Asymco Bulletin is a digest of all the work we have published for the week ending June 21, 2026.
Asymetric
Asymetric Podcast: Episode 138 — Watershed → Horace on WWDC 2026, John Ternus's timing, what we can learn from the candy bar, and Judd's indifference to origami. Also, World Cup predictions.
Now in beta for Asymco One subscribers; listen to Asymetricin your favorite podcast app. →
Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that price increases are unavoidable as Apple's range of options on memory costs has run out. WSJ estimates a $270 increase in the next iPhone Pro to maintain margins; another estimate puts it at $140 per average iPhone, which Apple could pass through with lower margins but unchanged cash flow. Either way, smaller vendors face an existential problem at $300 ASPs. This memory crunch is a hundred-year flood driven by AI demand, and the eventual drought will not arrive until at least 2028. →
Nota Bene
TD Cowen and Morgan Stanley increase Price Targets → TD Cowen raised Apple's target to $350 and Morgan Stanley took base to $360 with a $440 bull case, calling WWDC a chance to reframe Apple as an AI winner. The new average target is $305 with 34 published targets and 41 analysts following. In 2018 half of analysts also rated Apple hold or sell at the trillion-dollar milestone, and nothing changed. →
Office Hours
What's a billion between friends? → Bob V asked about the Apple-Google deal for the frontier model. People assumed far more than is actually happening: this is a narrow technology license, Google gets no data, and the contribution is swappable. What's a billion between friends? →
Where is the monetization? Follow the compute → Roger asked where AI monetization comes from beyond hardware. Follow the compute: if it is on-device, Apple bundles it; if it is in the cloud through an app or Siri, the user pays a subscription and Apple takes its usual distribution commission. The Services business does not need new economics, and the App Store may show another kink the way it did when subscriptions became dominant. →
Why is Apple selling hygiene? → Greg asked why Apple spent so much time on child safety at WWDC. Safety is hygiene, like plumbing, only noticed when it fails, and almost never marketable. Apple spending fifteen laborious minutes on it was not aimed at consumers, it was a message to policymakers that the custodian is doing its job. →
Asymetric 138, hosted by Horace Dediu and Judd Rubin.
Judd: The World Cup has only just begun, but somehow Horace has amassed 11 yellow cards. This is asymmetric. Horace, why are you being so rough on the refs and your fellow competitors?
Horace: I don't know what to say because I'm not even watching the World Cup. Never mind playing in it. But so, what can I say? First of all, the World Cup is, for me, something kind of very beloved. I used to watch it quite religiously when I was younger, and my family and my father in particular was always a big fan of what Americans call soccer, but the world calls football. And because I grew up in Europe, and I live in Europe now, it was always a big deal. We would kind of predict those first round games, like what the outcome would be, and have a competition with that. And I even went to see, in 94 when it played, I think it was 94, yeah, when the games were in the US again. And I actually went to see a couple of games. Miami and New England or Boston. But the last few years I just haven't been as excited about it. It feels like it's lost a lot of its charm. It's become very expensive. And I don't know if the right word is corporate. I don't think it is corporate, but it has felt more commercial in a way. Which isn't always bad, but I'm just thinking that football is a people's sport, or it's the beautiful game, the game that everyone plays even if they don't have any money. You just need a ball. And many people just don't, barely even use a real ball.
Judd: It's like they make their own. And feet.
Horace: Yeah, you need feet. But when I was hearing that ticket prices were like thousands of dollars and it was so exclusive, it just didn't feel like it used to. And also, the game has become much more defensive because it turns out you can game the game, so to speak. And the games are kind of a little bit less vibrant. But anyway, I'm not an expert. I just kind of don't have the passion anymore for it.
Judd: Okay. Good to know. When we were talking earlier you had said that it's been a watershed couple of weeks for Apple. Tell me more. Why do you think that is? What has been the major life, world, company changing events or series of events that makes you feel that way?
Horace: Well, we finally had, in WWDC, we finally had the kind of, I don't know if catharsis was the right word, but it's some revelation of what people had been hoping for for a long time. Which is, firstly, well, maybe, I hate to say it, but I think it's kind of like two years ago we had anticipated sort of Apple intelligence being something that was going to change everything, or at least bring AI into the world of Apple, and it didn't seem to do so. And now it seems like it actually has delivered on that promise of two years ago. Now, what it did is actually delivered beyond that, but people haven't yet absorbed just what changes will be coming, I think. Because I think, unlike a two-year-old promise, what we're seeing now is an integration that's far deeper, where the operating system is going to change dramatically the way it works for the user in terms of interpretation of their intentions. So I call it intention computing. And it's going to allow developers to participate with AI inside of their apps, and it'll make apps modular for an intent driven experience for the user. So they're reorchestrating the entire operating system and the entire app ecosystem to accommodate intent computing. That's my read of it. And that intent computing has very much been the promise of AI as a new way of doing computing versus touch computing, which has been the consistent interface for almost 20 years now. And touch was going to propagate into voice computing or spatial computing, and now it's intent computing. Now, actually, voice didn't really go very far. Spatial, the jury's still out, and I do think Apple's pushing hard on spatial, continuing to develop that, but it's far more, let's say spatial is far more, I would say, along the lines of what Mac is, whereas intent is much more along the lines of where phone is. What the dream of those who wanted to replace touch was, those who, for example, if you go back to Alexa, if you go back to, what's the Google version of that? You know, just smart speakers. If you go to Siri, even the original Siri, if you go to Humane, which had the notion of a microphone-only interface, maybe with like a mini projector. And even if you go to what OpenAI suggests that they are building, an AI-first device. The assumption behind all of these is that, first, you don't have touch; second, you don't have apps; and that your entire compute is a conversation with some intelligent agent, or the equivalent of a chatbot. And you ask it what you want to have done and it'll do it. By this I mean intent, because it's kind of like you just ask. It seems a bit utopian, because I think that it's not driven by analyzing what people actually do, but rather hoping to replace what they do now with this new way of doing things. Let's not forget that touch also didn't replace the way we were computing before touch. We had applications on our computers, but they weren't apps as we call them today, and they weren't, you know, involving swiping and gesturing. They involved mostly, you know, clicking and typing. So the idea of intent is just, tell me what you want and I'll get it done. And I think, as I said, it's a little bit utopian. It's, you know, remember Star Trek, you know, asking the computer. And yet when you look at what people actually do, they're not in an inquiry mode. They're not inquiring. They're not requesting. They're chilling. Entertainment, communications, they're doing things with their phones which are far more passive, you know, and far more like television than they are interrogatory or trying to be productive with a machine. That's, I think the reason behind intent's utopian vision is that it's created by computer people who think that computers are utility first, and, well, first, second and third. So I find it a little bit, the visions until now have been more or less, you know, not consumer friendly and not consumer accepted. But what Apple's building, in terms of intent, is a layer within the operating system. You can do those things, but at the same time you maintain all the other things that you're already doing. So you'll have the app economy, you'll have the app ecosystem, but apps will also be stitched together into workflows and experiences that would allow you to get things done. So, for example, instead of turning to three different apps to deal with your travel. You'll have an app for booking your flight, an app for booking your hotel, an app for booking your ride to the airport, maybe something more to do with setting your vacation settings in your calendar, maybe dealing with some shopping that you need to do before you leave. Instead, you might get all those things done with a few voice commands, which then will put together, it has to be iterative, so it'll give you back options and you'll go through them, and it'll connect to these apps that you're normally using. And my thesis is that Apple decided not to completely obsolete the app economy because it is somehow easier to replace all that. It isn't. They decided to keep trust and connections with developers and connections with data sets and connections with the trusted entities that are like banking, shopping, all those places you go. Those relationships will be preserved rather than you giving rights to all those things to a new entity that is this new agent. And so for that reason, I think the future that Apple is envisioning is where AI is layered on top of what we already have. That they call the system orchestrator, which routes your queries to multiple AI models but also to the apps that can work with those models and put the solution together.
