Asymco

Asymmetric Intelligence

Q&A

  1. The SoC crunch: Apple has had fires and earthquakes too

    Office Hours Research

    An Office Hours question asked by Jeff S., July 31, 2026.

    Q: On the SoC supply shortage: what are Apple's options? They could increase prices, which reduces demand — but what else can they do to capture this demand?

    What they've said they're doing is to take some costs away from other components. A big target would have been the screen, then the battery — non-silicon parts, maybe the casing. Now, that's a tough thing to negotiate; these suppliers probably already are on very thin margins to begin with. But Apple may have other ways to negotiate: in terms of duration of contract, in terms of exclusivity, or other things that they can pull. I think they're trying to get as much as they can from everybody. They'll say: if you don't do this, units are going to go down, and if units go down, you make less money too. So there's probably something going on there in negotiating.

    On the SoC, there's just an overall crunch across the board with semis, as we know. We're not privy to all that. But I think they've had tougher problems in the past. It's a 100-year flood, but they've had fires too. They've had earthquakes. As I always say, the biggest problem is the workforce that walks out the door every day at five. What if they don't come back? There are other issues that are existential, if I'm honest. But that's what management is about.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

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  2. iPhone unit sales: count users, not phones

    Office Hours Research · 1 comment

    An Office Hours question asked by Ian H., July 31, 2026.

    Q: We're used to remarkably flat Apple pricing over the years — a pound a day, the stairway to heaven. Generally, increasing revenues have correlated with increasing unit sales. Now price increases are feeding through, yet revenue is only forecast to grow about 10%. That may translate to lower unit sales for the first time in some time. What are the consequences, and the second-order effects, such as on subscriptions?

    First of all, we're not talking about a mature quarter — it's like a launch quarter for some things, but maybe not too much volume will happen. Another thing bothers me a little: I don't know when they're going to launch the next portfolio of products. If it happens in early September, they might see a surge into September. But maybe for constraints — things in manufacturing, other things in the supply chain — they delay; they couldn't get the lines up and running. So they may announce, say, September 15th, but start to fill orders a week later. And that doesn't hit the quarter, because the quarter ends at the end of September. That might actually cause what they've excused themselves with — this “constrained” language.

    There's a lot that could be different this quarter. I warned about it and said the guidance could be weird. I was actually referring to the December quarter, because maybe not all the products are out in the fourth quarter — they're going to push some things into the first. So they're changing the mix, they're changing the pricing, they're under constraint with supply. There's a lot that's difficult to perceive here. I think this is temporary, though.

    The number of devices out there depends mostly on the number of customers, first of all, which is growing, and the duration of use, which is also growing. I don't think we should worry that one quarter the unit number isn't as high. There have been quarters where unit numbers were going down, and everybody wrote Apple off and said it's all over. Focus on the number of users. Focus on those lines on the graph showing proxies for the number of users: subscriptions, active devices, and phones in use, if we can get that data. ACTIVE is still the model to go with.

    I wouldn't read too much into this quarter, or even the next two or three quarters, because we might have these weird things happening where they decide to spread things out. When I thought about this, I said: we're probably going to have people freak out, because the guidance is going to be weak. I didn't think it would be because of this or that constraint — I thought they would say something that wouldn't tip their hand. Because if you're going to launch this folding product, and it's going to be limited in production, and you're delaying the low-end product until next year, maybe your units are going to be pretty thin going into the next quarter and the one after. I was worried about the guidance, and I thought most people would freak out. But they're doing this for a purpose, and they've been planning it for years. Not just the folding — what's been planned for years is Apple Upgrade, and splitting the product launch into two quarters. They've probably wanted to do this for 15 years and just said: no, it's not coming together. I think it makes sense to do all of these things. But on a comp basis, it's going to look ugly, because you're readjusting everything. So let's watch and see what happens. There's a lot of work going on here.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

    Subscribe to Asymco One for full access to this and other content.

  3. Cook Doctrine's remedy: floods don't change architectures

    Office Hours Research · 4 comments

    An Office Hours question asked by Craig D., July 31, 2026.

    Q: Cook's moat was built by being the biggest buyer in a market where consumer electronics set the bid; hyperscalers set it now. Is he handing Ternus a structurally diminished asset — and does an engineer CEO help or hurt when the binding constraint is procurement rather than design?

