Asymco Bulletin 024 - August 2, 2026
by asymco-admin
Asymco Bulletin is a digest of all the work we have published for the week ending Aug 2, 2026.
July Office Hours
Apple Earnings Special: Office Hours Live Q&A → The Apple Earnings Special took place on Friday, July 31, the day after Apple’s fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call, Tim Cook’s last as CEO. Horace reviewed the results and their implications and took questions from the live audience. Asymco One subscribers will have access to the live recording. →
Latest updates at asymco.com/live. →
Research
Why is there no Apple Car?
Tesla grew deliveries 25% and still managed only a 1.4% operating margin, 0.7% excluding regulatory credits. The bull case rests on FSD subscriptions, now 1.48 million, but Peloton peaked at 3 million on the same accelerating curve. Cars cannot be consolidated, made uniform, or iterated fast enough; even BMW’s base is only 50 million users and Tesla’s is barely 10 million after 23 years. There is no critical mass for an ecosystem in automobility, and that is why there is no Apple Car. →
Apple Earnings Consensus for June Quarter
A summary of revenue and EPS estimates from Yahoo, TipRanks and my own, alongside the March quarter’s estimates and actuals. Results land half an hour after close on July 30th, with Office Hours the following day. Both aggregators narrowed their EPS ranges significantly during the quarter, with a smaller squeeze on the revenue maximum. I don’t yet have a hypothesis for why. →
Is the Market Overvalued? Four Perspectives
Four ways to look at valuation: P/E, EV/FCF, each against growth, and the two against each other. On P/E the market looks reasonable, but free cash flows are turning negative; Alphabet just recorded its first since 2004. When P/E and EV/FCF match, a company is in balance, and Apple is nearly alone there. Recessions are built on bad debt, and if data centers become debt financed against absent cash flow, contagion follows. Earnings are an opinion, cash flow is a fact. →
Nota Bene
Goldman Raises Price Target Ahead of Q3 Earnings → Goldman raised its target to $370 from $330, expecting 17% revenue growth and $54.8 billion in iPhone revenue from a price-inelastic base. Ng sits near the high end on both target and estimates. My iPhone estimate has higher unit growth but lower ASP growth; we end up $1 billion apart on revenues, almost all of it iPhone ASP. →
Apple reaches $5 trillion market cap for first time → Apple briefly touched $5 trillion, a day after passing Nvidia as the most valuable public company. Eight years ago, on the eve of $1 trillion, analysts called it a clean beat on the path to a trillion while warning that 80% of sales were secularly challenged. Strip out the price points and the 2018 quotes read like the present. The company quintupled by doing nothing different. It has always been doing the right thing. →
Wall Street Predicts Third Quarter Numbers For Apple → Consensus sits at $108.9 billion in revenue and $1.89 in EPS against guidance of 14 to 17 percent growth, on Tim Cook’s final earnings call as CEO. The quarter had no major hardware launches yet iPhone share increased. The thing to watch is guidance: September hangs on exact launch dates, given a split launch period and potential new ASPs. →
Apple Will ‘Watch Everything Burn’ When AI Bubble Bursts → Ed Zitron told MacRumors that Apple is insulated from an AI collapse and will sit on the sidelines and watch everything burn. I would say they will simply collect all the available profits. He is right to put the Vision Pro at the heart of the discussion; it is the most important innovation of the age. But his comments on how it works show he has not studied it deeply enough to understand why Apple’s culture made it what it is. →
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