Judd: That does sound very nice. It also sounds like a lot of, you know, maybe the methodology is slightly different than what's been talked about before, but as you were saying earlier, this is sort of where they seem to be where they were hoping slash promising to be a couple of years ago. But when I think watershed, I think something new. This feels like they're doing some really interesting things, but they're just sort of catching up to where they thought they would have been a couple years ago.
Horace: Well, Siri's gotten better and Siri has caught up to where it was promising to be. I mean, it's not even the way it should have been two years ago. It's where models are maybe as of six months ago. So things have gotten better from that point of view. So Siri has caught up and then surpassed where it was supposed to be. But my observation about intent is that it isn't only, it isn't just we have a new Siri, or we have new image playground, or we have new text creation tools and all of those things that work better that were introduced two years ago. Rather, we have, at the operating system, the orchestrator. And the ability for developers to work with these new Apple foundation models. By the way, there's five Apple Foundation models. Two are on device, three are in the cloud. One of them is hosted with Google. There is training that was supplied, or rather, you know, there was training data that was supplied by Google, and so Google's data was used to, you know, create these models to some degree. Possibly those will continue, that relationship will continue, and there'll be improvements over time also because of Apple and Google kind of partnering there. But one thing to note is that this isn't Gemini, this isn't any of the Google apps, any of the Google interfaces, and the data never leaves Apple's own servers, or what's called private compute. And so none of that was promised two years ago. The idea of the foundation models being updated. The on device foundation models, which by the way require quite a higher level of device performance that two years ago wasn't available. So they've done a lot to enrich this whole thing. And like I said, connections to developer, connections to Google, connections within the operating system, all of this is new. So let's just summarize it as, it's smarter, but it's also far more integrated.
Judd: That sounds great. You also were not shocked at how the market responded.
Horace: Yes. So the market, the stock fell immediately when, let me just put it as precisely as I can. During the keynote event, there were several segments. There was one on child safety, or, you know, safety in general. There was a previous segment to that that was on changes to the core operating systems, broadly speaking, not very detailed and not operating system by operating system the way we used to do it. And then finally Siri came in about two-thirds in, or Siri AI. And to introduce it came Mike Rockwell, who is the new head of Siri AI. He used to be the head of spatial computing, or vision pro actually, and he delivered vision pro and then moved to this role. As soon as he began speaking, and I mean within seconds, you know, they introduced him, he said hi, I'm here to introduce Siri AI, probably between the second and third syllable of Siri AI, the market fell. I was watching it. I was watching it and it had been up, up, up throughout the anticipation. It had been up for a long time before even the event occurred. But during the event, you can see it keep rising. And then, as soon, I think $317 right before Mike began speaking. And I of course blame Mike Rockwell for this. I mean, his outfit was terrible. His outfit as soon as he comes, not cool. I don't know, it was his haircut at the time, but clearly as soon as he began speaking, it felt like straight down and then it kept going and going and going to the end. Over the next couple of days it fell over twenty-five dollars. I mean, it's, but if the drop started as soon as he said Siri AI, is it just that—
Judd: people are freaked out at the name. If it was a different name, do you think it would have happened? What was the signal? Or did it just hit a number where it was far beyond what you've always described as a point. Many people said, you know, the market's got nothing to do with the event, the market's nothing to do with Siri.
Horace: I saw these feedback, as I had posted this on the social media, and I said no, I was watching, it was very precise. But notice that it wasn't based on what he said because he hadn't even begun explaining. He hadn't even done a demo. It just started falling as soon as, okay, now the presentation begins. It's time to sell, which is indicative of the phenomenon that's known as buy the rumor and sell the news. And the thing is that usually you don't know, but some people, you don't know the timing, so they'll say, well, as soon as the keynote begins, or as soon as the day begins of WWDC, people start to sell. Why not? But here they start to sell only when this Siri announcement was finally made. And it was spectacular. I've never seen a better representation of just sell the rumor, sorry, sell the news, because, you know, Siri, it doesn't matter what it is, they're announcing AI, they're doing all the things that everybody anticipated. It's time to sell, and it just kept going and going and going. And then days later people are trying to explain the quote unquote market's reaction, or Wall Street reaction, or investor reaction, or analyst reaction to WWDC, because it had kept, you know, it had fallen so much.
Judd: Will he be allowed to present again?
