David Emery on Apple says Micron's profit margins are too high - 'p.s. If we’re doing windfall profits taxes for oil companies, we should also do them for memory companies.'
on Apple says Micron's profit margins are too high - 'There are only 10 reasons to be in business. The first is to make a profit. The other nine don’t count. If Tim believes Micron is gouging, then I suggest he buy a memory designer/fab (don’t strain TSMC anymore than you have to) and make a “reasonable” profit. If I recall correctly, Samsung devices tried to prevail through corporate to get favorable pricing for the Samsung memory it consumes. Corporate said “NO”.'
on Apple says Micron's profit margins are too high - 'Calling BS: Apple’s hardware GM is 36% to 39%, slightly above hardware industry average of 35%. But, a lot of hardware are clones, Android, Windows, or Lintel, where the vendor does not invest in the chip nor the OS. Nvidia’s GM is 75%, Cisco’s 64%, Micron’s 80%… Naive people decry Apple’s profitability. The biggest reason for Apple’s high net profit is their efficiency, especially low OpEx and CapEx, also excellent ROIC at 45%. Finance 101.'
on This week's Apple trading strategies (7/27-7/31/26) - 'These are the year-to-date (YTD) share price performances of the Terrific Ten equities ranked by percentage gains in share prices over this time and the percentage gains in the major stock indexes over the same period. Year-to-date the Russell 2000 small cap index has outperformed the NASDAQ Composite, the DJIA and the S&P 500. Among the Terrific Ten equities Apple ranks second in performance with a 22.50% gain YTD. This follows Friday’s 3.53% rise in the share price. Meta, Tesla and Microsoft remain in the red on share price performance YTD and SpaceX has fallen well below its IPO day price. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) up 34.66% Apple (AAPL) – up 22.50% Russell 2000 – up 17.17% NVIDIA (NVDA) up 10.91% Broadcom (AVGO) up 10.35% S&P 500 – up 8.28% DJIA – up 8.08% NASDAQ Composite – up 7.46% Alphabet (GOOG) up 1.69% Amazon (AMZN) up 0.56% Meta Platforms (META) down (9.83%) Microsoft (MSFT) down (21.07%) SpaceX (SPCX)* down (23.29%) Tesla (TSLA) down (30.39%) * The year-to-date decline in SpaceX represents the loss in share price since the opening price of $150 on June 12th, the first day of trading.'
on Apple says Micron's profit margins are too high - '“ Tim Cook may have a point, but it’s lost in the irony.” It’s only lost in the irony if you look at it superficially. AND, only look at the pieces of the puzzle that fits your view point. What are the pieces he’s leaving out? Apple’s profit margins are NO WAY near 80%. Also Apple didn’t raise prices to raise profit margins; they, unlike Micron, raised prices because of increased costs. Another old wise proverb- a fool believes every word, but a wise looks well into the matter.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Bart, Do these estimates include the possibility of a sales slowdown in the EU because of restrictions on AI software availability for the iPhone and how will that affect sales in the EU?'
on This week's Apple trading strategies (7/27-7/31/26) - 'I don’t wanna kill him just never hear from him.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'The Takeaway -> The retirement cycle narrows the gap between Android & Apple significantly. While Android looked dominant early on by turning on cloud-AI for older models, those older devices are now hitting a hardware wall. Because Apple’s AI user base is built entirely on newer, high-spec hardware, it experiences virtually no user attrition. By the end of the iPhone 18 Ultra sales year in late 2027, Apple will close the active AI user gap from 350M users down to just 210M.“ ((That gap doesn’t look like an existential risk at all, but it does assume Apple users & sales continue it historical trends and there are not mass defections to other makers or Android. One thing to also remember is 45% of Android AI users will be midrange model owners who one could argue don’t value AI very much if at all, but rather the price & other value metrics. More in that later.))'
on This week's Apple trading strategies (7/27-7/31/26) - 'I obviously like the message even though at times I’d like to kill the messenger! 🙂'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Good God, she’s even more stupid than I realised. Perhaps on the QT she is being “incentivised”.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'So at ~ Minute 2, Martin states that Apple cannot be successful without its own AI model, and that she is confident that Apple will fail in this regard. (I think she is wrong about that, because I think Apple is far better rounded than that and is surely developing AI frameworks.) But her assertion at s:ss 2:00 is in conflict with her assertion right at the beginning that Apple cannot succeed without a hardware replacement cycle. So which is it? Is Apple a hardware company or an AI company? Surely Apple is the more than jsut the sum of both. Given the size of its installed base, Apple does not need every single unit of hardware in the field to turn over each year to generate a very strong sales volume. I have plenty of old hardware that does what I ask it to quite well. (I may need to set slightly higher standards and ask slightly harder questions in the near future, but for today, everything meets my needs. “AI” is a large piece of what will push those harder questions forward.) She doesn’t scream gloom and doom, but she is certainly far more pessimistic than I am – and I jsut think inconsistent in her messaging.'
on The day PC Magazine fired John Dvorak - 'Robert: My introduction to the Mac, and the world of Apple, was actually learning desktop publishing at The New School on an SE/30! Plus, I think they had a sole IIfx (the Iici’s big brother), hooked up to a larger but still monochrome monitor, in the lab. So happy when I got my own “big” Ikegami color CRT…at some ridiculous price of around $3,500. Plus a “huge” 540MB LaCie Tsunami HD, which also cost a small fortune! Plus a hulking-big Microtek scanner at something like $1,600! Ah, those were the days!!'
on Inviting friends of the blog to Apple’s Q3 2026 Earnings Smackdown - 'I don’t enter these contests because I just don’t have the time to do it justice. But I think last quarter’s revenue and EPS should at least mimic the comparative gains we saw last quarter. Part of the reason is that RAM costs weren’t yet really hitting prices, and may have even pulled some purchases forward.'
on Laura Martin: Apple's existential risk - 'Apple is Laura’s chew toy and she just can’t let go. Ever. LOL She reminds me of an ad I saw online somewhere There were different scenes of business people at conferences and meetings and all the dialog is the people repeating “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI …”. It was really funny. Meanwhile: https (colon) //finance.yahoo (dot) com/technology/ai/articles/ford-hires-350-gray-beard-212805272.html The AI failures cost the company “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” in recalls and warranty costs. Ford says bringing back the engineers has resulted in $1 billion in cost savings in 2026. “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said.'
