Yet another Hacker News

53 points mfiguiere 1 hour ago 33 comments

inthebay 51 minutes ago | parent

Still an open question whether not investing in AI infrastructure was the right move. They did better than Alphabet, Amazon and Intel, but Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk, since they're building on someone else's platform.

iAMkenough 46 minutes ago | parent

Apple can pivot Siri pretty easily.

garrickvanburen 45 minutes ago | parent

I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack, but if your bet is this a short term stop gap until the market is more “unlocked” - less of an issue, and better to get the direct market learnings along the way.

Shank 29 minutes ago | parent

> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone.

In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.

The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.

thisIsFiner 44 minutes ago | parent

Apple's AI infrastructure is a hub device like AppleTV, Mac Mini, iMac, or MacBook connected to iPhone and Watch. They will be the first to benefit from cheaper to run, eventually embed in chip models, and are positioned to be a key player in offloading demand from data centers.

They’re the bridge to the frontier models until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.

bigyabai 41 minutes ago | parent

> until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.

Citation: It Came To Me In A Dream

nomel 44 minutes ago | parent

They're not building on someone else's platform as much as leasing completely commoditized compute from whomever gave them the best deal. I wouldn't be surprised if this compute will actually be happening on xAI hardware [1].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/google...

btian 42 minutes ago | parent

But they could rent from any of the 200+ neo clouds right?

mathisfun123 22 minutes ago | parent

> Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri)

this is not how it works.

pelagicAustral 47 minutes ago | parent

One thing I can tell about Apple is they could make at least a few grand extra in any quarter if they were to bring back the 27' iMac

andy_ppp 41 minutes ago | parent

They would not, they would make less on Studio Displays and Mac Studios and Mac Minis, the decision not to do is product segmentation because they hate us customers and want to maximise revenue :-/

xattt 36 minutes ago | parent

It may be a break-glass-in-case-of-slumping-sales-numbers option, the same way VW brought out a 4Motion Golf wagon (with a manual[!] with an LSD[!]) in NA after Dieselgate.

NoMoreNicksLeft 30 minutes ago | parent

I see no point in buying a Mac Studio. I would buy a 27" iMac. I would definitely buy a 35" iMac.

I might as well just get some Asus and whatever fancy monitor I can afford (that's not a Mac Studio) if it just has to be a tangle of hardware.

windowsrookie 1 minute ago | parent

My grandmother with a 2015 27" iMac and a 2017 12" Macbook just replaced both devices with a 13" Macbook Air and a 27" Dell USB-C monitor. She would have preferred buying a MacBook Air + a 27" iMac, but Apple stubbornly refuses to make one for some reason. The studio display has an A19 chip in it already (more powerful than a MacBook neo!) why not just make it run MacOS?

layer8 20 minutes ago | parent

Same for the iPhone mini. ;)

tristanj 10 minutes ago | parent

The iPhone mini was a commercial flop. The sales numbers were bad. It only accounted for about 3–5% of total iPhone sales. And the product didn't make sense from a business standpoint: it required specialized/miniaturized hardware, cost more to manufacture than regular iPhone, but had to be sold for less.

There's a very vocal group of people online saying they want smaller phones, who make it sound like there's massive untapped demand for these phones, but when you actually give it to them, it turns out they're just a tiny slice of the market.

kasey_junk 5 minutes ago | parent

I’m a huge fan of small iPhones and only recently replaced it with a standard size model. I pretty much hate it for all the reasons I expected.

But when I looked up the sales numbers for all of the smaller phone versions I had to admit I must be pretty far outside the normal buyer. The market really spoke on this.

lukeify 42 minutes ago | parent

Naturally, AAPL stock has slumped nearly 5% on this news after hours.

mingus88 18 minutes ago | parent

Because good news indicates a relative high and that’s when you should sell.

Look at the 3 month chart. Strong quarter. Certainly doesn’t look like a deal I want to get in on

Now look at the 2yr 5yr and 10yr charts. Looks like historically high values

5% dips after hours is nothing

notaharvardmba 14 minutes ago | parent

Wait, we shouldn’t be basing our investment decisions today on data from the past and projections from people with a vested interest in the stock going up?

kvuj 12 minutes ago | parent

But you literally are? By looking at past performance you are trying to gage when to sell at a relative high.

827a 15 minutes ago | parent

It dropped at the moment that they announced they were issuing a dividend. Before that it was pretty flat after losing ~2% throughout the day.

jongjong 29 minutes ago | parent

This is a crazy big number. I think the problem for them now is how people are going to be able to afford to keep buying their products in the age of AI job replacement? They'll have to massively increase their prices and become more of a luxury product and manufacture fewer units with bigger margins.

cmsj 9 minutes ago | parent

The age of AI job replacement that doesn't really exist?

motionlessveloc 13 minutes ago | parent

> Diluted earnings per share was $2.10, up 14 percent year over year, and included a favorable impact of $0.05 from tariff refunds.

In other words, the money consumers used to pay Trump's tariffs was not refunded to the consumers, but went straight to Apple's bottom line instead.

cmsj 10 minutes ago | parent

If I remember correctly, Apple didn't put up prices due to the tariffs, they ate it out of their bottom line.

zach_moore 13 minutes ago | parent

dividend = please don't sell!

reaperducer 6 minutes ago | parent

dividend = please don't sell!

dividend = interested in long-term performance and institutional investment, not pump-and-dump for the next quarter.

bananaflag 11 minutes ago | parent

Shouldn't this be third quarter?

koolba 10 minutes ago | parent

Fiscal 4th quarter. It doesn’t have to align with the calendar year and usually doesn’t.

Jtsummers 3 minutes ago | parent

Apple's fiscal year more or less matches the US federal FY. It's not exact because the federal FY is 1 October - 30 September, where Apple's ends on the last Saturday of September so there's a bit of float on the starting date.