I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.They&#x27;re quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they&#x27;ve never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you&#x27;re like that, you&#x27;re probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.Meanwhile, I&#x27;m not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.

Speaking from a developing country with a large population of less educated people, I think you would be surprised to find out that a majority of the people in the world simply don&#x27;t do &quot;research work&quot;. Successfully booking a flight ticket from a straightforward app on their phone is already at their limit (BTW, ~80% of people in the world have never taken a plane). For most other &quot;research&quot; requirement like planning a trip, they would just search on tiktok to see what those influencers have to say (or nowadays, ask the AI)

I feel exactly the same way. There are personal finance management softwares that are mobile exclusive.Like, have you tried doing data entry on a phone? Who is using these products?

People use computers, just not Macs. Which is a shame because it feels like where Apple has the largest advantage compared to their competitors, being that high end Android phones are rather nice and the barrier to making a good tablet is quite low but a laptop is a whole different ball game, and Apple is far ahead of the rest.

You don&#x27;t really have to buy a new laptop every year though. If it wasn&#x27;t for my work provided laptop I&#x27;d still use my 2015 mbp

Perhaps a lot of people use their &quot;work computer&quot;.Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?

Is this because they don&#x27;t have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?

You don&#x27;t need a lot of space to see everything, because you can store information in your memory.You narrow down your options by having knowledge like &quot;I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let&#x27;s plan the itinerary in this way...&quot;I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.And it&#x27;s simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you&#x27;re distracted, you&#x27;re not pruning useless information, you don&#x27;t know what you don&#x27;t know.I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn&#x27;t have it any other way.

I get the feeling that people don&#x27;t do research work. They buy whatever is affordable that gets advertised to them first. They can&#x27;t even tell the difference between ads and search results. Their devices are primarily for media consumption and they create little if anything. They have zero need for most of the computing power their devices offer, could get by just fine on a phone from 10 years ago if it were still being supported, and they really only want the latest models for social status reasons.

&gt; I really don&#x27;t get how people do research work … without a computerPeople used to do it in their heads.Einstein, Tolkien, Hawking, Newton, Shakespeare, Euclid, Archimedes.With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)&gt; (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend&#x27;s just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don&#x27;t want to carry my laptop&#x2F;iPad anywhere.Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.

I really don&#x27;t get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer.For a lot of people, time is more valuable than money.They get on their phone and complete a task and move on.Spending an hour comparing a dozen tabs on a computer to save $30 on a flight is less important than spending that time with their loved ones.

Whenever I travel I&#x27;m also coordinating with at least 2 other people. That may include my wife&#x2F;extended family, or friends. I may jump on my desktop for research, but ultimately I&#x27;m sending a browser tab to my phone to share via txt with others.

I&#x27;m not going to list specific apps since I don&#x27;t want to be a shill, but in the last few years the web has become increasingly hostile with ads, fake reviews, bad information (Especially sites like Reddit.com). A lot of places that used to have good information have since been astroturfed. And Search Engines like Google will happily serve them up on the front page of any relevant web search.&quot;I don&#x27;t get why the kids these days book their travel using an app&quot; is this generation&#x27;s &quot;I don&#x27;t understand why people don&#x27;t use travel agents&quot;. There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.

My wife and I travel a lot, we aren’t that price sensitive. We are going to fly Delta where we both have status and stay in a Hyatt or Hilton brand hotel where I have status. It takes us less than 10 minutes to make travel plans on our phones.

This.Searching the internet on a phone feels like exploring the world through the eye of a needle.

Very few people do any research work. They usually click whatever platform they are already in (ie: mytrip.xxx) and just book the ticket there and probably pay using Apple Pay straight from their phone.

People do research work without a mac. A Windows box or Chromebook to do the stuff you want is less than half the cost of an Air, and a MBP is priced out of everything but status-conscious executive (and para-executive) consumers and FAANG-adjacent tech folks.

I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can&#x27;t open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.

I really don&#x27;t get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer. I really cannot stand seeing websites in a small screen without the ability to quickly open 4 browser windows with 4 tabs each for different combinations of dates, for example.

I wonder how much the Windows 11 debacle will increase Mac sales by.

Yeah, I agree. I have an Apple Watch 5 and I don’t really look at new models if they don’t have new sensors. Even then, I wait to see if they are useful. AirPods get replaced if they get broken maybe. I’m still rocking my 2018 iPad and I don’t feel like I need an updated one. iPhone gets replaced once they become unsupported. I’m still deciding if I want to commit to the ecosystem by getting a Mac or get a Framework.