Horace: Yeah, exactly. I don't know. But of course, when Steve was on stage back in the day, we had calamitous, catastrophic falls similar to this. One of the worst was when he announced the MacBook Air. I have no idea, but I think the stock fell 20% in the next few days. The very first air, the launch of that brand. It's not explainable because it is entirely driven by some kind of momentum and market, you know, markets are not pricing at that point. What they're doing is, there's an anticipation that other people will sell, so you sell. So it's an avalanche of anticipations. And the same thing before, this is an anticipation of buying, so you buy. So it's all based on what other people might be doing, and what other people might be doing based on what other people might be doing. So it's kind of recursive, and it's a news cycle that leads to this kind of, you know, amplification, on the upside and on the downside.
Judd: So, but again, I thought this was... other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Horace: that the kind of, these play, these types of games are over for Apple. It used to be much more prevalent, used to be much more common, but it became, let's say, less of a game. But it's interesting how the market itself is so hyperactive right now. We've had these international issues, we've had inflation issues, we've had consolidation or concentration inside of the tech sector. And so it just seems jittery. So my point though is, I kind of felt, because it was back to this game, I found it strangely comforting, because, hey, look, Apple is selling on good news. And the more the news piled on, by the way, throughout the week, you know, WWDC was still running. There were more and more events, more stuff coming out, there was more interviews with the executives and the picture of Siri AI, with, you know, the whole picture of the integration I've been speaking of, the relationship with Google, all those got fleshed out and it sounded better and better and better. Most analysts or whoever got their hands on the software said, wow, it really is pretty good, even being, you know, great, some people would say. And there was a lot of applause from the people watching the performance here of the product. That we're gonna need a lot more powerful hardware from Apple to take advantage of all these things. Obviously that is a positive for the business. So maybe that is not what was expected, but now we have a precision about exactly how many current devices can take advantage of the full scale of this improvement, and it's not many, so a lot more hardware will be needed. So my reading is, as an observer, as an analyst, there was kind of, I would say there wasn't a huge excitement during the event, because it was not their greatest event, especially taking so much time on the safety side of things, which isn't, it's, safety is a hygiene thing. You don't advertise that your system is more hygienic than ever. Just like people can't sell cars because they're safer, that is a not a purchase decision driver. So from the defense, yeah, well it works for one, but not many car makers. So it's flat, it's kind of, for me the whole keynote was a little bit flat. Also, by the way, the Siri demos were slow because they weren't faking it, and therefore that is exactly how their action happens. So from a snappiness and entertainment point of view, it was a bit like, it felt like there were a couple of beats off, you know, in the quality of the video. For me as an observer, again, it was like, okay, this is decent, this isn't great. But then as time after the event passed I was getting more and more and more impressed. Okay. The market went the other way. They hyped it up way in advance. They sold it deeply afterwards, ignoring all the interesting stuff coming out of WWDC. Historically though, that's how WWDC has always been sold off because people would always anticipate more than what was happening. In this case, they delivered actually more than they expected. Most people expected, and yet it's still sold off. And now it's bottomed out and it's probably gonna start recovering. But you know, there's a lot of cynicism around, as usual. And that's, again, encouraging to me in a way, because it means Apple works as an underdog, you know, it works better when it's underestimated. And it's great to see the market throwing away good, you know, the baby with the bathwater.
Judd: What else jumped out at you? I mean, not only just the keynote, but there were other events throughout the week and all sorts of other announcements. Was there anything else in particular you wanna touch on, for Tim Cook's last WWDC as CEO?
Horace: Well, a couple of things have been in the background. The news coming out of the analysts following this, the market for phones and computers and PCs has been, and this isn't getting a lot of highlights, but the market, because of the memory crisis, the market for computers is going to be down this year and the market for phones is going to be probably the worst year anyone can remember. I mean, we're going to see 20% drop for a lot of the vendors out there. And some may actually be almost in a state of, you know, economic or financial distress. Like, who, it's that bad. These are the smaller so-called budget phones, the lower price points of Android, okay. They're just not able to get, you know, any memory, and they're not gonna be able to ship their market shares.
Judd: Would now be a good time for us to introduce an Asymco phone.
Horace: Yeah, sure. It'll just be an iPhone with an Asymco logo on the back and we'll just charge double. But the idea of the market being in serious trouble is contrasted with the fact that Apple is, the same analysts are projecting Apple to be growing. Apple grew in the first quarter, projected equal growth in the second quarter, which is ending June. That growth would roughly be in line with the first quarter, which was like in the twenty percent plus. Now this is at a time when most of the vendors are seeing declines, and then the analysts are suggesting that declines will accelerate into the end of the year. So this sounds to me like a catastrophe. So while the market for smartphones is collapsing, Apple is somehow still increasing its volume. Now we don't know if it's going to actually continue their rapid growth into the second half of the year. But because it has had such a great success with iPhone 17, and because there's new product coming out, probably of the, you know, high-end, maybe a new version of air, a new version of fold, a new version of the pro products. And then the anticipation that 18, base 18 is not coming out until early next year means that 17, base 17 is gonna run through the end of this year. All of this is probably going to increase Apple's revenues in the iPhone segment. The NEO is doing amazingly well.
Judd: But time out, timeout. So did you just say you don't think that the iPhone 18 is gonna come out in the fall?
Horace: Well, that's what the rumors are saying, and they've been saying this for a while. The iPhone lineup into two. Now they already have an iPhone, the S, sort of the low-end version of the iPhone, was a spring product, springtime. So that started with the iPhone, I think it was C back in the day, and then became the S. And now the idea, I think, is that they're actually going to take the standard base model, okay, which is now maybe the mainstream model, and move that to a spring launch and keep the, by the way, there's a reason why in the December quarter the mix of the high-end product is far overwhelming. There's a lot more of the premium stuff sold, and not many people are rushing out to get the latest of the mid or low range of the iPhone. And they know this, and they've known this for a while. So it also makes sense to move around China a little bit. China holiday is in first quarter. And so moving the 18, and possibly also for India, I don't know when the Indian holidays are. But if we can move something off into the spring, it might be an interesting split. Now I don't think it's gonna affect sales that much because, like I said, there's not only a bias towards the high end, but we're going to have more high end than ever before. If a fold is coming, then the high-end lineup will be the pro, the pro max, the air, and then probably ultra will be the branding for the, so we're looking at four high-end iPhones we'll be launching in the fall, with hints of what might be the 18 base model coming in later. And thus also maybe concentrating a lot of the buyers to saying, okay, since this is what the latest is, we're gonna go with one of those four options, driving the ASP higher, and so on and so on. So yes, it's a radical departure, but it's been rumored for at least, I'd say, a year, maybe two years.
