John Konopka on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'The problem for everyone is that AI is an insane business as it exists today. If it were based on real products and real revenue then the big five would not be spending like this. Customers are not knocking down doors trying to obtain AI. Most end users are skeptical about AI. It is the billionaires who think that AI will give them god-like powers who are spending like there is no tomorrow. They all feel that this is like a game of musical chairs with one winner and they don’t want to be the loser. This game will go on till they run into some sort of natural limits. Maybe the bond market will start charging them much higher interest rates. Maybe there is not enough water, coal and uranium to power their data centers. If NVIDIA stops expanding and just replaces existing product that will hurt the stock. A lot of this seems leveraged and once the balloon starts deflating it will be painful for some. NVIDIA will likely shrink, but not go away. There is always a market for high speed computation, just maybe not at the $5T level.'
on Apple-AI enthusiast Errol Brandt looks forward to Oracle's comeuppance - 'Mark: Thank you! I will reach out early in the week! I very much appreciate your participation in the Apple 3.0 comment stream.'
on Tim Bajarin's Mt. Rushmore of tech journalism - 'PED: Any chance you would share with us his longer list? I agree wholeheartedly with respect to Mossberg and Pogue; the other two had far less of an impact on me personally. Hopefully Jason Snell is on the longer list too! YMMV…'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'It is indeed interesting how history tends to repeat itself. In the past, we had IBM main frames dominating, followed by the transitioning to Apple personal computers/iPhones. Now we have Nvidia dominating IA cloud computing, as we watch the transitioning to Apple desktop/iPhone AI computing. After a while, it gets confusing as to who’s actually the hare and who’s the turtle.'
on How Apple wins AI's endgame - 'Good point! We certainly have seen lots of examples of Apple competitors skating to where the puck is now, ignoring that Apple moves forward inexorably…'
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 - '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.'
