Joseph Bland on Alex Kantrowitz: A Gemini-powered Siri is 'OK for now' - 'Apple’s “payment” for renting Gemini, assuming it’s actually happening, will just be a reduction in what Alphabet pays Apple for being the default search engine on Apple products. That will increase Alphabet’s net profit by what, a billion a year? Hardly a massive ROI. And the private info of Apple users will be shielded from Alphabet’s prying eyes. It is, however, going to be a massive payday when Alphabet gains AI access to all the Android AI users’ personal info, which is the real reason behind Mr. Market’s bet on Alphabet….'
on Mr. Market bought the Intel-fabricating-Apple-M-chips 'rumor' on Tuesday - 'Apple silicon is a major advantage/differentiator. No amount of money could compensate Apple enough for giving those up to competitors.'
on Apple at $286.19: Another day, another record close - 'Gregg, MacStadium has been rack mounting Mac’s for probably two decades now. They brought in Mac Studios a couple years ago.'
on Mr. Market bought the Intel-fabricating-Apple-M-chips 'rumor' on Tuesday - 'TSMC Overseas Fabs – A Success? It was a long read, but worth it. Quite interesting.'
on Apple at $286.19: Another day, another record close - '(From that release) During exhibition hours, NeurIPS attendees will be able to interact with live demos of Apple ML research in booth # 1103. These include: MLX – an open source array framework designed for Apple silicon that enables fast and flexible ML and scientific computing on Apple hardware. The framework is optimized for Apple silicon’s unified memory architecture and leverages both the CPU and GPU. Visitors will be able to experience two MLX demos: – Image generation with a large diffusion model on an iPad Pro with M5 chip – Distributed compute with MLX and Apple silicon: Visitors will be able to explore text and code generation with a 1 trillion-parameter model running in Xcode on a cluster of four Mac Studios equipped with M3 Ultra chips, each operating with 512 GBs of unified memory. FastVLM – a family of mobile-friendly vision language models, built using MLX. These models use a mix of CNN and Transformer architectures for vision encoding designed specifically for processing high-resolution images. Together, they demonstrate a strong approach that achieves an optimal balance between accuracy and speed. Visitors will get to experience a real-time visual question-and-answer demo on iPhone 17 Pro Max.'
on Premarket: Apple was red, turned green - 'Setting up my two 60d Limit Sells now at 291 and 301 per Roger’s recommendation. Squirt qty’s so low and the cost basis on them not that low so I am not worried about the CapGains on it. Again, I only sell these tiny bits on climbs (I have a FOMO problem LOL). Cheers, longs!'
on Premarket: Apple was red, turned green - 'In early trading Apple is again setting new all-time highs. The shares are up $1.28 at $287.47. The high on the day so far is $288.61. Alphabet is higher by $.172 at $317.74. Nearly 75% of S&P 500 components are higher on the day at 10:30am in the east. The major indexes are now mixed.'
on Apple's 'lacks juristiction' defense fails in Luxembourg - 'Well, “standing” in the US is a complex legal issue. It’s been at the heart of most of the Trump Executive Order lawsuits. Plaintiffs have lost many times on the argument “they don’t have standing” (and IANAL, but it seems the same set of circumstances produces different results in different trial courts and appellate courts.) Extrapolating loosely to NL and EU, I’d expect Apple to have tried reasonable legal arguments, but judging (no pun intended) those arguments would require deep knowledge of NL law on ‘standing’. p.s. nice photo! I interviewed for a job in Lux city once.'
on Apple's 'lacks juristiction' defense fails in Luxembourg - 'What do we know about the Dutch foundations that have filed the case? Do they have apps on the App Store? If so, do they solicit donations through these apps and how would that be handled with regards to App Store fees? In what way is Apple abusing their dominant position? Aren’t there other App stores that they can release Apps through secondary to a previous decision? Or am I off base here?'