&gt; Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.Are we reading the same quarterly report?Wearables&#x2F;Home&#x2F;Accessories is slightly higher than the Mac, yes, but its a category that has been trending poorly for Apple for ~18 months now IIRC, and that hasn&#x27;t gotten better this quarter (9.04B-&gt;9.01B 3mo YoY). There&#x27;s no foreseeable future where Vision starts driving Mac-like revenue (meaning, it&#x27;ll be at least 2 years). Airpods are huge mainstays but have really hit market capacity and aren&#x27;t growing. Apple Watch will see strong growth if they can successfully get glucose monitoring working, but that&#x27;s an *if, and until then its slipping from an &quot;upgrade every 3 years&quot; to even longer lifecycle for most people.Meanwhile: Mac is their fastest growing hardware segment by revenue (+12% 3mo YoY) (iPhone is +6%, iPad is flat, Services +15%).iPhone aint going anywhere, Services are carrying their growth, but Mac is very solidly the #3 darling of this report. Their other product lines (Apple Watch, iPad, Airpods, etc) are interesting, successful businesses, but its unlikely we&#x27;re going to see much growth out of them over the next 2 years. The story is iPhone, Services, and Mac, in that order, and there&#x27;s no #4.

My understanding is Services includes the billions Google pays for Safari search default, reported to be $20 billion a year.

&gt; Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combinedThis is reputation laundering. &#x27;Services revenue&#x27; is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.

You can easily turn the &quot;ads&quot; off though. The only true ad are the start menu ones which is a single toggle in Settings. I have much bigger issues with setup time. I just got a Windows laptop and it took (not exaggerating) 3 hours to finally get to the desktop. Multiple reboots at the POST, then taking forever to download Windows updates and get through all the setup screens. Compared to a Mac setup it&#x27;s an insanely long time to just use your computer.That is even not counting the additional Windows updates after you get to the desktop and updates from the OEM. This is also with a Microsoft account while restoring my own settings from OneDrive.

&gt; We keep hearing that the next generation is &quot;true computer&quot; illiterate.We had that development with cars. 40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car. Nowadays, we have a subscription for seat warmers. The manual tells you to visit the dealer to get your brakes checked. Makes me sad, somehow. But people have choosen this path as a collective.

&gt; We keep hearing that the next generation is &quot;true computer&quot; illiterate.I &#x27;member when &quot;personal&quot; computers were going to be a kind of capital-equipment made available to the masses, creating new levels of autonomy and personal control over our own lives, working for our goals and interests... Whoops.Folks like Stallman did warn me though.

It also helps that they are moving phone financing off their balance sheet and onto AT&amp;T’s, where people who don’t know anything think AT&amp;T is giving away iPhone 17s right now, when of course, actually, Apple is.The better question is, who do you know pays full price up front for an iPhone with no discounts? Only people who destroy or lose their current iPhone? The parents of teenagers giving the teenager the old phone and replacing theirs?

There&#x27;s also the fact that it&#x27;s tough to share a smartphone like you can a computer. I suspect Apple hasn&#x27;t made user switching a thing on iOS for this reason.

My wife has been without a desktop or laptop for more than a decade. Her primary computing devices are her phone and iPad.For doing tasks like online banking or booking plane tickets, I find the mobile experience frustrating and therefore do it on my laptop. She finds the laptop clunky and finds mobile much easier.

&gt;We keep hearing that the next generation is &quot;true computer&quot; illiterate.This is logical result of walled gardens.

Seems like the obvious reason for this is that Mac is now a niche for people that operate computers, where there are likely 6 people that don&#x27;t for every 1 that does. We keep hearing that the next generation is &quot;true computer&quot; illiterate.The second reason is likely that there are computers that are 1&#x2F;3 of the price subsidized by the terrible ad-supported OS installs. (Has anyone tried to setup a MS computer lately, it&#x27;s an ad-box).

Mac hardware has been the best it’s ever been.Though if the Mac Pro with all those slots could run nvidia GPUs I’d be even crazier I think.

Interesting that Wearables is flat.AirPods completely saturated their market incredibly quickly.

Revenue growth is more interesting than raw revenue: iPhone up 6% YoY, Mac up 13%, iPad flat, Wearables, Home, and Accessories flat.So Mac is doing very well!

Even if people still own laptops, if they aren’t using them as much they aren’t going to upgrade as frequently and they aren’t going to buy the expensive models.Theres also the fact much of the developing world went straight to mobile, skipping laptops.

