mpantone

agilealtitude said:

...wondering if grocery stores will be considered 'essential services'?

Yes, grocery stores are exempt. So are certified farmers markets, convenience stores, restaurants (for meal pickup only). Pet food stores. The butcher. The fishmonger. The bakery.

You can see the text of one county's health order here.

Essential businesses also include hardware stores, office supply stores, UPS Stores, auto repair, and many others.

In a nutshell, basically they are telling people not to going out for leisure or recreational activities. Golfing? Against these regulations. Riding your bike for fun or exercise? Not permitted. Riding your bike to the grocery store for a dozen eggs? Permissible.

SpamSandwich said:

I don’t think that’s how stock buybacks work. If they could buy more AAPL any time the stock took a hit they’d be incentivized to pile on with negative news to drive down the stock, just like short sellers. It’s my understanding these stock repurchases are pre-timed and have nothing to do with market fluctuations.

There are multiple ways of executing a stock buyback.

One is the tender offer; this entails a buyback offer to shareholders. There's an application process, sorting processing, and ultimately some but not necessarily all of the tender offers are approved. This method requires notification in written form.

Another method is the Accelerated Share Repurchase (ASR) which is executed by a brokerage. The company buying back its shares needs to advance the cash to the brokerage and a forward contract is written up to outline terms (price, quantity, etc.). This is generally faster than the tender offer and the pricing can be more carefully controlled.

A third method is open market. That's right, the company buys back its own shares on its own. The challenge with this one is that often the open market repurchase will cause the share price to climb rapidly due to the smaller float and the increased value of the outstanding shares. This is more easily executed than the previous two methods but it is beneficial to have the cash on hand. Of course, the share price can change rapidly.

This past week's market conditions were ideal for an open market stock repurchase. Apple has plenty of cash. This is a fairly rare opportunity for companies like Apple to increase shareholder value.

red oak said:

The issue here is not the disengagement metrics.   It is the fact that Apple has severely curtailed testing.   It is another red flag to me that there is no go-to-market plan or timeline for Titan despite the huge investment in people and money

This is correct.

Moreover, Apple did zero autonomous vehicle testing between December 2018 and May 2019. None of their cars logged a single mile during this six-month timeframe which points to a possible suspension of the entire program.

And when they did resume in June 2019, only a fraction of their registered vehicles resumed very light testing.

Look, people. Different people have different needs.

I have a nicely appointed Mac mini 2018 connected to an LG 4K UHD HDR monitor. This is my primary computer at home.

I also have an HD TV and I like to have something like a HTPC attached to it primarily to run Kodi. It already has a Roku and Blu-ray player and can accept input from my iDevices. 

Guess what? Another Mac mini would be massively expensive overkill. So I bought a $170 Wintel PC instead. Having a Wintel PC in the house is convenient. I own certain devices that are more easily configured using Windows-based utilities than Mac-based utilities. I had to update the firmware on a third-party keyboard the other day: no Mac tool for this. With the arrival of 64-bit-only Catalina, having the Wintel box with legacy software support is even more critical.

I will bet a buffalo nickel that the Wintel PC will continue printing to my cheapo HP MFP long after Apple drops macOS support for this inkjet device.

Again, this is only my usage case. There are probably as many usage cases are there are people who own computers. If you have five devices most likely you are not doing exactly the same things (and only those things) on each device.

The comparison between the Mac mini and the Intel NUC is quite relevant and useful.

MplsP said:

It would be very odd that Apple's that far along that they're beginning production but they haven't announced it yet

It's called a production ramp or ramp-up. This certainly isn't the first time Apple has done this. For something that sells lots of units (like the iPhone), Apple's production ramp is likely six weeks prior to the availability date. Their manufacturing partners can't make ten million iPhones in a week.

Apple isn't the only one who does this. It's pretty common practice in the manufacturing industry. You want that new videogame console on Day 1? Well, it was probably built a month ago and sat in a warehouse up until a couple of days ago.

This is a very well known concept in economics and business.