    As Tim Cook says, this is the 100-year flood. The fact that there's a flood doesn't mean that you shouldn't live in cities. It so happens that floods damage cities more than they damage rural lands, because there's a low density of people there. The floods don't change our architectures. We might try to prevent them in the future, we might build dams. There are countries that live with earthquakes, like Japan; there are countries that live with all kinds of other natural disasters. And this should be seen as that.

    I think Apple's not going to say: these semiconductor companies made a lot of money, let's become a semiconductor company. They made a lot of money, and it could kill them. It's possible that the decisions they make now, in this moment of abundance — it's like winning the lottery. That doesn't make you rich. A lot of people who win the lottery will actually end up broke, and worse off. It's almost guaranteed in some cases that a windfall is damaging.

    The way you think about this is: is it likely to happen again? If so, we better protect ourselves. And Apple did protect itself. It was damaged by retail, damaged by distribution back in the old days, so they built stores — and everybody said that's a dumb idea. Then they said: we got damaged by Intel and Microsoft, so we built silicon. Then we built our own browser. All of these were reactions — the birth of Safari, the birth of silicon and Maps. All these were reactions to the fact that Apple was not in control of the things it needed to preserve and protect itself. I would even argue that Android was such a thing for Google. They needed to protect themselves against Microsoft controlling all access to end users. Microsoft together with Apple, but Microsoft was a far bigger threat than Apple was at the time. So they got into things they didn't necessarily want to do, that were not natural. Apple is also not naturally a content creator, but they got into TV. It had to be done.

    Semis are complex, but also simple. As businesses, they're very, very tough. And they're not great, which is why we have so few people involved. And then you get into a situation where, lo and behold, things are really tough. You treat it as something you need to make sure doesn't happen to you. You have to have fire departments, because you have fires once in a while. I think they're just going to work their way through this.

    Having leverage is not because they're mean and evil. Having leverage is because they are in the right part of the value network, where the customer is most important. Having that relationship with the customer determines everything, including saying: after we get scale, we're going to make sure we get a good price from suppliers. But it isn't like you started off saying, we're going to build a computer company and we'll begin by twisting the arm of everybody who makes chips. That's not how Steve thought, and it's not how anyone has thought since. It's all about: I want to focus on customers, but I don't want to be blindsided by some random natural phenomenon that's out of my control. And for that, you have to build insurance.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

    Subscribe to Asymco One for full access to this and other content.

  4. Vision Pro and glasses: the job is seeing, not capturing

    Office Hours Research

    An Office Hours question asked by Jared P., July 31, 2026.

    Q: Will Apple continue developing the Vision Pro? Hopefully there's a growing community.

    Absolutely. The more time goes by, the more I think it's evident that it's a project Apple is doing because they think it's worth doing. It's not motivated by the other product histories or anything. They feel this should be done.

    I'm not sure I can reveal, but I've been working with people in the healthcare world who use these products, and we have a paper coming out. It's amazing the way it transforms some of these professions. Some are in engineering, but some are in healthcare, particularly in surgery. When Apple is putting this out there and seeing residents with surgeons, it may learn from that, it may develop it, but I don't think it's a cynical move. I think they're just going to say: it's a good thing for surgeons to do this, and maybe that's why this product should exist.

    Far more interesting — and I have written a piece about this — is plain old glasses. When you look at that market, they're probably folding a lot of the learning from the Vision Pro into a new form of wearables that are on your eyes. I'll give you a very simple example. You have a relationship with Carl Zeiss. Zeiss makes the drop-in lenses for the Vision Pro. Amazing how easy it is to put them in. Why? Because they're magnetic. Who's ever done a magnetic frame for glasses?

    When the Apple Watch came, it was a tremendous innovation in the way the bands work. Bands were user-replaceable, in an instant, super easy to take on and off with the design of the loop. We forget that Apple changed the way watches are worn and put on, and the fact that you can create accessories for them. Now, for spectacles: the idea of a user changing lenses, the idea of perhaps even having those lenses be somehow magical. How much of that learning about behaviors with face-worn devices comes because of the research project that is effectively the Vision Pro?