&gt; Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.I view this the exact opposite way. The death of the laptop in favor of tablets has been touted for about a decade now, and it has still failed to materialize. Wearables have even surpassed the iPad.Not to mention, the Mac laptops have seen a recent surge of popularity last few years, due to still being the only realistic ARM-based laptop, with the battery life &#x2F; weight vs performance you get from this. This is still likely to remain the reality for at least a few years, and thus they&#x27;re likely to snowball even more based on this reputation.

Good investment decision and obviously the street was very wrong, but the reason the multiple was low was because of concerns earnings were at risk from a) their issues in China (which they solved, at least for now, but was a very valid concern at the time) and b) android eating them (there was a narrative they were about to be blackberried, or that android was doing what windows did to mac). There are good reasons why that didn&#x27;t happen.

Around a decade ago, even as they were just launching Apple Pay, Apple was trading at a multiple barely over 10x. Street was valuing Apple like a manufacturing OEM company. I remember buying a small chunck of shares at the time thinking, this is crazy, just the services revenue off of owning these platforms is going to become massive one day.

Not too long ago the iPad was painted as a disappointing product line, relative to the iPhone. It&#x27;s still bigger than the entire Mac business. Alas.EDIT: Ack, you&#x27;re right. Bad comment, self.

These are the wrong numbers. You posted the 2024 numbers, not the 2025 numbers.2025: iPhone $209.586 billion,
Mac $33.708 billion,
iPad $28.023 billion,
Wearables, Home and Accessories $35.686 billion,
Services $109.158 billion,
Total $416.161 billion

Yeah, the corporation cancer.DRM slowdowns have also made the built-in apps like TV worse for watching shows than just pirating and watching them with IINA etc. In Jobs&#x27; days iTunes even let you play purchased songs on any computer.I wish there was a law or something that did not allow shareholders &amp; board members who did not have an understanding of the industry, to influence or dictate the course of a company, without feedback from its USERS&#x2F;customers.

Great, Apple is probably going to force more ads onto all of its platforms to drive service growth.In ancient times Apple prided itself on not polluting its platforms with intrusive advertisements, but the line has been crossed and going back seems unlikely at this point.

The day Playground evolves to something similar to XCode is when iPadPro takes over.

If anything, they&#x27;re the iPhone company and they are massively understating how much of their revenue is directly attributable to the iPhone.Take &quot;Services&quot; for example: most of their services are things like App Store revenue and Google Search revenue, something they technically have on all of their platforms, but the lion&#x27;s share of that revenue comes directly from iPhone users subscribed to iPhone apps, playing iPhone gacha games or using Google (or any of the other officially supported search engines) in the iPhone version of Safari. The reason to have iCloud+ is to be able to backup your phone, and the photos you take on your phone, and store the emails and iMessages and other data you create on your phone. It&#x27;s all there accessible on the Mac and iPad too, but they have far more iPhone customers than Mac or iPad customers.Even the smaller services are mostly supported by iPhone users: most AppleCare users, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, arguably you could make a case that Apple TV+ (a.k.a. just Apple TV now for some reason) is the one service that isn&#x27;t directly attributable to the iPhone, but that is also like the one part of their services division that has had prior reports that it isn&#x27;t exactly turning a profit, and I don&#x27;t think you can even apply for an Apple Card unless you own an iPhone.It&#x27;s the same with most of the other divisions: the reason to have an Apple Watch or AirPods is they go great with your iPhone. They have their individual appeal, and at least with the AirPods, you don&#x27;t technically need an iPhone to use them, but these are at the end of the day iPhone accessories, the same as their Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse lines or displays are Mac accessories even though technically, any iPad could also take advantage of them now, or you could plug a Magic Keyboard into a Windows PC or something. The math on that doesn&#x27;t change just because of technicalities like that.So yeah, Apple is the iPhone company and has been for a very long time now. Macs &amp; iPads, the tens of billions of dollar businesses that they are, are just side gigs for them and Services&#x2F;Wearables et al. is just obfuscating the degree to which they are the iPhone company.

Framework desktop incoming here. (mac&#x2F;iPad&#x2F;i)OS 26 tipped me over the edge. Eyeing whether 7 years of GrapheneOS on a pixel will suffice as well..

One would hope that before ceasing to make the hardware that they open it up and actually allow you to install other OSes

If they ever stopped making Macs guess I&#x27;d start using Linux other than just for servers.

