Asymco Bulletin 027 - Aug 23, 2026

Bulletin 23 August 2026

Summary of Week 34, 2026.

Forward Looking

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Research

What’s so special about Apple Upgrade?

What has servitization ever done for us? Necessity is the mother of invention but return on invested capital is the mother of innovation. Invention is big ideas with unclear benefits. Innovation is big benefits with unclear ideas. This is why inventions are easy to point out but hard to find useful while innovations are very useful but hard to explain. Innovation is a matter of many small changes with big returns. The bigger this ratio between return and change, the more profound the innovation. Moving from selling music on physical media to digital files and then to subscribing to an →

A Second Study on the Apple Vision Pro in Surgery is now Published

Apple Vision Pro as the Primary Visualization Platform for Cataract Surgery. Dr. Tommy Korn co-authored a new study of the Apple Vision Pro and spatial computing in cataract surgery. It has been peer reviewed and published in Clinical Ophthalmology. I had spent a day shadowing Dr. Korn as he performed a dozen surgeries. It is remarkable that those delicate operations–saving people’s vision–can be assisted so competently by the Apple Vision Pro. Dr. Korn and his team evaluated the 2nd generation Apple Vision Pro (M5) using the ClearSphere app as the primary 3D view for cataract surgery. This surgery replaces the →

What’s Going on with Smartphones?

A state of the union look at the market for mobiles. Looking at the IDC data on smartphone shipments (2014 to present), the pattern shows a peak in 2017. Covid caused a contraction and recovery but since then the unit market has not reached pre-Covid levels. Moreover, the current memory supply crisis is expected to cause a dip unlike any of the previous ones. IDC expects the market in 2026 to decline double digits and another 1.1% decline in 2027. This may be optimistic. Yearly volumes could drop below 1 billion. The sub-$100 entry-level device tier could become permanently constrained →

Nota Bene

Rothschild & Co. Redburn upgrades Apple to ‘Buy’ from ‘Neutral’ → Redburn moved its target from $260 to $400 on the expectation of an iPhone Ultra at $2,199 lifting lineup ASP by 11% into June 2027. The jump looks dramatic until you notice the prior target was set almost a year ago, in September 2025. Eight other ratings and targets have moved in the two weeks since earnings, in both directions. A large revision mostly measures how long an analyst waited to revise. →

Office Hours

Apple TV: content is still king → Frederick H. asked why Apple is obsessed with making movies and shows. Libraries were being vacuumed up and locked into silos, so Apple chose to build its own from zero rather than buy anyone else's. Quality became the goal because awards are the only measurable proxy left once streaming destroyed ratings and box office. Sony learned this with Betamax and bought a studio for the same reason. If someone else owns the content, they dictate what you are allowed to build to display it. →

Apple and memory chips: a flat no, then a quiet maneuver? → Joseph B. asked whether Apple would buy a memory maker. Memory is a different business with different dynamics and it only works at a scale Apple could not absorb alone, so it does not resonate with them. I expected them to build or buy anyway, and instead they issued a flat public rejection, which surprised me. They will back into it another way, financing someone else, maneuvering, something involving Intel. It would be fitting if Intel became a memory company again, having left memory for CPUs at its origin. →

AI: a technology in search of a job → Bob V. asked how well Apple is pushing back on being late to AI. Reviews of the betas have been positive and the story has played out, but none of that is the point. For consumers, AI is still a technology searching for a job to be done, with real niches that are not consumer niches. ChatGPT is not the answer any more than TCP/IP or the 8088 was, and a chat prompt is a low bandwidth interface, a command line by another name. Emoji generators and image editing are features, not apps, and Siri is a feature too. →

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