'
on Apple's August bombshells (videos) - 'Joseph, it’s great to hear the assessment from your stepson. Please ask him to compare with Nvidia’s announced, but not yet shipping, RTX Spark with unified memory. Since it’s not shipping, it’s OK to wait, or to just get good guesses. The developer perspective matters. Nvidia offers CUDA, but saddles it on to a Window system – ugh. Apple offers Metal, MLX and CoreML running on elegant, secure MacOS.'
on Premarket: Apple was red, turned green - 'Re: #4. News seems to indicate that those infilled early orders were upgraded to the new models – for free!'
on Premarket: Apple was red, turned green - '@Joseph, Low again at ~29M. Much of that was in the last few minutes. Weird.'
