"I sold it too soon. But, I bought it even sooner, so," Buffett told CNBC's Becky Quick in an interview Tuesday on "Squawk Box" .
Apple remains Berkshire Hathaway's largest holding even after the conglomerate trimmed its stake to $61.96 billion at the end of last year, according to InsiderScore.
However, Buffett said Tuesday that he would continue to add to the position if it gets cheaper. He said the iPhone maker is not yet attractive even after falling more than 14% off its recent high, and dropping more than 6% this month. That's amid turmoil in the broader market, with both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite in a correction.
"I'm very happy to have it be our largest holding," Buffett said. "I was not happy to have it be as large as almost everything else combined."
"It's not impossible that Apple would get to a price, we would buy a lot of it," he added. "But not in this market."
Buffett said the firm has made more than $100 billion in the stock pretax, and was favorable in his comments regarding Tim Cook's leadership of the firm over Steve Jobs.
"Tim Cook has done better with the hand. Steve Jobs — he couldn't have done what Steve Jobs did — but Steve Jobs handed him a hand that Steve would not have done as well," Buffett said.
"Tim was a fantastic manager, and he's a good guy, and somehow he gets along with everybody in the world," he added. "That's a technique I wouldn't have, for example, certainly my partner, Charlie Munger, wouldn't have had it."
NB: Warren Buffett said he sold Apple stock too soon but clarified he has no actual regrets. Buffett said it is better than any business Berkshire owns outright including its railroad, which is worth more in dollar terms but earns nowhere near the return on capital that Apple does. He also said his railroad might last longer than Apple.
He said if Apple ever got cheap enough, he would buy a lot more of it. He owned a lot more of it priced a lot lower than what he would have to buy it back at. Complete nonsense.
Also Warren Buffett:
Quote: "Our favorite holding period is forever". Action: Trade Apple to realize gain.
Quote: "Price is what you pay, value is what you get". Action: Trade Apple to make $100 billion pretax, mention that price determines decision.
Quote: "At a healthy business, cash is sometimes thought of as something to be minimized as an unproductive asset that acts as a drag on such markers as return on equity" Action: Sell Apple and other equities and move $300 billion into unproductive cash.
Quote: "Investors, of course, can, by their own behavior, make stock ownership highly risky. And many do. Active trading, attempts to ‘time’ market movements..." Action: time decision to trade Apple for cash on the basis of price, tax and market conditions.
Quote: Apple is "probably the best business I know in the world," "we like to own businesses not stocks". Action: Convert Apple ownership into cash.
Quote: "I'd love to own 100 percent" of Apple. Action: Sell 60% of Apple holdings.
Quote: "I don't think of Apple as a stock. I think of it as our third business" Action: Sell Apple, move into unproductive asset cash.
Quote: "I sold Apple too soon". Action: Also say that you don't regret it.
Actions speak louder than words. The results will be felt by his shareholders.
In Apple’s first 50 years it shipped 5.13 billion computers. This shipment total is higher than any other computer company in its first 50 years. There actually are no other PC makers that are 50 years old. But all these things were true also 40 years ago. So what are we celebrating now that we did not celebrate at Apple 40? The answer is Services, the consistency in growth in user base and the potential trajectory of growth to never-before imagine audiences. The biggest change is a change of horizons. →
Says Neal Stephenson who first coined the term “metaverse” This revelation came soon after Meta canceled the Metaverse. Let’s look into Neal Stephenson’s mea culpa:
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that [Metaverse] was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” →
How everyone is wrong about AI. The newspaper was an unexpected development It was not a product that anyone asked for. Like many innovations, it wasn’t an invention. It was not patented or discovered in a laboratory. It emerged as a result of the convergence of three disparate technologies: continuous roll printing presses, the telegraph, and the railroad. This convergence occurred by the 1830s, facilitated by a business model aptly named “the penny press”. Stepping back, the printing press was initially developed in the 1450s, 40 years before Columbus’ voyage. It went through numerous evolutions. The big change was moving →
Running a data-center AI model on a MacBook → Apple's MacBook Pro, with its unique Apple silicon architecture, could revolutionize personal AI by enabling powerful AI models to run locally without relying on cloud data centers, potentially shifting the competitive landscape in Apple's favor despite current perceptions of lagging behind in AI advancements. →
“There’s So Much Left” in iPhone: Tim Cook → Apple's relentless focus on user-centric innovation, epitomized by the ever-ascendant iPhone, underscores its enduring dominance and untapped market potential. →
Amazon developing a new phone more than a decade after its first → Amazon's renewed attempt at a smartphone, "Transformer," aims to integrate AI and deepen Prime ecosystem ties, learning from past Fire failures by addressing trust, scale, and developer engagement challenges. →
Mac fastest growing PC brand in India in Q4 2025 → In 2025, India's PC market soared to a record 15.9 million units, with Mac sales impressively up 24% year over year, hinting at a bright future despite looming 2026 challenges. →
