John Konopka on Premarket: Apple is red - 'What’s with the call peak at ~150? Who thinks they need to buy an option to buy Apple at $150? I just checked Yahoo and you can buy $150 calls for next Friday for ~$118. Is this some sort of odd way of moving money around?'
on Premarket: Apple is red - 'IMO, we have 2 more weeks before Apple returns to buying AAPL on the open market. Barring a black swan, the retrenchment back towards a new ATH should start in about a week. Unfortunately, these days there are a lot more black swans….'
on Horace Dediu's answers to Laura Martin's Apple bull-vs.-bear Qs - 'Why was Candice Bergen doing the interview?'
on Horace Dediu's answers to Laura Martin's Apple bull-vs.-bear Qs - 'I’ve said for a while that the regulatory risk is the thing that keeps me up at night with respect to Apple. Not only is it a big fat target, but as its ubiquity grows world-wide, the imperative to manage the ‘iPhone as utility’ will grow. And at least within US law, the argument “using a monopoly to build a new monopoly” has relevance to Apple with the growth of ‘services on top of iPhones’. Now I don’t think most of the regulators have really thought this through from the ‘best for the consumer’ perspective, beyond listening to rear ends like Tim Sweeney argue that “what’s best for Epic is best for consumers.” One reason the Apple ecosystem is so beloved by consumers is that the alternatives inhale so vigorously! Apple would do well to champion advances in privacy and security liability, even at the risk of improving their competition, to forestall a lot of the ill-advised regulation we’re seeing now.'
on Inviting friends-of-the-blog to Apple’s Q1 2026 Earnings Smackdown - 'I’m sticking with $2.82. Loose number but The Street has eps far too low. $2.68-$2.73seems to be the range.'
on Horace Dediu's answers to Laura Martin's Apple bull-vs.-bear Qs - 'Thank you Horace – and thank you PED. ‘Nuff said…except for and just wait til that (relatively) inexpensive Mac comes out!'
on Horace Dediu's answers to Laura Martin's Apple bull-vs.-bear Qs - 'PED, I have a request. Horace marries the art of rigorous data analytics with insight. I believe (and lack the data to back it up), that Apple has long term growth in youth, in addition to long term growth in emerging markets, cited above. We have seen. here, US teen iPhone preferences cited here. That’s great but it’s US only, point in time only, and iPhone only. The on-ramp starts early, often with and-me-down iPhones to kids. It has decades of growth, more so as purchasing power and compute need increase. We see this in growth of services and the Mac+iPad franchise. Note Mac and iPad unit sales growth has been steady while replacement cycles expand.'
on Horace Dediu's answers to Laura Martin's Apple bull-vs.-bear Qs - 'Seems to be a good number of nails being prepped for the OpenAI coffin. Horace smacks another one in: “OpenAI wants a device to deliver its service, hence the “Ive Pen”. I see it as a mobile Alexa, not in any way a smartphone alternative.”'
on Horace Dediu's answers to Laura Martin's Apple bull-vs.-bear Qs - 'I love Horace’s right down the middle, no need for hyperbolic rhetoric style of delivery. Just the facts please with a side of here’s the trajectory where these facts can lead. We’re all adults (or at least we should be if we’re playing this game) and can have different opinions about where these facts can lead, but you’d have to come to the discussion with pretty solid facts to bend the trajectory.'
on Premarket: Apple is red - 'Index futures are mixed an hour out from today’s opening bell. TSMC, which gained $14.53 on Thursday, is ahead $2.90 this morning at $344.60. Apple, which dropped $1.80 on Thursday, is down another $0.72 pre-market at $257.49. Goldman Sachs, one of yesterday’s big gainers, is off $4.40 at $971.48 after gaining $43.19 yesterday. Let’s see what happens after today’s opening bell…'
on Richard Windsor: Apple and Google — Desperate Times - '“Furthermore, Google will be incentivised to ensure that Android gets the latest AI features before Apple does, meaning that there could easily be a situation where Apple’s AI is worse than what is available on Android.” I think this thought process by “Radio Free Mobile” is highly misguided. If Apple is paying Google a lot of money, there is no way Google is incentivized to give their best products to someone else!'
on Omdia: Apple's Macs and MacBooks had a very good year - ' I finally bit the bullet and just replaced my 10-year-old Intel-powered MacBook Air with an M4 Air with a significant memory and hard-drive upgrade. That’s asking a lot of compatibility/upgradeability capability. It took a lot to complete your task. I have to wonder if you could have accomplished as much on a different platform.'
on Bloomberg: Apple feeling the pinch of soaring memory prices - 'Yep, Neal had same thought. Apple in its wisdom has not raised prices in years past when it certainly could have, thus building trust capital within its user community for when they must raise prices. They also have been growing overall GM for years, as well as managing prepurchased capacity well.'
on Tim Culpan: Apple can't get all the TLC from TSMC it needs - 'That bit quoted above by Phillip doesn’t reflect the full article, which has a bunch of caveats that are pretty huge, including: “First, while smartphone processors are the largest portion of chips bought by Apple, they’re not the only type. Processors for Macs come under HPC, while it also has a strong lineup of custom chips used in accessories which fall under digital consumer electronics. Second, Nvidia isn’t the only HPC client. AMD is a major buyer of capacity for its own GPUs while Amazon and Google are on the growing list of customers developing in-house AI chips. Put another way, Apple’s chip catalog is broader and more varied, while Nvidia’s lineup is more concentrated around a huge number of wafers at, or near, leading-edge. It’s for these reasons that Apple will remain important for at least another decade.” Add in the reliability of demand for Apple’s business to TSMC and the possible temporary nature of this AI chip boom – both of which the article emphasizes – and the overall message seems to be “TSMC is trying to satisfy the demand for high-performance chips, while ensuring that it’s maintaining and satisfying its long-term relationship with Apple.”'
on Omdia: Apple's Macs and MacBooks had a very good year - 'Bill: How did you get it to work? It said “I can’t do that, Dave.” and I gave up! I don’t have the knowledge or skills or time to put up with the hassle.'
