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This is an absolutely incredible value for money. I mean the iPad Air exists in a universe of its own. Completely untouchable. The whole power of M1 and new camera. What other tablet could possibly even get remotely near this offering?

Have an iPad Air 3 and 4 at home and thus struggle to rationalise the upgrade. 

Having said this. The smaller iPad Pro is now looking a bit threatened. I am betting that they may try to squeeze M1 Pro into the next update for iPad Pro.

Finally! This is a big deal for especially micro entrepreneurs, freelancers, taxis and small shops. Soft PoS will transform their lives as PoS currently requires a separate device either old school or android based with GPRS connection that can be flaky. Will be interesting to see how this takes off in countries where local custom or laws demand a paper receipt.

Merchant acquisition of card payments is a huge business with quite tasty processing fees. I think Apple is on to a winner and I love how they keep adding incremental revenue services on a continuous basis. Many small rivers make a large torrent over time.

Overall an incredibly impressive quarter.

Clearly the flywheel is accelerating for them as gross margins are increasing and for me there are a couple of things that really stand out.

The M1 MacBook Pro range is now a talent acquisition tool for companies. You know you are winning when leading tech companies actively market your products as an incentive for people to work there. M1 is a game changer for developers, data scientists etc and thus I see Macs becoming even more entrenched and integral to the Digital transformation story of society than they already are. This is a huge deal for high margin sales and I feel that the Mac is in the early stages of a massive ramp in sales and user base.

Services is growing at an admirably consistent rate and is now at almost $20B/quarter which happens to be almost the same as Microsofts revenue from their cloud services. Microsoft's share price has benefited immensely from their transition to SaaS and cloud services revenue. I feel that the stock market has yet to give the same level of boost to Apple's share price. 

Homekit - clearly the HomePod mini is selling better with a doubled market share from before. This combined with the Thread and Matter protocols for interoperability with the other smart home standards will enable Apple to benefit from a much larger and cheaper eco system of partners and products. Apple is the one that has the most to gain from interoperability and it seems like their home automation story is starting to fall into place. This will drive even more services sales and I wish they would double down on home automation as a priority.

China - For a while it seemed that Apple would have problems in China due to anti-American sentiment and low cost local competitors with reasonable product offerings. This seems to have completely changed and Apple seems to be in vogue again.  Impressive growth and if a 5G version of iPhone SE surfaces then odds are Apple will be supply blocked rather than demand blocked for growth.

Boom! Design language and features clearly positions the mini at the Prosumer segment. I feel it helps to declutter their lineup and make it easier to understand.

Some professions will bulk order this model. I can see it being very successful and going all screen with power button Touch ID is logical for a small screen device. Smart.

This also caters a lot to the smaller bag crowd that also have a small form factor phone like the iPhone mini. Now question is will this convert some people away from Kindle devices?

Super smart move by Apple.. keep pulling up the drawbridge on the competition by ensuring the lowest entry point is better than many of the premium Android tablets.

They have a clear differentiation now between the entry point iPad and the other models in design language and features. This thing will sell like hotcakes and at the price it is a near disposable device with excellent video conference features for a remote-first world. By using old generation components they also help further build return on investment of tooling and manufacturing infrastructure to last more years of demand. This will help margins and also enable them to perhaps go sub $300 some day.

Bravo Apple!