discountopinion

Personally I am not against the share buybacks as it could be viewed as useful support against AAPL share softness on occasion.

My preference is that the proportions are adjusted towards a higher dividend of 1.5% vs. The effective 0.5% currently. Since currently Apple is effectively trading sideways short term and down (YTD) then investors can have a risk free better return in cash savings.

Many of the other big 7 companies reinvest a lot of their huge earnings into capex for AI or infrastructure. Apple has currently a capex light AI strategy under the cover of privacy where inference is done on end user devices and thus limited need to stand up large inference farms. However scaling laws for both training, inference and reasoning suggest that capex light is no longer viable and as such it is an interesting correlation that Apple is lagging behind in AI while deploying most capital towards financial engineering rather than AI engineering.

XAi came out of nowhere and spent a tonne of cash on compute and is now parity or ahead of the pack in AI in 2 years. Apple potentially could do the same.

Rest of Asia Pacific: +20.1% ($6.4B → $7.7B) - Strongest growth

Wesley_Hilliard said:

discountopinion said:

Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea - make someone outside of Apple the CEO. Someone who can act as a massive talent magnet in AI. Someone with incredible vision.

i sense that Apple would benefit from a 1997 Steve Jobs like entrance and transformation.

Apple has had decades of incredible profits and share price growth, only to stagnate and likely suffer from common corporate malaise. It would not be hard to imagine most staffers cruise their stock options rather than want to change the world.

Unpopular opinion - poach someone very senior from Tesla.
implement Elons work ethic and relentless innovation ethos.
i doubt you can get Elon but you can potentially get one of his protégées.

So you want to replace the CEO of one of the most profitable and globally popular companies on Earth that continually pumps out astronomically successful products with someone from one of the worst run companies in the history of silicon valley with one of the worst reputations on Earth?

Solid plan.

Thank you, it is definitely an option. I suggest parking your likely personal views on Elon’s politics as it does not help your line of argument.

Perhaps a brief moment reviewing his track record of innovation and building world class engineering teams can help. It is unparalleled and don’t take my word for it, listen to luminaries in the business. Most people would be exceptional running just one of the portfolio of companies. Tesla is an exceptional company (or collection of companies rather) taking huge risks shaping and building markets.

Hence any protégée of Elon will have much of his innovation DNA which is what Apple needs to make a meaningful difference in the next couple of decades. This is the most evident on the software side where evolution speed has been a large meh for quite some time. Look at xAi moving from standstill to parity or leadership in model quality in about 2 years. Apple is slow coach evident of a stagnant company.

Tim Cook says that Apple will be best known for its Health work in the future (paraphrased). Well ok, Apple Watch is nice and all but sorry it pales with the real hard problems that Neuralink is tackling which has a reasonably good chance at game changing improvements in the quality of life for many people. Yep, its an Elon company

Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea - make someone outside of Apple the CEO. Someone who can act as a massive talent magnet in AI. Someone with incredible vision.

i sense that Apple would benefit from a 1997 Steve Jobs like entrance and transformation.

Apple has had decades of incredible profits and share price growth, only to stagnate and likely suffer from common corporate malaise. It would not be hard to imagine most staffers cruise their stock options rather than want to change the world.

Unpopular opinion - poach someone very senior from Tesla.
implement Elons work ethic and relentless innovation ethos.
i doubt you can get Elon but you can potentially get one of his protégées.

nubus said:

discountopinion said:

Why only update the SoC of a low volume form factor where the SoC is not the main gripe from users? 

You're absolutely right but M2 in a flagship product is beyond embarrassing. If Apple isn't capable of doing anything else before a full reset in 2027/28 then launching M5 is the thing to do. Preferably cut $1k and accept the reduced margin while building next generation.

Fair comments. I feel the same about the AirPod Max and the Mac Pro of old. Low volume flagship products lagging behind consumer grade products in the silicon. It is a clear pattern. No-one would buy a Koeningsegg with old tech would they?