In terms of unit sales, Apple sells roughly double the number of iPads over Macs.If the rumors about a cheaper entry-level MacBook are true, that might put a small dent into that, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Most of the &quot;Services&quot; are the App Store and iCloud and AppleCare, so it&#x27;s still directly tied to market share of the iPhone. If iPhone sales drop 20%, &quot;Services&quot; will drop 15% (with some amount of time lag &#x2F; smoothing)

Eddy Cue was tasked, over a decade ago?, with getting out front with services. Microsoft was doing it. And no one wants to have all their eggs in the iPhone basket.Congrats to Eddy Cue then?

I&#x27;ve been using my 16&quot; MacBook Pro with M2 Max and 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD, for more than 2 years and I feel or see no reason to upgrade.At least not until there&#x27;s an external design refresh. But maybe I&#x27;ll get the M5 Max just for the heck of it.Mostly because it&#x27;d be a pain to move all the data and state (the Time Machine or Mac-to-Mac transfer is not always perfect and hands-free in my experience)They&#x27;re just too good for their own good.

Their computers don’t need to be replaced often so that makes total sense to me. Both of my m1 series Macs will be more than adequate for my web dev needs for the next few years or at least until Apple force deprecates them.

Kind of funny they don&#x27;t separate out accessories as its own category. If I were to guess it&#x27;s because they don&#x27;t want to advertise how much they make selling dongles.

It is also clearly why Apple wants to control all e-commerce and is fighting tooth and nail to keep controt

Especially given how long an ipad lives, and how overpowered they are for a large portion of their users.

I get that the phones outsell the Macs but just wild Ipads almost match Macs.

i&#x27;d love to know how much of that &quot;services&quot; revenue is just iCloud storage for storing iPhone backups.

Kind of telling that1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad.2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combinedBasically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services(millions)iPhone $209,586Mac $33,708iPad $28,023Wearables, Home and Accessories $35,686Services $109,158Total $416,161Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.

For companies revenue and especially profit margin share usually matters much more. If an iPhone user in the US etc. is worth &gt;= 10x more than an user in a third world country (both for manufacturers and ad&#x2F;service providers that’s a win).Apple could probably get &gt; 50% market share in those countries if they significantly reduced their margins (they’d still be profitable but of course it makes little sense m)

Android has the biggest market share, but way less margins than Apple; this is true for both phone and the App segments.

Won where?Android has about 70% market share and there are countries where only rich people get to use iOS devices.Other population layers also need phones and digital services.

&gt; leaning towards Arch on frameworkThat&#x27;s a wonderful idea.&gt; The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago.I don&#x27;t think Macs are even a consideration for most &quot;hackers.&quot; You can&#x27;t build you own machine, Linux support is limited, they just cater to a crowd that wants a polished experience and don&#x27;t mind giving up their freedom for it.As for the phone market, I think Apple&#x27;s success mostly comes to a combination of clever marketing and phone users being on average even less technically-minded than desktop users. Add to that social pressure now the the iPhone is dominant. That being said you couldn&#x27;t pay me to give up my Pixel running Graphene, a device that is completely immune to corporate spyware, forced &quot;upgrades,&quot; sideloading restrictions and compliance with idiotic laws like client-side scanning (if it ever happens).

Personal take :The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.

For us as consumers to think about, but there are multiple teams in many companies (not just Apple) that are dedicated to (exploiting) this interesting fact.

I still use my iPhone SE after 8 years and bought it for 170€. That’s under 25€ per year :-). (Ok I had the battery replaced for 30€ once.)

Thinking this through… I spent around $3500 and $4500 on my last two MBPs, but got 9 years of use out of each of them. That’s only $450&#x2F;yr.But where I used to get a new iPhone every other year, I’m now on the fourth year of my 13P and it still works great. That’s only $300&#x2F;yr.It’s interesting to think about.

Mac sales are up 12%, year over year. It&#x27;s Apple&#x27;s fastest growing hardware category. They&#x27;re just going to be lower next month (year over year), due to the release cycles being different.

Declining Mac sales aren’t concerning because Macs are high quality. People can skip generations and use their M1s for years.

Earned income tax makes no sense, it targets the young and hard working, and work should be maximally rewarded. Land value tax is what makes sense, targeting rent seekers and the wealthy. Also consumption taxes, if one is concerned about things like the environment or substance abuse.Land value tax is a consumption tax too, since defending and servicing and routing around one’s occupied surface area of the earth is very costly for the rest of society.

