Recent Comments

  • Gregg Thurman on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'I would be surprised to see Pro and Pro Max sales surge after the Duo ships as potential buyers weigh its cost vs what they get for the price tag.” Should read: “I would NOT be surprised to see Pro and Pro Max sales surge after the Duo ships, as potential buyers weigh its cost vs what they get for the price tag.”'
  • Steven Philips on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'What? And be sued by the EU? 🙂'
  • Gregg Thurman on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'Lee’s weak thesis is similar to the one I made over the weekend. iPhone sales aren’t down for lack of demand, they are down because of Duo curiosity. Even if that curiosity results in significant unit sales, it won’t be as revenue additive as its $2,000 minimum price tag would imply. That’s because the Duo is going to cannibalize iPhone Pro and Pro Max revenue. Bottom line, in my opinion (based on as much hard data as the pro Duo crowd), the Duo will only increase the size of Apple’s pie marginally. I would be surprised to see Pro and Pro Max sales surge after the Duo ships as potential buyers weigh its cost vs what they get for the price tag. What is a higher memory configuration Duo going to cost in relationship to a comparably equipped iPhone Pro/Pro Max? 1 Terra Byte, No Trade-in, No Apple Care – $2,599 vs $1,899. Note that foldables only account for ~3% of Android sales (after 9 years of market availability from multiple vendors). From an entirely business perspective I wish the Duo the greatest success. I just don’t see it happening in the same way the Mac Neo, mini or Studio is succeeding.'
  • David Emery on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'Yeah, that’s the sound of the Full Disk Access issue. My problem was that Apple quietly removed support for connecting to older Macs via smb. Fortunately, I found a workaround, I can still connect to my older Intel Mini via VNC and pass files back and forth that way. (Also, I’ll note that most of the problems I’ve previously had with Mac Music.app are -still there- in Golden Gate. But I’m not quite ready to produce the current list of errors. A lot of those are Heisenbugs, they’re apparently random in appearance.)'
  • David Emery on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'I have no interest in the Duo, and my 18 Pro arrived yesterday.'
  • Seth Bobroff on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'You can count me as one. I upgrade every year and am anxiously awaiting the Duo!'
  • Daniel Epstein on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'Of course the under reported issue is how sales for the Iphone 17 hold up until the delayed release of the basic Iphone 18. If the sales of the older Iphone model hold up well then the positive sales push from the Duo and Pro line will be noticed. If the basic models sales fall off too much compared to previous releases than the gain Apple usually gets from new model introduction might be lower than usual. At least in the first quarter. It may make for tough compares. I am sure Apple has looked at this from many angles so they should know more what they are risking by changing the release schedules.'
  • John Konopka on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'Sounds like clickbait. I think this goes to the Macalope’s first rule of Apple journalism. All news must spun as bad for Apple. Few people click on the headline “Good News! Apple is Doing Fine.”'
  • John Konopka on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - '@David It sounds to me from the article that Apple is not disabling this feature, just adding more cautions before allowing you to do this. I recently paid for something with a wire transfer and my bank had me answer a few simple questions to help me not participate in a scam before completing the transaction. Sounds similar.'
  • Daniel Epstein on Yahoo: Apple is one of a trio of stocks keeping the market afloat - 'Well it is interesting that 3 stocks can account for 21% of the market cap value of the S&P 500. Makes it very difficult for the money managers to keep to their investment allocation rules. These few stocks and a couple of others are probably under owned by many fund managers. So are individual investors taking up the slack? I guess that has to be the answer. Otherwise the companies values could have been limited if the fund managers were in control. And if these companies perform well then the fund managers performance compared to the S&P 500 should suffer a bit.'
  • John Konopka on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'I hate having to defend Muse, but this story doesn’t have much data. Sounds like a single person had a problem. In the comments to that story another person suggested that Muse had been installed and running with no guardrails and then the user added limits. Closing the barn door after … This user claimed that by limiting Muse before running it he didn’t see any bad behavior. This is all very confusing as we are trying to decide what to do based on a few anecdotes.'