    Historically, they probably had these research projects internally. They would learn internally and launch ten years later. In this case, they decided to make the experiment global, and had their customers and developers identify killer applications. It's a very different approach. It's not something Steve would have done. The Vision Pro is following an emergent strategy, and people are not used to Apple doing emergent strategies in the wild. Not to mention the price point, not to mention it's not part of the Upgrade program. But I think they're going to keep it going and make improvements to it. Maybe the ultralight version has been put on hold while they develop the glasses — at least this is the rumor — and I don't find that alarming at all.

    I think glasses are a huge opportunity. Glasses are bigger than watches — far bigger, it turns out. You should read the piece I wrote about EssilorLuxottica, one of the most incredible business stories ever, and how the industry of eyewear has evolved. It is ripe for, if not disruption, then transformation: injection of software, injection of sensing, injection of new technology. All of that is perfect for Apple. It hasn't been scratched by others yet, even though we have Meta in there. AI is going to also be sustaining it. My enthusiasm for the Vision Pro is becoming an enthusiasm for eyewear in general. Whether it includes displays or not is just a matter of time before we get to face-worn machines that are effectively ubiquitous. More people will wear a computer on their face than on the wrist — and maybe as many as will carry one in their pocket.

    There's a lot of focus in glasses, with Meta and everyone else, on recording what you're seeing. But the job of putting cameras on this thing is not its purpose. Its purpose isn't to capture data. This is one of those things that also confused people when it came to smart speakers. I pointed out that a smart speaker is actually a smart microphone. Only Apple's entry bothered with the acoustics, bothered with making something that sounds great, and positioned it as a great speaker. It didn't succeed — there were other reasons for that — but everyone else approached the problem saying: we just want to listen to what everybody says when they want to ask something. They approached it as computational acoustics, which, by the way, is prevalent in all kinds of products today. The idea of spatial audio comes from it.

    When it comes to wearables on the face, the job is going to be optics. When the Watch came out, they said: by the way, it's a timepiece. It took a lot of cues from timepieces, a very old category. So if you study eyewear, you have to study deeply what people are using it for. It isn't natural at all to use eyewear to take pictures. What's natural is to see better. The whole objective of eyewear is to give you clarity, not to collect information and process it in the cloud. So you pivot away from what the early versions of the products are. You listen to what the early entrants did and you get confused, because they all had the wrong jobs, or the wrong approach, or the wrong processes, or their own priorities. And you assume that what they did is what Apple's going to do. They're going to come at it a whole different way. Of course it can see — but to the extent that it can see, it helps you see. I really think they're going to position it as a great optical device, as they did with the Watch, saying it's a great chronograph.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

    Subscribe to Asymco One for full access to this and other content.

  5. Apple Upgrade: down to the penny, up to an algorithm

    Office Hours Research · 2 comments

    An Office Hours question asked by Bob V., July 31, 2026.

    Q: Is there any “message” in the short-term versus long-term lease price difference between the iPhone and the iPad? I recall the iPhone being about 1:1.5 and the iPad being closer to 1:1.

    This was a surprise to me, because I've never bothered with trying to figure out all the permutations and configurations of iPads out there. When I did it, I thought: wow, there's a lot more than I thought. (The back catalog is even more, but they took away a lot of options when you do the lease.) As it happens, the medians tend to move around.

    Why is there this similarity between the short term and the long term on the iPad? It might have something to do with the depreciation rate. iPads, as opposed to phones, probably last longer, and they calculated these prices on that basis. Remember, they have to consider the residual value: what are they able to get for the product once they get it back.

    I think all these prices are algorithmic. You couldn't have somebody suggest the price; you would have to calculate it every time. You see $50.01 — that's the two-terabyte 11-inch iPad Pro. You could give this as a research topic for a business school student, to try to understand what's going on here. It's fascinating, because I spent a long time trying to figure out iPhone pricing, and the feedback I got was that there's a very directed approach — they're doing it on purpose. The choice of prices is part and parcel of the product development. This is somehow different. Maybe it learns from that, it feeds into it, there's human input, but then they calculate these prices based on the economics of the product in use. That's probably what's going on here.

    We'll have to see if they change this. We have to track it — build an AI to scrape all this data, because there's no easy way to do it. You have to click a lot to get even what I got. It's a full day's work. Someone has to sit and do it every day to make sure prices haven't changed. Somehow we need to automate this and track the evolution of pricing as if it were a market signal.