Thinking the last part is happening or will happen anytime soon feels very naive. Advantaged companies have the means to not pay their fair share and they never will.Corporate tax rates were insanely higher many decades ago. Both industry and the public thrived despite it. Corporate tax rate slashed, public flounders, corporations act in ungrounded and bizarre ways. This is not a healthy system.

Correct. Corporate income tax is really a tax on shareholders (alternative to paying tax is paying shareholders a dividend). The corporate tax rate hits all owners regardless of income&#x2F;wealth. That includes pension funds, 401ks, small investors, etc. Proponents of progressive taxes should be against corporate tax and in favor of income tax, property tax, etc.

What happens when shareholders are out of the country?

It&#x27;s an open secret by now that OpenAI and SpaceX have already minted hundreds of millionaires, and in California (SpaceX has a large socal office) they&#x27;ll end up paying 50.5% tax (CASDI+others). (AMT is a whole other thing.) The amount of service they get for that is enough to turn anyone Republican, however.

Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically (&quot;someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!&quot;) but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control &#x2F; other price controls is another one (&quot;No more rent increases for me, yay!&quot;).Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That&#x27;s the point where it&#x27;s most efficient to tax it.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economicsobservatory.com&#x2F;which-taxes-are-best-and-worst-for-growth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economicsobservatory.com&#x2F;which-taxes-are-best-an...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taxfoundation.org&#x2F;taxedu&#x2F;primers&#x2F;primer-not-all-taxes-are-created-equal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taxfoundation.org&#x2F;taxedu&#x2F;primers&#x2F;primer-not-all-taxe...</a>

Their 2025 US taxes are actually higher. In Q4 2024 &quot;Apple paid a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in order to resolve the tax issue with Ireland, which dates to 2016.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;apple-profit-drops-36-tech-205041625.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...</a>

Actually it was a huge tax addition in 2024 (from Europe over dispute about how Ireland had taxed Apple for many years). In 2024 Apple added 14.4 billion in additional taxes accrued over many years.

No, the 2024 number is goosed by paying a big back tax bill after a court decision in the EU.

Yes Tax Avoidance strategies are inversely correlated to enforcement efforts.What could have possibly changed…

Are different sources of income taxed differently? Could it partly be from some change in income sources? Seems Services is more significant this quarter.

Effective US tax rate is higher in 2025. The 2024 tax number was inflated due to a one time payment relating to Ireland which actually dates back to 2016.

Enough to pay for everything DOGE and the Trump admin cut in 2025, assuming a big chunk of that is US taxes.

This stuck out like a sore thumb to me:Q4 2024:
Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion,
Provision for income taxes $14.874 billionQ4 2025:
Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion,
Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion[EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration.&quot;the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;apple-reports-fourth-...</a>

&gt; And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.And glass&#x2F;mirrors from Zeiss, amongst a whole bunch others:&gt; ASML employs more than 42,000 people[1] from 143 nationalities and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers.[6]* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ASML_Holding" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;ASML_Holding</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robotsops.com&#x2F;complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and-vendors-for-asml&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robotsops.com&#x2F;complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...</a>Let&#x27;s also not forget the the two most prominent chip design software companies, Cadence and Synopsys, are American:* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_EDA_companies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_EDA_companies</a>There are all sorts of inter-dependencies between companies and countries: welcome to globalization.

It’s a conglomerate of researchers that were employed by the feds and private institutions who met have received various forms of grantsI think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity

And TSMC depends on machines by ASML they can also sell to others.And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.Which was a conglomerate of a bunch of state-funded US research labs.And the US cut its science funding.Misery all the way down!

TSMC&#x27;s business is much higher risk, each improvement to manufacturing process is a massive investment that&#x27;s never a guaranteed success.

TSMC is famous for not taking margin when they could. It’s part of their strategy.

If true, TSMC would command much higher margins. Their net revenue is a fraction of Nvidia or Apple

My intuition is that we would adapt just fine. Maybe we&#x27;d have to drop to assembly more often, read the chip docs closely, etc. Unheard-of performance benefits are still being found from Commodore 64s and first-gen IBM PCs, for crying out loud. What if we wrung every last cycle out of the Samsung or Intel chips?

I mean... do they? TSMC is the best but in a world where they had to use Samsung or Intel is it really a death sentence?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;apple-will-spend-more-than-500-billion-usd-in-the-us-over-the-next-four-years&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;2025&#x2F;02&#x2F;apple-will-spend-more...</a>&gt; The fund’s expansion includes a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona. Apple is the largest customer at this state-of-the-art facility, which employs more than 2,000 workers to manufacture the chips in the United States. Mass production of Apple chips began last month.

