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

> We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" 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.

> We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.

I 'member when "personal" 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.

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.

There's also the fact that it's tough to share a smartphone like you can a computer. I suspect Apple hasn't made user switching a thing on iOS for this reason.

>We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.

This is logical result of walled gardens.

It also helps that they are moving phone financing off their balance sheet and onto AT&T’s, where people who don’t know anything think AT&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?

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

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't happen.

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.

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.

Framework desktop incoming here. (mac/iPad/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

Yeah you are right, my bad! Fixed

Not too long ago the iPad was painted as a disappointing product line, relative to the iPhone. It's still bigger than the entire Mac business. Alas.

EDIT: Ack, you're right. Bad comment, self.

> And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.

And glass/mirrors from Zeiss, amongst a whole bunch others:

> ASML employs more than 42,000 people[1] from 143 nationalities and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers.[6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

* https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...

Let's also not forget the the two most prominent chip design software companies, Cadence and Synopsys, are American:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies

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 grants

I think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...

> 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's an amazing book on Apple in China all about this issue (and more). It's a great read and I'd highly recommend if you'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!

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

>What would Apple'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.

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

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/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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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'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.

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

AirPods are certainly super popular, but I can'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.