Apple TV is a categorization failure → Apple TV, launched in 2007, struggled for 19 years as a misunderstood, underappreciated gateway to content, overshadowed by Apple's product-centric reputation. →
Apple’s Custom Silicon Opens up Potential for a Cellular MacBook → "Apple's C1X modem not only matches Qualcomm's performance but also reshapes the economic landscape for always-connected MacBooks, hinting at a future where seamless cellular integration redefines portable computing." →
Survey shows record upgrade interest for iPhones → Morgan Stanley forecasts Apple as the sole major smartphone vendor to gain market share in 2026, driven by strong upgrade intent and advanced features, while Android struggles with rising costs and declining loyalty. →
MacBook Neo Market Impact: Analysts weigh in → Market analysts predict the MacBook Neo will disrupt the low-end PC market, especially in education, by leveraging Apple's higher margins and user-centric design, despite challenges from price-sensitive K-12 sectors dominated by Chromebooks. →
World’s most respected Apple Analyst. —Macfilos
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It was not a product that anyone asked for. Like many innovations, it wasn't an invention. It was not patented or discovered in a laboratory. It emerged as a result of the convergence of three disparate technologies: continuous roll printing presses, the telegraph, and the railroad. This convergence occurred by the 1830s, facilitated by a business model aptly named “the penny press”.
Stepping back, the printing press was initially developed in the 1450s, 40 years before Columbus' voyage. It went through numerous evolutions. The big change was moving from batch (page-at-a-time) to continuous (rotary) processes. In the 1600s, Gutenberg type presses could operate at the rate of 240 impressions per hour. By 1818, The Koenig press could reach 2400 impressions per hour.
The steam-powered rotary printing press, invented in 1843 in the United States by Richard M. Hoe, ultimately allowed millions of copies of a page in a single day. Mass production of printed works flourished after the transition to rolled paper, as continuous feed allowed the presses to run at a much faster pace. Hoe's original design operated at up to 2,000 revolutions per hour where each revolution deposited 4 page images, giving the press a throughput of 8,000 pages per hour. By 1891, The New York World and the Philadelphia Item were operating presses producing 90,000 4-page sheets per hour. -Wikipedia
By harnessing steam engine power, the marginal cost of printing approached zero and typesetting productivity was such that tens of these pages could be laid out in hours. The production problem was solved.
The telegraph gave rise to news services which could relay national or international news to local papers nearly instantly. Small towns did not need to employ correspondents to reside on assignment to report what was happening in any and all national capitals. New syndication business models represented by Reuters and the Associated Press would distribute to thousands of smaller papers and communicate the stories via the Victorian Internet. Local reporters could flesh-in the paper with the latest from the community. The content sourcing problem was solved.
Finally the railroad offered daily distribution from urban to rural populations. This meant the entirety of a country's population would have access to news and commentary and, “all that was fit to be printed” on a daily basis. The distribution problem was solved.
A Bundle and Institution
From the capital point of view, the greatest investment for a newspaper publisher was the printing plant. The bigger the plant, the bigger the circulation. And the bigger the circulation, the bigger the profit. Printing presses kept getting bigger and faster. An old newspaper man told me that a newspaper is nothing more than a mechanism for depreciating a printing plant.
In order to pay off this investment, publishers not only sold papers but also advertising. To appeal to more readers they added a variety of content types beside news. Sections emerged to cover sports, lifestyle, photographs, opinion, comics, serialized novels, financial information, entertainment/gossip (thus forming the Hollywood star system). This included style pages, advertising and serialized novels. Some of the greatest literature of the time by authors like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens was first published in newspapers. Weekend editions were an obvious product extension.
Thus an institution was born. The newspaper became the primary source of information for the world. It became highly influential and a political (and propaganda) instrument. It came to be the historical record. We still seek out old papers in archives to find out what happened day-to-day in history.
The bigger the bundle the better the business
What made it resilient was its continuous bundling of additional information types, catering to diverse audiences. There was something in a newspaper for everyone. For men and women, from youth to elderly and for rich and poor. Since the cost of adding pages to the paper was marginal, bundling ensured a growing audience. This audience attention could be monetized through newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising.
Obviously nobody would read a newspaper cover-to-cover. There was far more information than could be consumed and also far more than was interesting to any one person. The style reader probably did not care much for sports. The Hollywood gossip reader did not probably check the finance pages. But most readers of newspapers bought the bundle because it offered optionality.