Judd: Well, I guess a couple things. I mean, in American football, not soccer, but in American football, there's a saying that when it comes to your quarterback position, if you have two starting quarterbacks, you really have no starting quarterbacks. So if you have four premium phones, don't you have zero? I mean, like, they can't all be premium. They can't all be. They're just expensive.
Horace: Well, you have a good point. And historically, you know, Apple's been about a simple and clean and clear product portfolio. You know, famously when Steve came back he eliminated half a dozen, whatever, there were so many different versions of back. He eliminated a lot of them and then introduced the iMac and it became, as you say, the quarterback, the leading quarterback. But with the iPhone over the years it's kind of gotten a little bit broader. And you see this in what, the so-called, my stairway to heaven is my, the breadth of the products available. Of course that includes different memory configurations, so that there are far more now than there used to be. Used to be one iPhone or maybe two, and now we have like about 15 with all the memory configurations, and not to mention the color configurations. But as far as the so-called premium, now there's this puzzle around fold, and I must say I'm a little bit confused by this product. I think we talked about this before, but I think when it opens, it kind of starts to look and feel a lot like an iPad. Like an iPad mini actually. And I'm not sure that people want to carry an iPad in their pocket. Of course, when closed it's a phone and it feels fine, but it is, the iPad is not necessarily, maybe it'll become, because if it is with you all the time, it'll become far more attractive for you to interact with the iPad type of interface. But I will say that one of the rumors about why they're doing this is that there's a lot of interest in China. And it isn't for software reasons, but rather because it is such a, it's such an event, it's such a theater, it's so theatrical, right? When you have a machine, a moving object, it's a different thing than something static, and so there might be a preference for something that shows action, that shows clever mechanicals. And that could be one of the reasons that market is appreciating it. I'm reminded, by the way, of the debate back when I was at Nokia, that there were flip phones that were very popular in the US. And Nokia resisted going to a flip phone. They had something called a monoblock, or the candy bar. The candy bar phone was the way Americans called it, but inside Nokia we called it the monoblock, and it was better by every possible thing you could measure. It had more durability, it had longer battery life, it was more durable, it was easier to use. You didn't have to do something to get something done. And it just was cheaper too. Obviously you could make it fancy and expensive, but it was cheaper to make and cheaper to manufacture and so on. So everyone, all the engineers were scratching their heads. Why Americans preferred flip phones. And Motorola launched the Razr, which was a super thin flip phone, and that went on to become the number one world bestseller in the phone space. So much so that, you know, they make dozens of versions, and eventually they relied so much on it that when it began to decline the whole Motorola failed. I mean, the whole company essentially collapsed. Strange story, but you know, you have a hit product and a couple of years later you're out of business. That was the story of Motorola. But it wasn't just because it was a fold, it was because they, I don't know, they made a lot of mistakes as well. But flips were very popular. And so when we try to find out why people wanted a flip phone, it was that this mechanical action felt like, I don't know if people felt like, well, that's one idea, but people felt like it's much more satisfying. It's satisfying to open it and answer and close it, to hang up, and especially if you don't like whatever the conversation was, it's satisfying to just hang up on something with violence. So it was, you know, as some people even in Japan, it was common to have tiny little flip phones with little antennas. So you had to flip for the phone and then extend the little antenna to make it work. And that's outrageous, you know. You have simplicity on one side, you have complexity on the other, and people are voting for complexity. Now, I don't suggest, and this is one of the reasons I think people reject, and Nokia, or sorry, Apple rejected a lot of these moving origami, you know, have your laptop flip inside out, have it be an iPad or a tablet with a pen. Do all these things as if it's kind of a convertible. But here we are. So maybe after, you'll know the answer to this question.
Judd: I won't. How popular are the current folding phones from, you know, Samsung or the other manufacturers? I mean, are they that popular?
Horace: Not that popular at all. They've been doing it for years.
Judd: Yeah.
Horace: Partly the reason they're not popular is that they are flimsy, and there's a visible crease, and they're gimmicky and cheap. The, but cheap feeling, but very expensive to buy, and this is the problem. And it isn't a killer function, what do you do when it's open? Well, you have a bigger phone screen, so maybe you watch videos or something. So it hasn't come with a killer app, if you will, for the bigger screen. So this is what's interesting about Apple, is whether they will, first of all the form factor is slightly different. It's shorter in height, and then when it opens it's much more like, like I said, like a mini iPad. And I think once it's in iPad mode it's going to be probably usable for entertainment and other things in a much more intuitive way. Maybe the keyboard and other things will be easier to use. I don't know what they're going to introduce in terms of software, besides just making it an iPad. So from Apple's point of view, they are also getting rid of the crease. It probably mechanically will be nearly magical. Probably they'll solve a lot of the durability issues as well. So there's a lot that they can fix about those products. And then there's something that needs to be done on the software side to make it more attractive and usable. So yes, there's room to improve, but it's not clear that people are craving this, except again, maybe culturally for various reasons. I do believe that $2,000 will make it very, very niche. You know, it'll cost more than a MacBook Pro.
Judd: This just feels like, I don't get it. I don't get it. This feels like it's like the cube. You know, like, sure, you can have a beautiful acrylic cube. But, okay.