    When I saw it, I said: something's different. This is not the way Apple's ever done things. Maybe it's reading too much into it, but think about the implications even from the accounting point of view, because this is not a sale. Do they book it as a sale if the product is in the hands of the consumer? Do they put it in Services somehow? I don't think technically you're allowed to declare a sale unless Klarna buys it from you, or something like that. The answer would be to look at how accounting for leased products is done.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

    Subscribe to Asymco One for full access to this and other content.

  6. The foldable iPhone: what will it be good for?

    Office Hours Research · 8 comments

    An Office Hours question asked by Frederick H., July 31, 2026.

    Q: What job does a foldable iPhone accomplish? Aren't iPads suitable for a decent screen experience, and iPhones for what they do, with plenty good screens?

    Honestly, I don't feel I have that job to do. I have an iPad mini, in a waterproof case, and the new supposed Fold product — I don't like to talk about rumors, but it is pretty believable by now — is not going to be that much smaller than this. And I don't find myself reaching for the iPad mini if I have my iPhone in hand. Now, if it were to open up, maybe I would watch a few things there. But I'm still so used to the form factor of the iPhone that I'm not sure I would crave a new form factor. But then you never know.

    One of the things that surprised me about my own job to be done: back in the day, remember when the iPhone was small. It was tiny — look at an original iPhone. Then the 4, then the 6, began to be bigger. Then there were the Max sizes, and I kept saying the problem with the Max, or any big iPhone, is that you can't reach all the points on the screen with one hand. It becomes a two-handed device, and I thought that was inconvenient. I always thought the majority of people would prefer smaller phones that were easy to put in your pocket and completely usable with one hand. But it turned out I was wrong. Big screens were desirable. I myself ended up with one, and now I only get the Max form factor. So maybe we need to try it before we learn what it can be used for.

    I have other reservations — durability reservations, price reservations. Any moving parts are bound to fail sooner than those without moving parts. But some people have convinced me that there is a significant market out there for this product, if only to demonstrate that you are able to buy one. That alone may drive sales for at least the first quarter or two. So it isn't clear what the job is. I do believe, though, it'll do fairly well.

    The other thing against it is that the other fold products, from Samsung and others, haven't done that great. They've been around for six years or more, and no one seems to say this is the greatest thing and everyone's switching to it. Perhaps Apple's version will be the perfect match, the perfect package, perfect in every way, that will cause adoption to take off. So I think it's a wonderful addition to the portfolio, but perhaps again a little bit more towards the highest end, and limited in how many users will take it up. Let's see how it goes.

    Q (follow-up, Frederick H.): What would a foldable phone do to iPad interest? Is this an experiment? And how does this relate to the apparent convergence of Apple's software platforms?

    If, when you open it, it looks like an iPad mini — people are speculating about this — the operating system will be effectively two operating systems: the small screen and the big screen. Apple has a great interface for big screens in iPadOS. Then the question is: is there value in having your iPad in your pocket with you? I think it's going to be an experiment. We'll see how people and developers take to it.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

    Subscribe to Asymco One for full access to this and other content.

  7. Apple's guidance: in six months there will be a new set of worries

    Office Hours Research · 4 comments

    An Office Hours question asked by Joseph B., July 31, 2026.

    Q: What's up with the guidance? And why does this seem to be news to Mr. Market?

    Start by not getting emotional about this, because I've seen so many times mispricing of Apple. But the market, as they say, is always right. It is simply the voting of a lot of people, and what it determines is the market price. It doesn't determine right or wrong, it just says that's what the market thinks.

    The thing about the last few weeks, or even months, has been that Apple's been caught in a debate about whether AI is going to pay off or not. It was used by a lot of people who wanted to rotate out of AI names into something safe, and Apple seemed to be that choice. Apple never wanted to be chosen as a safe harbor. Management doesn't have that as their KPI, or in their plans, or in the product pipeline.

    So strange things happen. It was unexplainable to me why the stock went up as it did in many days over the last few weeks. It was good and I felt it was fair. If it had been trading at 50 P/E, I would have been getting a little bit nervous, thinking it's maybe not justifiable. But there are many companies trading at hundreds of P/E, and who's to say that's wrong?