  • Fred Stein on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - '“I’m not sure…” that Lee knows much. iPhone Pro sales are up 12% vs last year in China, the second largest market. That would offset other geos. His first premise falls flat. Since each Duo sale is really duo – two time the revenue, it takes little to pump the full season YoY comps. His second premise falls flat.'
  • Alessandro Luethi on Mark Gurman retails Apple smart home rumors in his first 'Power On' podcast - 'With all the unconditional hate Gurman is getting from this board, reading PEDs take is, well, refreshing!'
  • Daniel Epstein on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - '“My take: I’m not sure the situation is quite as binary as Lee paints it.” I basically agree with Philip’s take. This is not a binary do or die moment for the Iphone or Apple. It is more indicative of how the supply chain has pushed Apple to adjust its usual cadence. It is important to make Apple’s position for the future to have make or break tension for these writers to get people excited and or worried about something. Since there doesn’t seem to be an Apple killer or competitor on the horizon this “month” bringing up concerns about the popularity of the Duo vs Pro Max seems like a good short term subject until orders start. So we have about 10 days to wait before learning more about this subject. If Apple also introduces new products before the Duo order date like expected I think that is a reflection of how positive Apple is of its path this fall.'
  • Alessandro Luethi on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'If Apple plays it well, privacy control could really become one of its main selling points. Having an app requesting full disk access to do interesting things is not a good way to handle privacy.'
  • Rodney Avilla on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'Of the 3 people in my close family looking to buy the Duo, 1 is waiting to handle it first.'
  • Michael Goldfeder on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'I’m still predicting the web site will be overwhelmed with orders on the first day and crash.'
  • Greg Lippert on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'There will be supply constraints. So if you’re waiting for a duo, you might be waiting a long time.'
  • George Kiersted on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'Based on the small sample of people I know — waiting to handle it in person before committing is likely for most.'
  • Rick Johnson on How many reluctant iPhone 18 Pro buyers holding off for the Duo? - 'There is probably a significant number of people who are taking a ‘wait and see’ approach – if the reviews are positive and the experience of early adopters is a success then they jump in line for either the Duo or the 18 depending on those assessments. So, let’s not overreact to the initial demand.'
  • Greg Lippert on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'As far as Meta is concerned – guardrails be damned – we want access to it EVERYTHING to feed it into our surveillance machine – and sell our product (you) to our advertisers/customers.'
  • Richard Gayle on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'We do not know what guardrails there are for Muse but I would not be surprised that they are minimal. So I would not be surprised if the FB Muse might sometimes just find a way to gain full disk access without permission. And maybe then send that information back to FB (that is the thing that is lost in much of the discussion — in one instance, Muse sent over 100,000 lines of Apple Messages to the FB cloud where who knows what could be gleaned.) There are a lot of stories about AI agents getting out of their sandbox in novel ways and surprising their developers. Muse on the Mac does not have the same strong Apple-derived sandboxes that iOS has. Perhaps Apple will do more than just put up a warning.. Perhaps putting the Ai agent behind stronger walls is a plan.'
  • Fred Stein on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'A bit more background from 9to5Mac: (Note the ironic tone…) “You would think a permission prompt to give an app “full disk access” to your Mac would be self-explanatory, but it appears not. Even tech-savvy people have been granting this access-all-areas pass to their machines without appreciating just how dangerous a step it is. Apple says the feature was intended for backup apps, but developers are now using it for many more things, including AI agents. The company has said it intends to “introduce additional controls” to ensure users fully understand what they are doing if they grant this permission. Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action.”'