Horace: But this is why I don't like to speak about rumored products, although there's a lot of evidence for this one. But no, I brought it up because I think the portfolios, the split between the two. I mean, we're talking about watershed, okay, and we're talking about how the market is contracting for phones. Into this, Apple is expanding its portfolio. It's going to launch a lot of new product in the fall. There's a lot of expectation that they might, if not volume wise, but at least in dollar wise, going to expand, they're gonna grow their business. And their market share probably will increase substantially. This is where it comes down to. Historically, Apple's had 18 to 20 percent of the phone market. A lot more in terms of the install base because the phones last longer. But with this crisis in memory, and with this market expansion in product, the lineup and the new spread of launch dates, it's possible that Apple is going to reach 22 to 25% market share in devices, or, I should say, in iPhone. Okay. In the phone market. And at the same time, in the PC market, we're looking at 10 million NEOs this year. I think the market share in the phone, it's much harder to make an impact in the PC market because Apple's share is relatively limited. You know, closer to ten to fifteen percent. And so, but they probably, we're going to see a couple of points increase there, and we're going to see a couple of points increase in the phone, and this is going to be going down in history, the twenty twenty-six, twenty twenty-seven time period we'll probably see a substantial increase in market share for Apple. We'll look back upon this year and ask what happened for that change to occur. And that's why I think now, this last few weeks we've had this WWDC with AI. And we've had the memory crisis, which also is caused by AI, you know, restructuring the phone market. Some analysts are suggesting we're not going to see a recovery to 2025 levels of phone sales for three to four years. That's three to four years for Apple to continually beat down their competitors. And Ternus is going to take over just at this moment when there's probably this market shift happening. I think we might, and I've been sort of pulling punches on this, but we might be looking at Apple doubling down on a market share strategy that will see them shoot up significantly. Something that we've been thinking for 20 years they might do, but they haven't done yet. They've always been kind of happy with their limited market share, but obviously extremely high revenue share and extremely high profit share, to the point, by the way, where their profit share might end up being nearly a hundred percent, if not actually one hundred percent, going into the end of this year. So this is why I think the watershed is maybe AI, but we don't yet see the impact of AI on the bottom line. But we're seeing evidence that the market share game is changing. Because they made this decision probably two years ago to split into a fall lineup and then a spring lineup. Yeah. I think the only thing is that it's compounded by the memory crisis. That's affecting, by the way, it's, let me clarify, it's less of an effect on Apple because they manage their supply chain very well. They're also not squandering a lot of this memory on cheap product with no margin. But it's also not affecting Samsung as much because Samsung also has more of a mix of premium product. They sell lots of cheap, but they can always retreat back into the premium, and they then drop a lot of low-end product and they can still be in the business of selling phones. But Samsung is doing very well selling memory. They're far more profitable selling components than they are selling phones. So for Samsung to actually exit the phone business would probably be a blessing, because they'll be like, well, thank God we don't have to deal with that low margin, typically negative actually on many of their phones. That's interesting. But it's all the other guys, the Vivo, the Oppo, which are, by the way, numbers three and four in volumes. Nobody's heard of them because they're China mainly, and they sell in Africa and they sell in Middle East and they sell in parts of Asia. But globally those are the four, the two big brands. There's some other one, oh, in India I forgot to mention, and there's a lot going into these markets that is at two hundred dollars price points. And those $200 price points are no longer sustainable with the cost of memory that's out there. So what we'll see is contraction, Apple's share goes up. Premium, what they call premiumization, premiumization, I don't even know how to pronounce this, but the idea of portfolios going to the high end even if you're not an iPhone, that's been happening for a while. So maybe we'll look back upon this year again as something of a, I would, you know, market discontinuity, cracks, it's something cataclysmic, it's something substantial.
Judd: Well, it could be. It could be. I mean, it's interesting to me in that, I think what I can't get away from, and I'm curious if they care about this at all, but just because something is expensive doesn't mean it's special. And I don't know what, what do you think they think is special about the iPhone at this point? I mean, obviously it's the best phone.
Horace: But this is a syndrome that occurs every year. But people are always remarking about the very, very high end of the market. So the premium iPhone, when it reached one terabyte and it reached a thousand dollars, people freaked out and said, oh my god, the iPhone is so expensive, why is the iPhone, they're just gouging, da-da-da. Well, again, that's the top of that staircase. It is the highest of many products, but if you look down into the middle of that distribution, of that range, that's where the most popular phones still sell. They're selling at, you know, six to eight hundred dollar price points. This is the bread and butter iPhone, whatever is the right analogy. That is a mainstream product that's not going away. There's also, by the way, low-end versions, and there's last year's versions that are still for sale. Those end up being the cheapest. And so all of those things are gonna carry on. What they're separating is that the launch window that used to be fall for Christmas purchase, which, by the way, Christmas is gifting. So when you gift people, you want to always show maybe a little bit more of your generosity. So the gifting process typically also attracts the premium. And then the students and everybody else who needs to buy medium grade phones, they're still, but the 17 is going to be still for sale. It's done very well this year. It's gonna continue next year as the low-end product. The 18's coming out a couple of months later. No big deal. It's just that from a marketing point of view, from a ramp, the production point of view, they probably were seeing this already, that the mainstream phone and the low end phones were doing better later in the year, and that is later in the next year versus the end of the year. So I don't think this is a giant change in how Apple thinks about premium. I think it's just a cadence question that some people said, which I find incorrect. They said, well, the seventeen is doing so well they're gonna keep it going a couple of months more. No, no, no. This was decided years ago, but they're going to start to launch in a kind of a two-phase process. And, by the way, I think it keeps the excitement of the iPhone moving into spring. Because the problem they've had is that people would see new iPhones in the fall and then there'd be nothing new and the competitors would take advantage. Point of fact, Samsung always launched six months out of phase with Apple. So if Apple had a big event in the fall, Samsung would launch six months later, literally, so that they would come in when Apple was, you know, being long in the tooth. So now Apple suddenly has fresh product coming also at the same, you know, not quite six months, but into that Samsung cycle, and it's going to drive excitement. And as I said, China, their holidays are different than ours. So I think there's some value to this staggered approach. You know, if I were to design it, in fact, from the very beginning I would have probably said, yeah, why don't you launch around the whole year so that people are always looking forward to something. Again, Steve was the one who said, no, we do once, simple, yada yada. But it was because of clarity, it was because of the simplicity, and it wasn't optimal in the case of the five, yeah.
Judd: Well, but it's also an event. It's also an event.
Horace: It's also an event.
Judd: And what they had been doing over the years is releasing new colors in the spring, but maybe that just wasn't enough. Anything else before we sign off?
Horace: Well, again, the AI thing is one of those things that we've been waiting for two years. But we're gonna probably have another ten years before it propagates to most of the people who are using Apple phones. So let me, you know, a lot of commentators that I think are smart about this have been saying, hey, it looks like AI will be first experienced by the majority of people through an iPhone. And that's very profound. It's not just that, yeah, using a chatbot is not in and of itself an experience. People, I mean, some people are addicted to it, some people are using it productively, some people are becoming mentally ill, whatever. Yes, but the majority of people, your mother, my grandmother, or, well, I don't have one, but, you know, these types of laggard users or mainstream users are probably going to experience AI through their iPhone.