They did not need to read it all but they could if they wanted. Maybe a scandal in Wall Street would attract the gossip reader occasionally. Maybe a pennant race would attract the style reader. If something exciting happened, you could read all about it.
Consumers were happy with the bundle and the newspaper became a tentpole holding up the information a society needed to function. It swayed elections, influenced public opinion and investigated the bad and the ugly in society. By the turn of the century, more than 9000 newspapers were publishing daily or weekly in the US. A proliferation such that almost every one of the 3140 US counties had more than one.
Percent of communities in the US with published newspaper titles. Banks, Arthur (2004), “Cross‐National Time‐Series Data Archive,” via Diego A. Comin Bart Hobijn THE CHAT DATASET NBER Working Paper 15319
Unbundling the Newspaper
Then the internet arrived. Gradually, it became possible for every single piece of the bundle in a newspaper to be made available as a web page, free with some display ads. If you were interested in style, there were 1,000 style sites. If you were a sports fan, there would be 1,000 sports sites. News junkies could get the latest news faster online. Financial news was now real-time. No longer did you have to wait for the morning to find out what happened in the markets the day before.
As national and global news could be obtained on web sites, newspapers hoped to continue as sources of local information. That also gradually got peeled away by social media. The result was nothing short of catastrophic. Since 2004, the United States has lost one-fourth (2,100) of its newspapers. Weekday circulation declined 45%, from more than 122 million to 68 million. Consequently, half of the counties only have one newspaper, and two-thirds lack a daily newspaper. The loss of newspapers has resulted in the displacement of 36,000 journalists, including photographers, editors, comic strip artists, and copywriters.
The internet unbundled the newspaper but also the music album, the magazine, the TV channel and almost all forms of entertainment. Unbundling built new empires: iTunes/Apple Music, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook.
This unbundling led to a new way of finding opportunities. You could actively look for bundles and once you found one you could ask when and how it would get unbundled. And vice versa. Jim Barksdale summarized it as: “i know of only two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling.”
So much so that if you found a huge bundle that somehow resisted unbundling you would have to investigate it for what's wrong with it. The classic example is the automobile. As a bundle of many types of trips and configurations into a simple but over serving business model clearly it was ripe for an unbundling. That is what ride sharing (with or without a human driver), and new modes represented by micromobility seek to do.
The AI Bundle
The iPhone is an enabler in this game, capable of either bundling or unbundling depending on the apps which are built for it. Wearables do some of the side quests but the phone is still the core of the personal network.
I would contend that AI is exhibiting a lot of bundling characteristics. We assume one model is good enough for all types of tasks even though there are pitfalls in privacy, security or complexity. Being a prompt mechanic feels like more of a DIY experience. But indications are out there that AI will be unbundled. According to The Information,
“Apple has complete access to the Gemini model in its own data center facilities. Apple can use that access to produce smaller models that power specific tasks or are small enough to run directly on Apple devices so they can run the tasks faster.”
This approach relies on a process called model distillation, where a larger AI model trains smaller versions that can run efficiently on-device. These smaller models reduce the need for cloud processing and improve speed, which fits Apple’s focus on privacy and performance.
“Since Apple has full access to Gemini, its student model can also learn to imitate the internal computations that Gemini uses to arrive at its answers.”
But it does not stop there. The implication of AI as a job destroyer is also challenged by bundling theory.
Jobs as Bundles
We have long been warned that AI would eliminate millions of jobs. One of many forecasts predicts that by 2030, approximately 10.4 million US jobs, 6% of the workforce, will be lost to AI. The underlying assumption behind these figures is simple: if AI can perform tasks that are currently performed by humans, the human workforce will be rendered obsolete.
A new paper by Luis Garicano, London School of Economics, Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, University of Hong Kong suggests it's not that simple.
The paper argues that jobs aren't tasks. They're bundles. For instance, radiologists don’t merely read scans; they interpret edge cases, collaborate with clinicians, and approve decisions that individuals make. Replacing the image-reading aspect doesn’t necessarily equate to replacing the Radiologist job.
Authors draw a line between “weak bundles” and “strong bundles” based on their ability to be split apart. Weak bundles can be easily separated, while strong bundles cannot be without losing their value. You can think of bundling strength as also the degree of modularity/integration. A weak bundle is more modular, a strong bundle is more integrated.
"In weak-bundle occupations, AI automates some tasks and narrows the boundary of the job… In strong-bundle occupations… AI improves performance inside the job, but does not remove the human from the bundle."
In jobs with weak bundles, AI doesn’t merely replace a task; it fundamentally reshapes the job. The human is left performing tasks that the AI cannot, often in a more specialized and limited capacity compared to the original role.
