“They need their own fabs” is a very current events-biased read of the situation.

You can easily end up like AMD or Intel spending years with your own fab that’s uncompetitive.

One of the best things that ever happened to AMD was spinning off their fabs.

Intel only recently righted their ship after spending years with fabs that couldn’t keep up with competition, and even Panther Lake still contains some TSMC silicon.

The AI boom is inevitably not going to last forever. Either demand will subside or production will increase. High prices in tech rarely stick around.

Perhaps something that Ternus can add to his legacy-building exercise, given that he led hardware.

I always wonder if this is a possibility. They've worked so closely with TSMC that they've many times over the decade bankrolled R&D and equipment that TSMC uses. I would be super interested to know if that relationship has left them enough know-how of the fab process to someday control their destiny there, that would actually be pretty insane.

Especially outside of Taiwan.

This comment hits hard as I tried to buy a Mac Mini this morning and could not find one anywhere in Calgary

As a company, this is a great problem to have. Way better than the opposite.

Doesn't this prove that they are hardware independent? Even having products not in stock was a Steve Jobs thing and this is possibly a temporary effect of supply chains changing.

I imagine you're saying the capital return program is a mistake because they should reinvest the money in R&D etc.

I think the issue is there's diminishing returns to spending, and in some cases it can be outright negative. For example, one major thing you can do with money is hire more people. Hiring more people than you can handle is a great way to grind everything to a halt. You're basically making a bet when you hire that the additional capacity outweighs the danger of coordination failure.

Perhaps you could invest more money in fabs or something like that. I don't know, I'm a software person. But I did work at apple on software for 15 years, and I do not think throwing more money at software is particularly effective. The biggest teams at apple are often the least functional.

That is absurd. Nobody is arguing that Apple should deplete its war chest. Steve Jobs's infantile stance against dividends has fortunately been replaced by a proper return to the company's OWNERS.

And "Harmony OS" is going to threaten their ecosystem of hardware, software, services, and developers?

Always remember that most of their “services” revenue is the App Store 30% tax on casino games for children, and the commissions for Safari default search engine coming from Google. These two are Apple’s twin licenses to print money, and both of them grow without Apple needing to innovate or really do anything.

App Store grows as the addictive game publishers improve their manipulation skills, and Google’s check grows as browser usage increases. Every time someone types, say, “Citibank” into the search box and doesn’t add .com, Apple earns a tiny payment from Google.

I’m sure they als make a decent chunk of money from iCloud as users who buy base models are almost certainly forced to make use of iCloud Photo Library to free up enough space on the device to even function; but I suspect it’s orders of magnitude less than that.

They really should have built a car.

It'd make them leaders in batteries.

It'd keep America at the forefront of EVs.

Huge disappointment.

I never know why this keeps getting downvoted, is HN really full of investors and not engineers? why do you want buy backs and not R&D?