    It seemed to have run ahead of itself a little bit. But on the other hand, the reaction is completely unwarranted if it's based on what Apple reported. Apple reported a very strong quarter. It reported some circumstances that are unusual. Foreign exchange is one. The struggle with getting supply is another. By the way, nobody seems to talk about memory anymore. Nobody seems to talk about the fact that we've seen price increases, which was just a month ago. It's all now that Apple is constrained, for other reasons. In six months we'll totally forget about this, and there'll be a new set of worries.

    Fundamentally, the company is doing very well. I think it is entering a cyclical period of above-average growth. It might be because products are getting a little bit old in people's hands. It might be that demand will truly pull forward a lot of new consumption, but it's constrained by being able to deliver. Again, not the first time.

    It's surprising to me how volatile, though — to see a 10% drop in one day, including after hours. I don't recall there being that much movement even in the times of Steve Jobs, when we did have huge volatility. But perhaps my memory's weak. On fundamentals alone: the next quarter, which isn't even a holiday quarter, growing 10% — as a disappointment? It'll re-accelerate.


    Editor's Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco's July 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, held the day after Apple's FQ3 2026 earnings and open to Asymco One subscribers.

    Subscribe to Asymco One for full access to this and other content.

  8. The portability superpower

    Office Hours · 2 comments

    An Office Hours question asked by Fred S, June 9, 2026.

    Q: With MLX, you can write for Apple Silicon and then migrate to Nvidia’s chips — a kind of reverse Trojan horse, since people usually build tools to migrate the other way. What’s going on there?

    I’m not an expert on MLX specifically, but it fits a very old pattern. When you look at Apple’s history with portability, they are extraordinarily good at it. Months ago, around the Apple-50 commemoration, I was watching the Computer History Museum interviews with the old hands — Avie Tevanian, Mike Markkula, Bertrand Serlet. Bertrand described the transition from PowerPC to Intel, way before the M series. When it shipped, people were shocked. Nobody could imagine that an OS could be migrated so quickly and so seamlessly

    I met Bertrand at WWDC after he gave that talk. He called the old system a skyscraper, and described how they had to move the skyscraper. I told him it was impressive, and he was almost dismissive: this is nothing, we’ve been sweating portability for decades. That came from his background before NeXT, working on the Mach kernel and the portability of Unix, which became the heart of OS X.

    So you’d have to go back decades to see how entrenched this is in Apple’s DNA: the instinct to avoid becoming dependent on an architecture they don’t control, and to be clever about the migration path. When Apple bought into Unix, what they got was portability, the ability to scale up and down from server to device, and security, because it was a protected kernel with protected processes. Microsoft never prioritized any of that, so their OS became a kludge that got patched ad infinitum.

    That’s why this looks easy for them now. Doing it at the level of AI chipsets is not surprising in the least. By the way, the same engineering shows up in running macOS on an iPad as a touch display — they’ve quietly made the entire Mac interface touch-ready. The day a Mac with a touch UI arrives, it’ll be anticlimactic. They probably built it years ago and are just waiting to turn it on.


    Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.


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  9. Did a lottery winner become "the company of the future"?

    Office Hours · 3 comments

    An Office Hours question, June 9, 2026.

    Q: The Wall Street Journal just ranked Nvidia the top “company of the future,” with Apple down at number 12. What’s going on with Apple’s brand image — and is that ranking right?

    Look at Nvidia’s history. For most of it, revenue was flat. Then, in the last few years, it wasn’t. We usually picture growth as a hockey stick — really a smooth, almost exponential curve. Nvidia isn’t that. It’s a flat line, and then another line at a very steep angle. Zero to one. It isn’t even a curve; it’s two lines.

    Compare it to everyone else. Meta has a nice curve. Microsoft and Google look brilliant. Apple, apart for seasonal spikes, is similar, and so is Amazon. But Nvidia is a step function. That's because they got lucky. The chip they’d been making for years — a graphics accelerator, a matrix-multiplication machine that does one thing, scaled up — turned out to be useful first for crypto, and then, just as suddenly, perfect for AI, which is nothing more than linear algebra. They won the lottery.

    Now, they’re smart, and they didn’t squander it. They’re building ecosystems and platforms on top. I’m not against Nvidia. But to call a lottery winner the “best company of the future” says nothing about sustainability, processes, priorities, or scale. How many customers does Nvidia have? Five, maybe — the big hyperscalers, every one of which is desperate to fire them. How many chips does it ship? Tens of millions, each costing tens of thousands. Very profitable. But Apple ships hundreds of millions of A-series chips a year, and more. The silicon Apple puts into people’s hands is orders of magnitude more prolific.

