Bart Yee on Omdia: Apple still rules the shrinking tablet market; Lenova is growing fast - 'Despite iPad shipments dropping 8% YoY, Apple is still comfortably ahead of the next three vendors (Samsung, Lenovo, Xiaomi) combined and more than double Samsung’s total. From Q3 FY2026 Apple earnings call for iPad: “iPad rev. was $6.2B, down 6% year-over-year, driven by continued difficult compare against launch of A16 powered iPad in the prior year. At the same time, iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, & over half of customers who purchased an iPad were new to the product.” 1. no new product introduction spike in quarter to spur sales. 2. as noted, > half are NEW iPad buyers who never had an iPad before, some users are new to tablets or Android tablet switcher or current iOS user buying a tablet for the first time are choosing iPads over competition even w/iPads priced in the premium price range. This grows iPad install base, as does iPad longevity, reliability & long term support of current & passed down iPads. 3. literally, > one out of every 3 tablet sales is an iPad, even in a declining tablet market. Worldwide. Think about that. 4. Average Sales Price (ASP) is important: Apple iPad $459 (Base iPad sells best but still decent iPad Air & Pro sales) Samsung $320-340 est. (Restricted cheaper A series tab sales -> prioirtized more expensive Tab S to keep profits up) Lenovo $140-175 (Aimed at & sold into international education market at high volume, low margin contracts. Lowest ASP of top 5) Huawei $260-310 (Strong sales in “luxury” tablet China domestic market, small int’l sales, reduced cheap tablet sales) Xiaomi $180-220 (Sub-$250 focus in Asia Pacific & China) An iPad sale ≠≠ an Android tablet sale, but iPad’s >>volume x >ASP = >> Revenue by far.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'I think people seem a little bit too eager to dismiss some of these potential threats.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'John, great observation. I wonder what the cost comparison is between the Nvidia and Apple solutions and when will they be available in meaningful numbers to foster widespread adoption?'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - '” questions linger as to what could happen once custom silicon (think ASICs) looks to displace GPUs in the data centers of tomorrow.” Jensen may be play chess, but his primary opponent is a Grandmaster. ”Broadcom and Apple Baltric ASIC partnership “ Who is leading who in this two man race?'
on Tim Bajarin's Mt. Rushmore of tech journalism - 'That list seems ok for 20th century tech journalism. But, we are more than a quarter of the way through the 21th century, and things are a lot different. For the first place on the current list, I nominate PED as publisher of his own blog. I think he has created something really great, and quite different from anything in the 20th century.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'Thank you all for the thoughtful and informative conversation on this Apple 3.0 post. I have nothing to add except a note of appreciation for everyone that took the time to comment. I’m still learning after decades of keenly observing Apple and the technology markets.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'So this could create a significant competition not for the desktop BOX, but rather between the AI operating system that runs on your choice of box. NVIDIA has a lead here, arguably, with the infrastructure most of the hyperscaler AI is built on. But will that scale down to desktop AI engines? Or will Apple’s desktop-first AI prove to be a better environment for home-scale/office-scale AI? And will NVIDIA keep their desktop infrastructure specific to their desktop boxes, or will NVIDIA take the Microsoft/Google (Android) approach and license that more broadly to hardware/system vendors? I dunno, but this will be interesting to watch!'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'This caught my eye from the article – “But here’s my favorite piece of evidence, the tell I’d point to if I could only pick one: watch what NVIDIA sells now. The DGX Spark — Jensen’s new “personal AI supercomputer” for your desk — is a small quiet box with 128GB of unified memory shared between CPU and GPU. Sound familiar? It’s a Mac Studio. NVIDIA, the company whose entire empire is built on discrete GPUs with discrete VRAM in centralized racks, is now shipping Apple’s architecture, at Apple’s form factor, aimed at Apple’s use case — and even Jensen has started musing that “an AI supercomputer could become common in the home,” name-checking Apple’s M-series as laying the groundwork. The king of the datacenter is hedging into my thesis with his own product line. When your opponent starts copying your homework mid-argument, the argument is over.”'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'Thanks for posting Ped. It’s worth reading the full piece. “If Apple has its way, hyperscaling as the default architecture of AI is dead. Not dead like it disappears — dead like the mainframe: still humming in the basement for training runs and big enterprise, while the actual life of computing happens somewhere else”'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'I don’t think for one second that Nokia or BlackBerry RIM would agree with those views! And yes, Microsoft survives by serving corporates, but its valuation for consumer personal products must be near zero by now. Nvidia is a dead man walking, and quite possibly OpenAI is as well. Dead as in a shadow of their former selves.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'I count customers. Nvidia has 5 customers. They all are feverishly investing in how not to remain customers. Apple has 1.5 billion customers. They are all looking forward to the next way to remain customers. As an exercise to the reader I invite you to count SpaceX customers.'