Judd: Yeah.
Horace: And that's, you now, we're now seeing just what that experience might end up being. It's gonna be a Siri and it's gonna be apps. And as a final line, the economic model, everyone's been thinking that you pay for AI, you pay ChatGPT monthly, you pay Anthropic, or you pay whomever. What Apple's probably going to do is not charge, unless, maybe you have a new tier of iCloud accounts, that, you know, if you're a frequent user you might hit a limit and then you'll be invited to pay more. But also the developers are going to be probably charging extra for these types of AI functions, and so what that goes into is services, almost without any drama, without any change in business model. Suddenly Apple will be seeing an acceleration in services, which has been the growth story for forever now. And I'm pretty excited that, it's almost, it's almost, what's the word? It's almost anticlimactic. The financial model of AI is anticlimactic. It's there, there'll be lots of revenue, but it's not even mentioned by Apple. They never talked about it in WWDC. Fascinating.
Judd: Horace, this has been great. Thank you for taking the time today. Thanks to everybody listening. We will be back with you very soon on Asymmetric.
An Office Hours question asked by Bob V., June 9, 2026.
Q: When the iPhone 4S came out, the rumor was that Siri was its own operating system running alongside iOS. Watching WWDC, that intent-based OS finally seems to be arriving. Was Siri just thirteen years too early?
It would seem that there’s nothing really new here but a quality and performance increase--admittedly a quantum one. Siri’s original dream, back when it was a research project at Stanford, was very much along these lines (as was Alexa, et. al.). I started my own career in information retrieval, a natural-language interface to query computers before we even had search. The idea was that you shouldn’t need to know how to program, or how to use a database query; you just ask for what you need and get answers sorted by relevance. All of that existed in the 1980s.
So what’s new isn’t the chatbot. You can build a neat chatbot that fools people into thinking they’re talking to a human. What we started to see at WWDC is something else: a commitment to re-architect the entire guts of the OS, across all of Apple’s operating systems in order to surface this experience.
But I came out of it asking: show me the money. None of AI is interesting unless we see economic activity, because if there’s no benefit, people treat it like another unrequested, unloved, unused feature. That’s the bane of product development. An unused feature is a symptom of over-service — you deliver things people don’t take up, and therefore won’t pay for. Christensen put it well: a commodity is a product where an improvement in performance does not allow you to increase its price. Iowa corn might be better than Kansas corn, but on the Chicago exchange it’s all just corn. All commodities have the same performance; a pork belly, a barrel of oil, a kWh, a bushel of corn. You don't want that to happen to your product or service. Improvements must be both used and valued by the customer.
Apple is a consumer company with about 1.4 billion users. If they treat AI like Memoji — cute, but not life-changing — there’s no economic impact. I do however think Apple Intelligence is coming together into something people will use daily, and then we’ll see how much they’ll pay for this extra power.
Right now the simple option is to pay for new devices to run it. Eventually, however, it will get repackaged into Services--probably as a subscription to more access, and that’s where the recurring revenue lies. iCloud already bundles a compute allocation; expect those tiers to change, and expect more price elasticity to enter the picture.
An Office Hours question asked by Greg, June 9, 2026.
Q: That long child-safety section seemed to be championing the walled garden — things Apple can do that companies whose business models depend on selling data can’t. Was that a stance against Facebook or a message for the politicians?
It’s a super important thing, but the word I’d use is hygiene. I remember this from Nokia: there are features that are pure hygiene. If you have them, most people don’t care; if you don’t, everyone complains, because it’s unusable. Safety is also like plumbing — only noticed when it fails. That’s why safety, even automotive safety, is almost never marketable. Volvo, maybe, but they’re a niche. People don’t want to hear about negative things.
So here was Apple, in front of millions, talking and implying things sabout child "abuse"— unpleasant things everyone wants to avoid. Any marketer at Apple would have been beside themselves, because that’s a forum you’d normally use to generate euphoria, not dwell on harm.
Which tells you it wasn’t really aimed at consumers. It was designed to induce a particular feeling in policymakers and authorities who’ve been pressuring Apple: we are custodians, doing our job extremely well, and we’re making it very public. That’s a strange thing to do unless there’s something happening behind the scenes.
It also fits how regulators think. Engineers work with constraints; regulators work with outcomes and don’t think about how to get there. They are happy with a good intention pursued with the wrong approach. So Apple stood up and spent fifteen laborious minutes on safety as one of the three tent poles of the keynote — uncharacteristic, dull by design, and very carefully calculated.
An Office Hours question asked by Roger S., June 9, 2026.
Q: Beyond selling more capable hardware — phones, Macs, iPads — is there real monetization in all of this AI?
Absolutely. They gave us an architecture: it’s about intent, about orchestration, about routing a request through multiple models and input types, and then deciding whether it goes through an app or back to Siri. Where’s the money? My answer is: follow the compute.
If this works on-device, the user is happy buying the device, with the memory it needs, and Apple bundles all of that into the purchase price. Developers still sell their apps, but they’re not selling extra compute. But if a result requires heavy computation in the cloud, through an app, then trace it: who sends you the bill? That invoice comes from somewhere. If it’s a developer or a model supplier, it isn’t free — they’ll ask you to subscribe to get the answer, priced as a fixed fee or variable. Apple gets its usual commission, thirty percent or fifteen, somewhere in between.ssss
If Siri depends on services that don’t go through an app, then Siri charges back through iCloud for the compute. So all they’ve really done is take the exact same business model — Services with subscriptions — and either fold compute into existing subscriptions or add new ones. Apple gets the same distribution commission it always has. Nothing changes. In fact, the absence of any commentary from Apple about new economics is, to me, a tacit acknowledgment that nothing different is needed.
That means the App Store, and if anything economically interesting happens, you’ll see another kink in its trajectory — the way we saw a kink when subscriptions became dominant. To users, it’s invisible. Maybe the monthly services bill rises ten percent; maybe they add a couple of subscriptions and drop one. It all reflects in Services, at a 72%+ gross margin, with a hardware uptick alongside. I reckon it’s a ten-year cycle before half of the Apple base are AI active daily, paying something for it. Developers will just see more of the same, only bigger.