    If Apple’s roadmap bakes-in exactly what AI needs then where is Nvidia in a decade? Maybe in the PC business. Maybe the next Intel. The premise that they have an unassailable advantage, what Buffett calls a moat and the strategy people call sustainable competitive advantage, is exactly what I’m not convinced of. IBM in its heyday had far more diversity. Nvidia, to me, is a very good company, but a very lucky one, comparable to Qualcomm. And building chips was never a foundation for becoming the greatest company in the world forever.


    Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.


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  10. Will agents kill the app economy?

    Office Hours

    An Office Hours question asked by Dave Emery, June 9, 2026.

    Q: Will agentic AI replace the vibrant app economy, consolidating revenue to Apple and the agent providers? Or will it enable a new set of apps?

    The premise of intent as an operating system is that you assemble the solution to a complex problem out of many modules: models, private data, awareness of the user’s context, and many kinds of input. The orchestrator assembles that solution and decides whether to hire a module provided by an app. Most people who assume intent computing also assume a post-app future. Apple doesn’t. On the outer ring of their "orchestrator" model of computing, they put either Siri or apps to deliver the experience.

    Here’s the key. Within apps lie the permissions we entrust. Your banking credentials live in your banking app, because you trust the institution and it has earned that trust. The "Claw" theory says: just harvest all of it. Find the bank code, the social-security number, the mother’s maiden name, hand it to an orchestrator, and let it act as your agent. Apple says no. They don’t want the things that have earned your trust to be disintermediated, especially when something goes wrong. If you get hacked, it wasn’t Apple’s OS that lost your keys.

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    So what apps used to provide was an interface, plus data, plus a trusted relationship with the provider. What intent computing may take away is the interface — which was the costliest part of building an app anyway, with millions of developers recreating the same drop-downs and authentication steps. The app becomes a callable API. That looks like a demotion, but Apple will still invoke the app, hand off the credentials, and often let the app deliver the final experience.

    This is disruption theory: as a value chain modularizes, profit capture migrates — what Clay called evaporation and condensation at different points in the chain. But branching isn’t extinction. Just because something evolves and forks doesn’t mean the old form dies; that’s why there are still apes and humans even though one evolved from the other. We’re going to have intent, and touch, and vision, all in parallel. The old way of invoking an app directly can live on for fifty years. Yes, there’s still money in the app economy. There’s much more than that, too.


    Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.


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  11. Why is betting against Apple the extraordinary claim?

    Office Hours · 2 comments

    An Office Hours question asked on June 9, 2026.

    Q: You recently calculated Apple’s CAGR at an impressive 26.6% over the last twenty years. Without giving stock advice, what do you make of Apple’s forward prospects?

    The point of my article was that more than half of analysts have a hold, a sell, or no opinion on Apple, and I found that surprising. I aggregated the ratings myself, and it settled to about fifty firms actively covering, split roughly half Buy, half Don't Buy. A “hold” says the stock is fairly priced, and if a company is growing twenty percent a year, it doubles its revenue in three to four years. So if that’s the growth, why would you not buy?

    Computing the CAGR from each year forward to the present, over twenty years shows the curves are volatile early but then settle around twenty to twenty-five percent. So why are these analysts so cautious? Because they’re making one-year calls, swamped by near-term noise, while the CAGR is a multi-year return: lots of short-term volatility, lots of steady long-term growth.

    I’m only dumb enough to assume that twenty years of history is long enough to see a pattern. I know history doesn’t guarantee the future. But we could have had this same conversation every day for the last fifteen years, and the flywheel just kept spinning and it also kept getting more massive. It’s actually extraordinary to assume that a massive flywheel with this much momentum suddenly stops. That’s, for me, the harder thing to argue than that it won't stop.

    You can do the same with GDP. Countries compound at two to three percent for two hundred years, and the most likely future is more of the same, not utopia or catastrophe. Extrapolating a long-term trend a few years out is not an extraordinary claim. The extraordinary claim is that it stops: that Apple loses its place as the interface to the most valuable devices in the world, that customer satisfaction evaporates, that all the threats we’ve heard a hundred times finally land. I’ve heard them before. They never happened. So why should I believe them now?


    Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.


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