Asymco Bulletin 019 - June 28, 2026
by Horace Dediu
Asymco Bulletin is a digest of all the work we have published for the week ending June 28, 2026.
Research
The Puzzle of Sustainable Growth
20 more years at 24%? If we use the rule of thumb that long-term investments in Apple have yielded about 24% then the rule of 72 means you double your money in three years, every three years.
The question has always been about sustainability.
This is the question at the heart of Warren Buffett’s investment thesis. He called it a moat. It’s at the heart of management theory and it’s called sustainable competitive advantage. And it’s at the heart of Apple investment. Especially as the company was known as a hit-driven business. Hits are nice but they are not likely to be consistent. It’s why it’s had a low P/E ratio even though it was booming. →
Why iPhones prices don’t change
Exponential increase in performance at a flat price. Is the formula about to change? The iPhone price structure is very carefully constructed. One could even say it’s engineered. It has operated under many constraints: segmentation, margin, scale and market windows. The balance between these and other constraints has been managed for 19 years. Until 2021 inflation was not a major factor but following the Covid perturbation the iPhone pricing fell dramatically. To see the →
Nota Bene
Only one in eight smartphone users uses a smartwatch. What’s the problem? → Counterpoint has Apple Watch shipments up 21 percent, the fastest among the top ten, yet pegs the whole category at 3 percent growth through 2030. That treats the market as mature when only one in eight smartphone users wears a watch. With roughly 650 million users against nearly 6 billion phones, the constraint is non-consumption, not demand. The catalyst that finally unlocks that headroom will be a health and wellness killer app, cheaper than GLP-1 drugs and far better at changing habits. →
‘China’s Apple’ is in free-fall → Xiaomi, the company everyone insists on calling China’s Apple, is down 63 percent in a year, with revenue off 11 percent and profit cut by more than half. The market blames memory prices and the EV selloff, but the real cause is a lack of discipline. Xiaomi fast-followed Apple into cars and then refused to follow Apple back out when the project was cancelled. Phones and cars overlap in nothing, and a century of carmakers trying to diversify shows every version of this mix fails. →
The Memory Shock: Six Readings from a Supply-Chain Conversation → Singling out memory as strategic makes little sense when the supply chain is a global train, and qualifying an alternative supplier takes a year or two, not months. Apple’s old leverage of prepaying for hundreds of millions of devices is being undermined by data-center buyers who commit the same cash for a fraction of the units, so suppliers took the money and ran. Tim Cook calling this a hundred-year flood he has not seen in forty years told me he was shaken and out of his element. The phone market may fall 12 to 20 percent this year, the worst on record, but if Apple sneezes everyone else gets the flu and Apple quietly gains share. →
Office Hours
Why is the most expensive thing you own the dumbest? → Home has waited years for its missing ingredient, which is inference, because setting up a smart home today turns you into a programmer and it still fails. Apple TV is the hub only by convenience, and as an appliance you replace like a refrigerator it withers, so whatever comes next has to be a software object that keeps evolving. The real embarrassment is that the most expensive thing you own, a house worth millions, is the dumbest thing you own, with less intelligence than a $300 watch. The answer is not a humanoid robot that unsettles people but a little speaker with a screen that turns to greet you. →
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