Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
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Post by Dave on Apr 5, 2023 1:31:21 GMT -8
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,335
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Post by Dave on Apr 5, 2023 1:39:28 GMT -8
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,335
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Post by Dave on Apr 5, 2023 1:43:52 GMT -8
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Post by hledgard on Apr 5, 2023 8:24:21 GMT -8
Was that the discussion about the difficult situation Apple is in, and Tim has to walk a fine line to keep Apple healthy?
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chinacat
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Post by chinacat on Apr 5, 2023 9:31:33 GMT -8
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4aapl
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Post by 4aapl on Apr 5, 2023 9:31:42 GMT -8
It's amazing how an article can look so much more negative with just the turn of a couple words. A story about the meetings earlier in the week used "meet with" instead of warn, and didn't throw out genocide and forced labor. But politicians will be politicians. Occasionally these things pressure someone to "do better", but most of the time even when on the congressional stand, it seems more a way for the politicians to get info that is already out there, while getting free press and being able to say "look, I'm doing something". I don't personally have positive or negative feelings about any of the bipartisan committee members listed, but it just seems the way these days. "This is the way" -Mandolarian More production being moved to India, as we've heard before. The relative change to past production there is big, but the overall percentage is still small: finance.yahoo.com/news/made-india-iphones-surge-apple-093000493.htmlThe Stock.app has Bloomberg with an article titled "Apple's Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China". It's paywalled, but my guess would be this slow move to more manufacturing in India, while also using the push by US Politicians as being "forced" to build more outside of China. "Sorry guys, we'd like to keep production here, but the US Government is making us diversify. No hard feelings. Bring it up with them, they're our scapegoat." And if there happens to be some nice government pushed incentives to move more production back to the US, while in Apple's best interest of a diversified production, all the better. "No no no, don't throw me in the briar patch" "Painting this fence is really quite special, and I love it. I don't think I could let you paint any of it, but maybe I could if you make a good offer..." It's all a bit of drama, which gets people riled up in the press. Apple might not do everything perfectly, but they seem to do better on many fronts than others out there, while also looking forward many moves on the chess board.
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4aapl
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Post by 4aapl on Apr 5, 2023 9:47:46 GMT -8
I prefer the days that AAPL manages to beat the indexes, even on down days. But that drops the RSI to 62, and around the low I think it was 60.x.
It's an interesting turn for the market today, that 3 pieces of down news actually brought the market down. In recent months, negative news has mostly been taken as positive, as far as being hopeful to change the Fed from hawkish to dovish.
This could be a turning point, deciding that the Fed is already likely at it's limit and working on changing its stance, and so further negative news is actually seen as negative.
Ahhh, fun times. Nothing stays the same forever, and the same news or rumors can be taken multiple ways.
OTOH, the latest teen survey (article on the stock app) saying that the iPhone has a 87% marketshare is still pretty amazing. But even with that there's the "but it dropped from 88% in '21", or the "there's not much growth potential". I'm sure we'll see that flip in the coming weeks, along with some fearful rumors during the quiet time leading up to the May 4th AAPL earnings.
(there's some articles getting more critical of Apple readjusting the workforce in one group. For comparison, there's another applauding GM for trimming 5000 workers via a voluntary severance package. That often seems to be the way to go, and was something that happened at MOT just after I joined out of college. One person in our program, only 3 months in or so, took it. But it was mainly for people about to retire or leave to pull the trigger, culling the herd a bit, while preventing destructive and demoralizing layoffs)
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Post by Luckychoices on Apr 5, 2023 10:42:27 GMT -8
Thanks for posting this, Dave. From the link: ======= "The delegation headed to the West Coast this week has three days of meetings planned, starting with Iger on Wednesday afternoon. Gallagher is particularly concerned after Disney’s remake of the film “Mulan” thanked Chinese government agencies accused of extreme human rights violations in the Xinjiang province.
The province is home to detention camps that have held Uighur Muslims, where detainees have allegedly been subjected to terrible human rights violations, such as torture."
======= Oh, no!! Not terrible human rights violations!! Another complete and utter bullshit move by our lawmakers. Do I think China should be torturing Uighur Muslims? Of course not. But instead of heading to "Hollywood and Silicon Valley this week to warn Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook and other West Coast executives about their ties to China"...how about U.S. lawmakers show some concern about our citizens and school kids being randomly slaughtered?
