retrogusto

I don't know where AI is getting the idea that children are among the groups at greatest risk. Everything I've seen so far says that children are the group with the lowest risk.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/key-coronavirus-question-how-are-children-affected/

https://www.livescience.com/why-kids-missing-coronavirus-cases.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-case-children-infants-low-disease-expert-explain-why-2020-2

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/children-faq.html

Yeah, anyone who thinks it’s directly correlated is mistaken.

There are also a few other things to consider: Apple makes a ton of cash each quarter—so much that they don’t feel that they could efficiently spend all of it on things like R&D. As a result, they can distribute some of it to shareholders, but there aren’t so many ways to do that. When they pay a dividend, the underlying value of the shares theoretically decreases by the amount of the payout, because company assets have been distributed to shareholders’ individual bank accounts. Those shareholders pay tax on those dividends at the rate of normal income. If the company buys back shares, the underlying value of the shares does not decrease (and will increase in the future faster than it would have), because the money has been reinvested in the company, and gains from the share value will be subject to capital gains tax rates, which are 15% in the US if you hold the shares for more than a year, which is much lower than other income is normally taxed. As an additional benefit, when shares are bought back and retired, those shares no longer receive a dividend, so the company’s overall dividend payout is reduced. So for every million shares Apple buys back, they are saving $770,000 per quarter at the current dividend rate. This may not seem like a lot, but it adds up—according to this article, they saved almost a billion dollars in dividend payments last year just as a result of the shares they bought back in the first three quarters last year. Those same buybacks from last year will save them even more this year, because the dividend rate is higher now, and the more you buy back and the higher the dividend, the more you save. 

They probably said “show time” on this invitation instead of “showtime” because they are announcing a streaming service and it would be too weird otherwise—it’s already kind of like saying “it’s net flicks.”

Speaking of Netflix, sharing a login isn’t necessarily against the terms of service. You can pay according to the number of simultaneous users, and set it up with with multiple user accounts. And HBO has also explicitly said that they aren’t opposed to sharing. 

As for hardware, I’d like to see an SE replacement with FaceID, although I just bought a Xs two months ago so I may have to refrain from buying it.

Microsoft is very lucky that Amazon relies on their AWS profits to subsidize everything else—if Amazon started pricing AWS with the same margins as their retail business, a big chunk of Microsoft’s newfound profits would be up in smoke. But honestly, that’s probably no less likely than the idea of iPhone sales suffering a significant slump. Both seem highly unlikely, but Wall Street seems to have a lot more confidence that Amazon will never be as aggressive with their AWS pricing as they are in other areas. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s much more likely than, say, iPhone sales dropping by 2/3–which, as another commenter reasonably asserted, is what would have to happen for this valuation to make any sense. 

designr said:

lewchenko said:

There could still be truth to it. 

$750 is still expensive. Flagship prices only 2 years ago for the mid range phone option if you consider the XS and XS Max the flagships now. 

Broadly speaking , Apple might be finding that less people than expected are willing to shell out top money when cheaper options are available (iPhone 8)

The XR’s biggest problem is its size. I know people who have said they no longer have an upgrade path from either a 6/6S/7 etc as they don’t want a bigger phone and the XS is too expensive. The 8 is the only option for them and it’s not much of an upgrade. My wife is one of them. She would (and is) buying nothing instead which is a lost sale for Apple as she really wanted to upgrade. 

Agreed. I predict a smaller (6/7/8-sized) and cheaper (maybe $650) Xr variant next year. But I think that was planned all along anyway. They just wanted to see if they could sell the larger $750 version first.

My guess is an SE-sized phone with updated internals and Face ID, sometime around March, to boost sales in the post-holiday lull. It would have lower margins than the existing line-up, but the pricing on some of the components will have had a chance to go down a bit by then.