  • Bart Yee on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'Saw that a little while ago. Apple has traded within a narrow range above $330 since Sept. 11, about 18 days, and avg volume has drifted down to 49M shares. Daily volume has only exceeded 38M shares 5x out of those 18 days. As most here suspect, until there’s compelling news on the iPhone 18 Pro demand and supply, everyone is waiting on iPhone Duo’s preorders and then availability and delivery times. Since it’s materially a much smaller expected total orders (>4-5M but <7M through 2026) the preorder website shouldn’t crash…however, Apple itself doesn’t comment on preorders and supply directly so we have to rely on delivery time checks and industry analysts and commenters for clues – imprecise as they may be. No further comments so far on production rates, yields and supply inventory. However, the earliest delivered users will be inundated with demo requests. Plus there should be significant stock for Apple Store demos, probably 6-10 per store and then pickup stock, if any is allotted. Only at that time will we see or hear some possible stock moving news. Normally I would say AAPL is being treated as an ATM but NVDA is carrying another Trillion above AAPL and GOOGL & MSFT are over or near $4T as well so there’s lots of liquidity sloshing around.'
  • Robert Paul Leitao on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'On a day nearly 75% of S&P 500 components are moving higher Apple is off $0.73 at $332.16. Constellation Energy is leading the index higher with a gain midday of 15.46% at $291.11 on news Google has struck a 20-year nuclear power deal with the company. Apple supplier Corning is up $8.25 or 5.18% at $159.37 and Broadcom is up $15.68 or 4.33% at $362.51. We are now halfway through the noon hour in New York.'
  • Bart Yee on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'Glad you’re mostly enjoying your new iPhone 18 Pro. The constant refrain of “Apple’s incremental changes aren’t worth upgrading to from last year’s model”. Well DUH! You may or may not see a “big enough” difference from one generation before to consider an upgrade. BUT, with AI having Apple install extra DRAM and 2nm A20 CPU as standard plus better thermal management, coming from iPhone 16, 15, 14, 13 and 12 (October 2020, 6 years ago), the performance differences can and would be huge for everyday tasks and more complex tasks. This would be even more evident if any of these older models’ batteries had degraded to near 80% or below. As for setting up a new iPhone and restoring a backup to new iOS 27, From Gemini “By keeping Siri AI and Apple Intelligence turned off, you are only preventing the user-facing AI features from activating. Your phone will not actively consume extra processing power to build background generative assets (like Genmoji caches or predictive writing models), nor will it prompt you to join Siri AI waitlists. What to Expect Post-Upgrade Because the phone must completely re-map your local storage and cloud-synced file metadata, your iPhone will likely run warm and experience temporary battery drain for anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. To help your phone finish this mandatory indexing as fast as possible, leave it plugged into power, locked, and connected to Wi-Fi overnight.” My rule of thumb is to expect extra battery drain while reindexing and give it at least a week on a solid and fast Wi-Fi connection with plug in power each night. Carry an external power source when not plugged in.'
  • Robert Paul Leitao on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'An interesting story on Yahoo! Finance this morning stating in the title, “Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft are keeping the stock market afloat.” https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/nvidia-apple-and-microsoft-are-keeping-the-stock-market-afloat-140845362.html It’s a short article I won’t try to summarize. The title does that for the reader.'
  • George Ewonus on Apple has a 'Full Disk Access' problem - 'As for AI & Meta, caveat emptor! (And I didn’t need AI to look that up)'
  • David Emery on Premarket: Apple was green, turned red - 'My 18 Pro arrived yesterday. Transitioning from the 15 Pro was harder than it should have been, took me 3 tries. And then, despite the two phones being connected by a USB cable, it appears Apple’s default data transfer mode is via iCloud. NOT a particularly smooth experience. But the phone feels significantly faster, particularly Safari. I noticed the battery charged to 100% the first couple of times, probably in part to support the background indexing that apparently is happening with iOS 27 to support AI. (And I -think- I’ve turned off all that AI stuff. That’s my default position on AI, if/when I need it, I’ll enable it. But NOT before! Now stay off my lawn! )'
  • David Emery on Jim Cramer calls BS on Erik Woodring's Apple target cut - 'Don’t agree that’s the right word. “pedantic” implies ‘irrelevant facts’, where this is “data without meaning” whose veracity cannot be determined.'