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4aapl
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Post by 4aapl on Apr 5, 2023 10:48:22 GMT -8
Like GM, I don't often want to use MSFT as an example of what to do. But... microsoft legendary memo 30 years ago about lavish employee perks and cost-cuttingFWIW, when I was at Apple, there seemed to be a good happy-medium on in-house perks. The cafeteria was good and had a wide selection, but it wasn't free most of the time (the exception was you could get a ticket for a free meal when working weekends or nights on the weeks right before a huge project like 10.3). They'd have beer bashes on Friday evenings, but that was every 2-3 weeks, and they weren't overly extravagant. But like feature creep, perk creep can be a thing. That was part of why I didn't like hearing how extravagant the rainbow stage Apple was adding was, since it's the events and atmosphere there at the stage that would matter, not if the stage cost $10M instead of $1M to build (or whatever) due to some fancy painted glass. At some point perks become part of the culture, part of what is expected. And many of them can make sense, one way or another. But like Apple's focus on a more limited product line, it makes sense to focus on what matters. And while some may like that e-bay had a car washing thing every Friday (they were around the corner from where we lived, but I don't know if it was free or not), is that really something that a job should be supplying or coordinating? And is it a perk that most people would like? Does it add value, ideally for both the employee and the company? OTOH, donuts on Tuesday morning at 8am might be enough to encourage a lot of people to come in early that day. And that costs a lot less than a Gucci leather jacket for going to a required meeting.
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4aapl
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Post by 4aapl on Apr 5, 2023 10:54:03 GMT -8
But instead of heading to "Hollywood and Silicon Valley this week to warn Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook and other West Coast executives about their ties to China"...how about U.S. lawmakers show some concern about our citizens and school kids being randomly slaughtered? But it's spring break! How else are we going to justify a trip out to Cali? This weekend we're supposed to see temps in the 50's, Reno in the 60's, and it looks like Cupertino is expected to be almost to 70. Can I sign up? Are there extra seats on the plane?
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
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Post by Dave on Apr 5, 2023 13:14:24 GMT -8
Was that the discussion about the difficult situation Apple is in, and Tim has to walk a fine line to keep Apple healthy? This was the discussion that I was referring to. Monday March 27, 2023
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,335
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Post by Dave on Apr 5, 2023 13:23:02 GMT -8
But instead of heading to "Hollywood and Silicon Valley this week to warn Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook and other West Coast executives about their ties to China"...how about U.S. lawmakers show some concern about our citizens and school kids being randomly slaughtered? But it's spring break! How else are we going to justify a trip out to Cali? This weekend we're supposed to see temps in the 50's, Reno in the 60's, and it looks like Cupertino is expected to be almost to 70. Can I sign up? Are there extra seats on the plane? Or, the tensions between the US and China have escalated to a dangerous point and someone felt the need to update Cook personally. Or, maybe not.
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chinacat
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Post by chinacat on Apr 7, 2023 12:11:08 GMT -8
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Post by hledgard on Apr 7, 2023 17:29:09 GMT -8
A fascinating article ! Really woke me up. It is so easy for all of us to simplify so many issues. The article is wonderful for its depth on a very complex production/supply/political/balance issue.
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,335
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Post by Dave on Apr 8, 2023 1:33:25 GMT -8
A fascinating article ! Really woke me up. It is so easy for all of us to simplify so many issues. The article is wonderful for its depth on a very complex production/supply/political/balance issue. I agree. The complexities of manufacturing something as intricate as an iPhone is overwhelming. And it’s easy to understand how the prospects of having a market of new customers offered to you, along with an inexpensive workforce, but only if you commit the bulk of your production to this one country. But as they say, there’s a fly in this ointment, a very big dangerous fly. That fly is China’s open stance of world domination. And not just in manufacturing dominance but militarily as well, which they have been very open about. I can see manufacturing enough of your product there to satisfy the Chinese market and growing that production base as the market base grows, but not to the point of the dependence that we are at now. But it’s easy to get pulled into this intricate web that China has woven, anyone can do that, the true talent will be in the untangling from that web. I guess we will all have to wait and see how this unfolds.
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