There&#x27;s an amazing book on Apple in China all about this issue (and more). It&#x27;s a great read and I&#x27;d highly recommend if you&#x27;re interested.Also Chip Wars is really good. I may be confusing which one is which because I read them back to back, but they overlap!

&gt;What would Apple&#x27;s next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?Onshore TSMC fabs followed by Intel fabs.Properly motivated, I think Intel and Apple could do a lot relatively quickly.

If a war rendered TSMC unavailable it would crash the global economy. There is no next best option.

Had to look up what TSMC meant (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).What would Apple&#x27;s next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?

All these companies depend on TSMC for their life.

The title was changed since I made my comment. Seems the message of their earnings increase outdid trepidation about their future.

What do you mean serves them right? They made records.

Beats earnings consensus, up 4.5% in after hours, yeah, that’ll learn ‘em. You misread something, but I’m not sure what it is.

AirPods are certainly super popular, but I can&#x27;t think of many places that are extreme outliers in almost every category like the Bay Area. A lot of startups have failed assuming their business that worked for Bay Area customers would work elsewhere.

&gt; Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don&#x27;t.What does this even mean? When I went to my local Apple Store to see the iPhone air in person (to decide if it was right for me, which it was), they had a line out the door for people who wanted to buy new phones. Their Mac business is very healthy since introducing their own silicon. Everyone in the Bay Area (skewed, I know) has AirPods on the train or at the grocery store.

New law: large companies grow until they become a media company and the C-suite gets to attend the hollywood premiers and awards shows.

Interesting that Google and Apple matched their quarterly earnings in revenue .

AI spell check OR rather sentence improvements are awesome.But by AI, people mean LLM and context. Remember what I told you -- yesterday I was booking a flight, can we check the prices again? What happened to that hotel booking? Dozens of other use cases. A private AI with awesome memory and zero hallucinations will be ... awesome.

Siri can’t tell the time and people on Android can remove passerby’s from pictures, we can’t. I’m an Apple fanboy but Apple has been coasting for 10 years.

They have enough &quot;AI&quot; stuff. People just don&#x27;t know it is AI. That is the best way of integrating AI into your product(s). The tech behind stuff doesn&#x27;t really matter for the end user.other companies should also follow that trend, use ai for useful features, just give the feature a good name... no need to mention &quot;ai&quot;... because next year it could be something else that is powering the feature.

Apple has (entirely on-device) OCR, computational photography, image segmentation for creating stickers, image classification and person&#x2F;pet recognition, voice-to-text. These were added and useful before &quot;AI&quot; became a buzzword dujour.If you&#x27;re only talking language models, Apple has on-device language models available to developers and end-users via Shortcuts, and image generation for emojis. They just don&#x27;t advertise most of their neural network models as &quot;AI&quot;.

If people are buying iPhones without AI mashed into every orifice, why bother?

They tried and made fools of themselves. They&#x27;re trying again right now.

US prices, meanwhile in Portugal where minimum wage is about 800 euros bruto, it goes by a mere €
1692, meaning 1962 dollars.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worten.pt&#x2F;produtos&#x2F;portatil-apple-914-7662-13-6-apple-m-m2-ram-16-gb-512-gb-ssd-apple-gpu-mrkean-8592978392017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worten.pt&#x2F;produtos&#x2F;portatil-apple-914-7662-13-6-...</a>Hardly a great value for Portuguese households.It gets even worse outside southern Europe.

At this point Macs have a great deal of parts in common with phones and tablets - M4 &#x2F; M5 chip, flash design, and so on.The main purpose of the Mac (for Apple) is to host the development environment that is used to create apps which sustain the iPhone ecosystem.It does continue to baffle me just how cheap Macs are. $649 for a brand new 16GB MacBook at Best Buy with M2, more than powerful enough to do the aforementioned development. And cheaper than most iPhone models.

No wonder they treat the Mac like a third-class citizen. Mac sales barely pay their tax bill.

They&#x27;ll just need to start from scratch on all this. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;substackcdn.com&#x2F;image&#x2F;fetch&#x2F;$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep&#x2F;https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8103a7d6-b5e9-49cc-9e44-4b2a626617e7_1787x950.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;substackcdn.com&#x2F;image&#x2F;fetch&#x2F;$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:...</a>I don&#x27;t think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.

&quot;If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.&quot;Is that true? Does cash mean nothing?

I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.

There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple&#x27;s involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.

by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use.I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.

Metal has little value for research community.

Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.

Apple reports fourth quarter results