on Mark Gurman: OpenAI's first device will be shiny AI donut - 'Highly anticipated by… no one? Perhaps I’ll eat my words, since it’s rumored to be a donut.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'Agree that Apple wins. But win/lose seems simplistic. Most on this forum have watched client/server ebb and flow for decades, both still growing and both re-inventing themselves throughout. And that re-invention means winners and losers on both sides. Apple has already won every client device category except eye-wear – way too early. They won the App market. Claude validates Apple silicon for 3rd party AI. Early reviews of Apple AI on Apple Silicon sound really bullish As for the ‘server’ AI, Nvidia has CUDA and other moat-creating assets. The rest of cloud-AI, both frontier and inference, look like the early days of the PC clone biz and the dot com boom.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'There’s a persistent problem with the dead man thesis: it presumes that such huge battles will result in one company being killed. But what often happens is that companies competing head to head in what looks like an existential contest slide off to compete in other arenas. Microsoft’s OS chokehold was supposed to kill Apple. Then Apple’s chokehold on phones and its ecosystem was supposed to kill off Microsoft. Instead, both companies are booming and neither is an existential threat to the other. They remain vicious competitors, to be sure, but a lot of it is in arenas where they aren’t head to head. Now we have the argument that Apple will kill Nvidia. I predict we’ll see the same dynamic: any existential competition, if that is what is happening today, will cease to be the central focus as the two shift to focus the majority of their energies on new markets where they likely won’t be competing head to head. But you gotta admit: asserting that a multi-trillion dollar company is deadman walking is eye catching.'
on Tiny Chinese chipmaker teaches giant Apple a lesson - 'Just a thought experiment: Global Wafers in Sherman, Texas, receives a lot of funding from Apple on its current path to producing 1.2 million wafers a month. Apple uses a lot of those wafers for its US suppliers (ie TSMC, TI). Doing a little checking, CXMT produces 200,000 wafers a month. Would CXMT produce some memory for Apple if Apple supplied the wafers at a reduced price? Currently, Apple uses those wafers for its own suppliers in the US. But I wonder if there might be a point where Apple could take a hit on wafer costs by sending them to CXMT at less than full price but make it up on cheaper memory chips to put in Apple products. CXMT gets its profit. Bet Cook and Ternus know. It is more complex than this, I am sure (ie the wafers are supposed to be for US companies first), but an interesting thought.'
on Omdia: Apple still rules the shrinking tablet market; Lenova is growing fast - 'It would be interesting to know the installed base number. iPads last a long time.'
on Omdia: Apple still rules the shrinking tablet market; Lenova is growing fast - '“Lenovo was the only company to record shipment growth, with volumes increasing 27% year on year.” this is an example of picking out the stats that support the story you want to tell. I believe a more accurate stat as to what’s happening in the whole market place is market share. Lenovo’s market share actually decreased from 11.1% to 7.8%.'
on Mark Gurman: OpenAI's first device will be shiny AI donut - '“The device is designed to…tailor conversations and act more like a real person.” Oh, yes please. I want more of that, for sure. It’s fraud, isn’t it?'