Once AI takes over a portion of the work, humans cease to divide their time. They dedicate themselves entirely to the remaining tasks, resulting in increased output per worker, i.e. higher productivity. Thus even weak bundles don't necessarily imply job reduction but increased output.
Artificial intelligence is transforming job roles, rather than eliminating them. While certain tasks may be reallocated and productivity could potentially increase, employment and working hours have remained relatively stable. In many instances, the bundle holds.
In a strongly bundled occupation, AI still improves task-performance, but the human retains both tasks and a larger revenue share. Whether the aggregate labor share rises or falls depends partly on the distribution of coordination costs between tasks within an occupations.
If most employment sits in strongly bundled jobs, the aggregate labor share is more resilient than the task-exposure models predict. The distribution of bundle strength across the occupational structure is therefore a first-order empirical question for understanding AI’s macroeconomic impact.
In other words, the doom/utopia AI outcome dichotomy is false. It depends on the potential for unbundling. If you're in an integrated (strong-bundle) job, blending judgment, context, and responsibility, AI is sustaining: it will make you faster and better paid. If you're in a modular (weak-bundle) job, it will shunt you into an integrated role, whereby productivity rises.
The degree of job displacement will depend on the degree of bundling in most jobs across the economy. It may turn out that integrated jobs will be added as the opportunities created by productivity will be market creating.
History is filled with examples of restructuring of ideas and the re-configuration of businesses due to technological change. AI is an example of both enabling and disabling of existing businesses and occupations. Very much the way the Internet turned out to be.
Displacement happens but innovation creates more opportunity and reallocation of effort to better (or at least more) outcomes. The newspaper and internet created markets and jobs. Will AI do the same? Modularity may hold the answer.
Says Neal Stephenson who first coined the term “metaverse”
This revelation came soon after Meta canceled the Metaverse.
My thought was immediately, will Meta rename itself back to Facebook? We'll get to that soon, but first let's look into Neal Stephenson's mea culpa:
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that [Metaverse] was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.
A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.
When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.
Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.
Timing is everything and 20 years is always kicked around as some "infinite time horizon". It's notoriously difficult to predict when a transition happens and too many times we give up because we were certain how long it would take. That's rather the story of my life.
To remedy this, first, I never thought Magic Leap was interesting. Nor did I bother even skimming stories about Google Glass. I went nowhere near anything made by Facebook/Meta. Did not even try to use any one product, did not read specs, reviews or any other commentary.
I knew the products would not be very good being not much more than demos or experiments. To understand the market, you first need to make a marketable product and these were not good enough.
The goodness here was defined in the absence of creepiness. I've always argued that wearables are easily categorized: just look for places on the body where jewelry is placed and you'll know where wearables will be worn.
Jewelry has been developer for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years and it is inextricably connected to our psyche. Glasses do pass for jewelry but only if they conform to high standards of style. Functional objects rarely are granted status as ornament. Finding that balance is the key. It happened with watches and maybe ladies' hats.
Stephenson is right in saying that face ornaments are difficult "given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible."
That does not disqualify face wearables entirely. It simply needs design thinking and that's what was always what I expected from Apple. The Apple Vision Pro was not meant to be used socially. It does not even work outdoors.
It's a productivity product and one aimed at professionals. Apple will release a face wearable only when it conforms to its principles of user-centric design.
That was not the case for Meta because it is not a company concerned with customer satisfaction. Its business model is to sell users to advertisers and was motivated to enter device development only so as to disintermediate the smartphone. Doing so would remove any impediments to harvesting users data. The priority of user affinity and affection was nice to have but it requires a maniacal attention to even have a chance of success at being loved.
Rebranding around a hypothesis like the metaverse was impulsive but Facebook was a dying brand anyway and having diversified well beyond it, deprecating it was no great loss. Slapping on the Meta moniker was a bark up the wrong tree but not much was lost. I doubt there will be another change unless Zuckerberg falls in love with another way to get rid of its distributors.
NB: Apple never chose to use Metaverse branding. What it developed was spatial computing. It approached the problem not as a content but as a platform and user interface. Will we move to spatial computing en masse to the detriment of "rectangles in our pockets". I don't think that the right question. In reflecting on the past of computing, a new platform did not just replace the previous but created new markets altogether.
Each new interface was an order of magnitude more popular than its predecessor. Keyboard, mouse, touch, each added a few zeroes to the number of users. We are now at nearly 1:1 machine to human. I don't think that this is the limit.
We are entering the n:1 machines to human and wearables are the only way we get there. And as I said, where there is jewelry there will be a machine. Spatial interfaces are more natural as far as our perceived reality is concerned. The rest is engineering.