Tim Cook warns memory costs to be passed-on to customers
Apple will not absorb all costs of memory and storage chips, Tom Cook confirms.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
No further details were provided.
Tim Cook decided to issue this warning about the price increases in advance through the Wall Street Journal. This communication preempts by at least 2 months of the Fall launch event. Due to this, it's likely that price increases on current products might arrive well before then.
Recall that guidance for the current quarter (ending June) was issued in April which indicated growth and markings consistent with the last quarter (ending March). The current quarter ends in 12 days and I would assume price increases are likely right after that. The current quarter likely saw increased inventory builds as components in the supply chain purchased at prices set a few months ago were used up.
This has kept pricing and margins constant but at the last earnings call, Tim Cook warned that cost increases in memory were likely to impact "beyond the June quarter". Here is the exact quote:
...let me talk about memory specifically, which I think is the root of the question. And I'll go back to December for a moment and just walk you through the chronology. In the December quarter, we really had a minimal impact due to memory, and you can kinda see that in the gross margin results. We said it would be a bit more in the March quarter, and we did see higher memory costs in the March quarter, and they were partially offset by benefits from carry-in inventory that we had. For the June quarter, and what's embedded in the guidance that [CFO] Kevan went through earlier, we expect significantly higher memory costs. They are also partly offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory.
Then where we don't give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business. We'll continue to evaluate this, and as we've said before, we'll look at a range of options.
It seems the range options have run out. Tim did say that the situation was unprecedented and not seen in the 40 years he's been in the business. Analysts are busy trying to predict the trajectory of memory pricing.
The Wall Street Journal states "Passing the higher cost on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone Pro model, estimates research firm TechInsights."
This is debatable.
Another estimate suggested that the increase in cost is about $140 per average iPhone. Passing that on without marking it up would obviously be less onerous. Margins would fall as a result but the cash flow would be largely unaffected.
But what isn't mentioned that these increases would also be worse for other vendors. A $140 or $270 increase on a $300 phone would be more dramatic, even impossible, as memory becomes unobtainable for smaller vendors.
This is a "100 year flood" and worse than tariffs and Covid. The cause is of course AI hardware demand which may ultimately be beneficial but the near term issue is that supply cannot be built quickly enough to meet demand.
How could the supply question be addressed? Apple has said they won't build memory as it's not something they are good at. But they might deploy cash, presumably to accelerate supply, as they have with other components. It's still a tenet of semiconductor business that all shortage is followed by a glut since supply reacts to demand with a delay. The problem is that the glut might not come until at least 2028.
An Office Hours question asked by Bob V., June 9, 2026.
Q: The Apple–Google deal for the frontier model is multi-year with no known end date. What happens after — and what is Google really getting out of it?
When that deal came out, people jumped to conclusions. I talked to Laura Martin {of Needham), who assumed Google would run Siri, and thus get all the data from Apple. Since that data was the real gold mine, even without much revenue from Apple, Google would begin to control the user’s data and experience. This would be check mate to Apple. I was skeptical from the start that Apple would ever release end-user data. That has now been made clear: this is a technology licensing deal including some Google training data but no services from Google and only some cloud capacity from Google using Nvidia chips but running Apple's own Private Cloud.
The follow-up sessions after the keynote answered most of it. Federighi and his staff have been adamant that Google gets nothing — certainly no data. Only one of the many models accessed through Core AI runs on Google Cloud, outside Apple’s own private servers. It’s the most powerful one, but it’s a world model, and Google has no access to anything. The tools aren’t Google’s either. It’s not Gemini. It’s not their image model. It’s Apple’s own foundation models, several of them, and one happens to run with Google in the cloud, privately and securely.
People assumed far more than what is actually happening here. Google's contribution is also probably swappable: at some point Apple may decide to do it themselves. And let’s not forget that Google sends Apple more than twenty billion dollars a year. So now Apple sends one back. What’s a billion between friends?
Apple is not going to give away the single most important thing it has, which is its relationship with the customer.
TD Cowen analyst Krish Sankar assigned a Buy rating to Apple yesterday and set a price target of $350.00. The company’s shares closed yesterday at $301.54.
Separately, Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring also weighed in, maintaining an outperform (buy) rating on the stock while increasing his base price target to $360 and his bull target to $440, or 51% potential upside. He said this event "has the chance to reframe Apple as an AI winner."
NB: New average is $305. Published targets: 34. Analysts following: 41
The moves follow WWDC and might suggest relief that performance expected will be met. Note well that this AI adoption cycle will be slow. My expectation is 10 years to 50% penetration. (I measure penetration as percent of Apple uses using Siri AI at least once a week.)
In 2018, Apple became the first U.S. company to attain a $1 trillion market cap, jostling with Saudi Aramco for top spot globally. At that time many on Wall Street threw in the towel, concluding that the stock had peaked. I remember reading many analyses saying that what goes up must come down, whoever reaches the top inevitably falls, the law of large numbers, its best days were behind it. Indeed, at that time, roughly half of the analysts covering the stock rated it a hold or a sell.
