Reposting an amalgamation of a few comments I made a while back, because I’m petty. I mentioned staying the fuck away from AAPL and my comment got downvoted into obscurity. I hope the people who did so know that their tears (and Call premiums) are fueling my put gains. Even an hour before close today, I said, “buying some AAPL puts and QQQ Calls.”
\---
Apple is going to get boned. Look at the record: Vision Pro, Project Titan, TITANIUM!!!, Siri getting AI (last year), Siri getting AI (upcoming) = all garbage
Yet people are paying 40PE for a company with single digit growth? Because everyone is fired up about a foldable phone – something Samsung did 7 years ago. And it’s going to be $3,000+ - why else partner up with a BNPL – hand off the liability and reap most of the gains. (they learned from their GS credit card partnership)
Apple’s biggest recent success has been the mac mini and mac studio. The funny thing - **it was a complete accident**.
Apple uses unified memory - often viewed as suboptimal. You couldn't upgrade a MAC after purchase - the memory is soldered directly onto the PCB - contrast this to a PC with memory slots, which allow you to add or upgrade to faster memory.
One huge unforeseen benefit: Apple unified memory removes the strict memory capacity limits of traditional discrete GPUs - (In other words the CPU and GPU can share the memory)
Enter LLMs - People realized instead of paying Claude/ChatGPT – they can run their own agentic machines running Llama or Gynese Open source. The catch is you need massive amounts of memory – Not feasible on a PC without pending $100,000
And thus, the Mac Studio/Mini bonanza was born
You can SPEC out a Mac studio with 128GB and load a 70 billion parameter model- Get the 512GB config and you can run **400 Billion parameter models** – Borderline top of the line LLM power
They were so in demand; people were refreshing the Mac Refurb store like it was a job. I had to use an automated script that would ping the store every 15 seconds to check inventory so I could finally snag one.
FWIW, a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512GB from 18 months ago was \~$10,000 MSRP. Today, if you find one on eBay for less than $40,000 (USED), it’s probably a scam.
Tim Apple was an excellent manager and steward of capital. He bought back almost $1 Trillion of stock in the past 10 years. But that game is over. No more ZIRP, no more $100s of Billions stocked away in Irish tax shelters.
Let me guess: There’s a new iPhone upgrade “Super Cycle” coming. It’s just another canard, like the “Trillions of dollars on the sidelines”
Btw, look at their revenue.
Total $109 Billion vs estimates of $108 Billion.
Notice what segment beat by a shit-ton? Mac sales are up \~30%. Otherwise, they would have missed.
[https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/apple-revenue-profits-beat-expectations-iphone-mac-sales-2026-07-30/](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/apple-revenue-profits-beat-expectations-iphone-mac-sales-2026-07-30/)
Edit: Let's not forget they are crying to Trump to let them buy cheap Gynese memory. Instead of buying back $1 Trillion in stock, maybe they should have invested into new products - Intel redux?