on Mr. Market bought the Intel-fabricating-Apple-M-chips 'rumor' on Tuesday - 'For perspective on chip making in the US, SemiAnalysis has an on-line newsletter. A recent article discusses TSMC’s decades long work on this. It’s a long read, and more useful than a rumor.'
on Mr. Market bought the Intel-fabricating-Apple-M-chips 'rumor' on Tuesday - 'yes they need to proven trustworthy'
on IDC: Apple's iPhone shipments are setting records left and right - 'IDC’s numbers are a little and a lot off depending on what they’re referencing: “Apple’s shipments are forecast to grow 6.1% YoY in 2025, up sharply from 3.9% in the last cycle.” “Apple is set to have a record year in 2025 with shipments forecast to cross 247 million units, thanks to the phenomenal success of its latest iPhone 17 series,” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.” For 2024, IDC estimated 232.1M, a preliminary estimate Jan 12, 2025. I have not found any correction to that. If iPhone sales grew 6.1%, that puts it at 246.3M, a little off from 247.4M. Either the growth rate is actually 6.6% or the 2024 number was revised by IDC internally to 233.2M. Small potatoes. This number is more egregious: “This calendar year will not only be a record period for Apple in terms of shipments but also in value, which is forecast to exceed $261 billion, with 7.2% YoY growth in 2025.” This bugged me a lot and should have raised some eyebrows at IDC and here. Why? As I had pointed out a few days ago, CY2024 iPhone revenue was $200.619B. That’s a long ways from $261B, because $261B would represent 30% YoY growth!!!, not 7.2%. When I had calculated potential forecasted CY2025 iPhone revenues, based on Q1 FY2026 quarter’s 10% iPhone revenue growth as guided by Apple CFO Parekh, I came up with $216.5B, a 7.9% YoY growth. If we instead sub 7.2% growth, we should get $215.1B. I believe the $261B figure is an erroneous typo that should actually be closer to $216B instead!! I’d certainly love to to see $261B in annual iPhone revenue someday but it’s not CY2025, maybe end of year 2027 because that would require only 10% YoY revenue growth in 2026 and then 2027. Another cross check was taking $261B divide that by projected sales of 247.4M, giving an ASP of $1055, an astounding 19% rise from 2024’s $888. Given current and past robust sales of base model iPhone 17 & 16’s in 2025, it’s just not likely yet. If IFolds became a huge hit, maybe that’s possible into 2026 & 2027. I’ve sent an email to IDC to inquire about this typo or maybe miscalculation possibility.'
on Apple's Amar Subramanya has his work cut out for him - 'Investment thesis: The people running the Magnificent Seven (and a bunch of other great companies not growing quite as fast) are smarter than the journos writing about them. So whom should we believe? The Mag 7 need profits (or sometimes zero profits and massive growth of the business–see Amazon’s earlier days, for example), while the journos need eyeballs. So the CEOs are running their companies, looking for opportunities and hyper vigilant for disruptive innovations that could kill them. And the journos are desperate for controversy; when there is little, they employ the chicken little sky-is-falling strategy: Apple is the next Blackberry! Nvidia is the next Intel! AI is the next Internet bubble! These headlines are better at grabbing attention than ones that might better reflect reality: Apple is the next Apple. Nvidia is the next Nvidia. AI is the next transformative opportunity and will have many winners. These headlines fail because everyone knows they are highly likely to be true–why read what you already know? Investment opportunity: buy and hold, tune out the noise. We’ve all seen those articles, “If you had invested $10k in __________ 30 years ago, today you’d have made millions. A more accurate headline would be: If you had tuned out the noise 30 years ago and just sat there, you’d have made millions. That’s why so few people actually invest $10k in one stock for 3 decades; they have trouble tuning out the noise generated by journos who can’t make a living unless there is controversy. Trust the smartest people, not the cleverest writers.'
on Apple at $286.19: Another day, another record close - 'https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-thunderbolt-5-macs-ai-clusters-mlx'
on Apple at $286.19: Another day, another record close - 'Search for “ Apple demo’d a mini AI cluster” And it should pop up.'