Apple is measured by satisfied customers, and WWDC is measured by satisfied developers. The right framing for AI is not making men into supermen, it is lifting the half of humanity below the median in communication, health, and mobility. The opportunity is in everything currently done poorly by humans: eating, sleeping, exercising, scheduling, finances, administrative work. Scaffolding is unglamorous, but no building has ever been built without it. →
AI sales are booming but free cash flow is not, so the question for Apple Intelligence is how it unlocks new cash flows. The answer seems to be that the cost of inference flows through to apps and subscriptions, leaving the Services business roughly unchanged with a possible uplift. The real monetization is hardware. AI's compute, storage, and memory requirements are already leaving two-to-three-year-old devices behind, and the upgrade wave will run across iPhone, Mac, iPad, Vision Pro, Watch, AirPods, and a refreshed Home. Nvidia won the lottery with five customers; Apple has 1.5 billion. →
The grand debate framed intent computing and spatial computing as alternatives, with passive ambient interactions or full immersion Spatial replacing touch. The dichotomy is wrong. Touch never replaced keyboard, and intent will not replace Spatial. Intent computing is Glance computing measured in seconds, Spatial is high-commitment sit-down work measured in hours, and both will coexist alongside touch, keyboard, and sensor computing. Spatial will become the highest utility for those who edit, create. →
Apple Intelligence rewires the computing stack. The operating system becomes an orchestrator that connects user intent to knowledge bases and decides whether Siri or an app fulfills it. Apps are not deprecated but transformed from intent destinations to callable functions, and the App Store becomes an API directory. The new points of value should be the orchestrator and the foundation models, but models may be commodities, and the trust apps earned to hold private data is not easily transferred. Apple preserves its value as the agent of trust and discovery. →
Nota Bene
Counterpoint Research: Apple has shipped over 450 million Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones → Counterpoint says Apple has shipped 450 million Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and "needs" to deliver a revamped Siri. The strong language contrasts with minimal evidence of demand, since iPhone 17 is already hitting first-quarter revenue records. 450 million is a real number; the ratio of how many are actually used for AI remains to be measured. →
Apple confirms not using Google models, apps or search in Apple Intelligence → Federighi confirmed Apple is not using Gemini, Google Search, or Google Assistant in Apple Intelligence. Apple introduced five custom Foundation Models, four running on-device or in Private Cloud Compute, and only one runs on Nvidia GPUs in Google's cloud. The orchestrator routing all of this is an OS for AI, and slipping in a new OS layer is demonstrably sustaining to Apple's core value proposition. →
Trendforce: Global Smartphone Production Fell 1.7% YoY in 1Q26; Sharper Decline expected in 2Q26 → Trendforce reports global smartphone production fell 1.7% in 1Q26, with a sharper decline ahead, while Apple grew production 21% to 60.2 million units. Trendforce believes Apple is prioritizing market share expansion in the downturn to drive future services revenue. None of the other vendors offer notable services. →
Asymetric
Asymetric: Deleted Scenes → Not everything in the Asymetric podcast survives the editing process. I am posting some of the deleted segments to YouTube as Asymetric Deleted Scenes, starting with the first. →
TrendForce’s latest figures reveal that global smartphone production reached around 284 million units in the first quarter of 2026, marking a 1.7% YoY decline. Despite a sharp rise in memory prices since the second half of 2025, the effect on production was minimal because brands still held inventories of cheaper memory components. Additionally, consumer expectations of higher prices in the future have helped sustain short-term demand, cushioning the impact of rising memory costs on production during the quarter.
However, as low-cost memory supplies are gradually exhausted and significant ongoing increases in memory prices reduce profits, most smartphone brands have begun adjusting production in the second quarter.
Looking ahead, TrendForce forecasts global smartphone production to decline approximately 16.2% YoY to 1.051 billion units in 2026. Under a more severe scenario, the annual decline could become even more pronounced if memory price increases remain elevated and brands are forced to raise retail prices repeatedly.
TrendForce notes that Samsung is relatively well-positioned to withstand the current cost inflation cycle thanks to strong financial backing from the broader Samsung Group and a sizable premium product portfolio. Nevertheless, its significant exposure to lower-end models remains a concern—particularly amid weakening consumer sentiment—making end-market demand a key factor to monitor.
Apple ranked second with its production of approximately 60.2 million units during the quarter. In addition to ongoing production ramp-up for new iPhone models, output was supported by the launch of the iPhone 17e, resulting in 19.7% YoY growth.
Compared with competitors that have already entered a margin-protection phase, Apple remains better positioned to absorb higher memory costs while maintaining profitability. TrendForce believes Apple is more likely to prioritize market share expansion during the current downturn as it lays the groundwork for future growth in recurring software and services revenue.
Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo focus on preserving profitability as production plans face greater uncertainty
First quarter production declined seasonally among the major Chinese smartphone brands, including Oppo (29.5 million units), Xiaomi (26 million units), and Vivo (22 million units). These three brands ranked third through fifth globally by production volume.
While all three delivered strong market share gains in previous years, surging memory costs are now weighing heavily on profitability, creating significant uncertainty around their 2026 production plans. As a result, production targets may be revised downward if cost pressures persist.
Transsion produced approximately 19.8 million units in 1Q26, roughly flat compared with the same period last year, placing sixth among global smartphone brands.
The brand has been particularly vulnerable during the current memory price supercycle given its smartphone portfolio is heavily concentrated in entry-level and budget segments—where profit margins are already thin. Limited access to low-cost component inventories has further amplified the impact.
NB: Counterpoint tracks sales, Trendforce tracks production. The production data may include inventory build-up not shown in sales while sales may include drawdowns not shown in production. The two analyses however agree on a market under significant supply-side stress. Profitability is a big concern and availability of components is critical. As noted previously in response to Counterpoint reports, the 2026 full year volumes will probably show the worst decline in decades.
Apple's position is highlighted in the quote above. I'm glad Trendforce believes Apple's priority is on market share expansion with the intent of driving future services revenues. Note well that none of the other vendors offer notable services.
One Foundation Model runs on Nvidia GPUs hosted in Google’s cloud and some Google proprietary model data used to refine Apple's Models.
Apple has shared new details about the technology behind its latest Apple Intelligence platform, explaining how its new Apple Foundation Models (AFM) work and clarifying the company's relationship with Google. During a post-WWDC technical discussion, Apple executives said the company does not use Google’s Gemini models, Google Search, or Google Assistant infrastructure to power Siri or Apple Intelligence
Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering:
“Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on iOS. For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploy to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.”
AFM Core (used for expressive voices and invitation capabilities on device)
AFM Core Advanced (on device)
AFM Cloud
AFM Cloud Image image generation and editing tools, including spatial reframing
AFM Cloud Pro complex reasoning and agentic actions; Nvidia GPUs hosted in Google’s cloud
These models are custom-built for Apple Silicon, trained using proprietary data, and refined using outputs from Gemini frontier models. The company emphasized that there is no direct use of Gemini itself.
Note that at the heart of the system is a decision by System Orchestrator, which routes requests to run on-device or through Private Cloud Compute. This "Neo Operating System" funnels multiple contexts for input: app actions, personal content, a semantic index, on-screen context while maintaining privacy.
Traditionally routing inputs and outputs, managing resources and protecting user data was the domain of the Operating System. The Orchestrator sounds to me like an OS for AI. Slipping in a new OS layer to accommodate AI properly on any device is demonstrably sustaining to Apple's core value proposition. Integration, safety, abstraction. All leading to comfortable adoption and engagement with the new technologies. Always has been.
