radarthekat

There’s a use case within that three day stalking window that, while unethical, is certainly feasible.   Your partner, I’ll use girlfriend as that’s my situation...  your girlfriend goes out occasionally for a girls’ night out and returns home well past midnight.  You become suspicious so tag her handbag or even car before she goes out.  Then, a few times during the evening you search for that air tag.  She’s not going to get alerted, but you’ll know if she’s no longer at the restaurant or club she claims the girls frequent.  You’ll potentially even know the hotel or residential address where she went, assuming she’s cheating.  And she’ll be back within 24 hours, or less if she’s trying to cover her tracks; she’s not likely to not come home for three days.   

The company is Arris Composites.  What they do might just be revolutionary and incorporated heavily into the design of an Apple car. 

cg27 said:

Rayz2016 said:

Nice problem to have …

Why not keep as much net cash as possible?  Keep the powder dry for acquisitions, rainy days, dividend increases, or whatever.  Getting net cash to zero sounds dangerous should the economy really go south.  Maybe they’re just saying they’d like to get to zero but know that will never happen, because they won’t let it.

By removing unproductive cash from the balance sheet and using it to reduce the share count, a business increases the percentage of each dollar invested representing the operating business.  And at the same time increases the ownership percentage represented by each remaining outstanding share.  As a potential investor you want your invested dollars [capital] to purchase an operating business that produces outsized returns, not static and unproductive cash.  

There was a time a few years ago, back when Icahn was carping, that each dollar invested in Apple shares represented only 75 cents invested in the operating business and 25 cents invested to buy a bit of Apple’s cash hoard.  Most casual investors don’t think about that.  But what if you said to your broker, “please invest $100,000 from my account in this company I feel is a good business” and your broker replied, “sure, but I’m going to invest only $75,000 in the company’s shares and let the other $25,000 sit and do nothing for you.”  You’d question his action, and yet that’s exactly the decision that all of us investors faced, and made, when we bought Apple shares back in those days.  Get unproductive cash off the balance sheet, and put it to good use. 

Seems like AR (apple has shown interest in and released development tools for) is meaningfully different than VR.  I wouldn’t necessarily place a VR headset along the roadmap to AR glasses.  The only really meaningful commonality is the need to greatly shrink the electronics.  

doggone said:

When Pharma companies outsource R&D to China they have monitors embedded into the site.  This is necessary to ensure the work is done correctly and there is no fraud in generating data when developing molecules.
Apple could use the same approach - have Apple personnel on site to monitor activity, identify issues as they occur as well as work on long term issues that take time to resolve.  Apple already have engineers on site so they know how to do this.  Even if the cost was in the hundreds of millions, the effect on the bottom line would be minimal.  

This might be viable for the assembly facilities, where there’s a very large volume of work going on strictly on behalf of Apple.  But it might not be viable for the close to 200 other suppliers who are manufacturing for Apple and for potentially many other customers.  Surely it would send costs skyrocketing you install Apple personnel in the factory that makes the tiny screws used on tne bottom edge of the iPhone, as one example.