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technology

Apple Vision Pro better than expected

It costs a little, but then you have something.

Apple has been surpassed by Microsoft as the world's most valuable company, and the former stock market darling still got a whirl from Wall Street despite rising sales, while virtually all tech companies rose. Perhaps that is precisely why there was a lot of attention on the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset that Apple itself for some reason calls "spatial computing.

When the Apple Vision Pro was announced last year, I wrote

'All the omens are that the Apple Vision Pro will be a flop - a flop by Apple standards, that is. But that's not a bad thing at all. At least Apple is trying to develop something new again, and that's better than unimaginatively buying back its own shares for hundreds of billions, as it has in recent years.' 

Because the price is too high at $3,500 to break open a mass market, there is no reason to change opinion about the Vision Pro's short-term business impact.

Apple is on its way to $500 billion in annual sales, so before any new product raises an eyebrow when going through the annual figures, it has to come close to the annual sales of Apple's least contributing product. That's the iPad, which still did $7 billion in sales last quarter. To get anywhere near that, Apple would have to sell a few million copies of the Apple Vision Pro, which is not going to happen with the current model at this price.

Vanity Fair was invited by Apple CEO Tim Cook to learn about the Apple Vision Pro, which led to this revelation from the reporter:

'When I turn it off, every other device feels flat and boring: my 75-inch OLED TV feels like a TV from the '90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And here's the problem. 

In the same way I can't imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can't imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can't imagine trying to work without a computer, I can envision a day when we all can't imagine living without augmented reality (AR). 

When we become more and more encapsulated by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug [...], the dopamine rush that this resolution of AR can deliver.'

Most reviews were less lyrical than this one, but mostly positive. The bottom line is that Apple has once again succeeded in developing a surprisingly special and high-quality product. And yet, there's something nagging.

Apple tries to solve an unsolvable problem

Wired correctly states that a "killer app" has not yet been found for the Apple Vision Pro. It is not yet the ultimate entertainment device and that is not because of the quality of the image, the sound or the controls, because they are extremely good. It's because of the applications, and then not even the "content," the traditional video narration form in picture and sound. The problem lies in the lack of new communication applications between people.

Now I am not neutral when it comes to VR and AR, having worked at VR pioneer Jaunt for a few years. I experienced the exact same experience in Jaunt's test lab as the Vanity Fair journalist, because good VR has an almost hallucinatory effect. But you remain a spectator in someone else's film.

And the core of the Internet's success is not information, transaction or entertainment. It is communication between people. The great breakthrough of social media was not caused by expensive content from movie studios or game developers, but by movies like Charlie Bit My Finger.

Despite all the success of social media like Facebook and Instagram, the messaging service Whatsapp is being used more intensively by users. And just when it seemed that the market for messaging apps was saturated, Telegram managed to attract as many as a quarter of a billion new users in 2023, bringing the total number of users to 700 million people. The demand for communication options between people seems inexhaustible.

So the big question for Apple becomes not how it can develop even flashier VR and AR applications, or how it gets Netflix to create apps for the Vision Pro; but whether it manages to develop interpersonal communication applications for the Apple Vision Pro that are as useful, funny and addictive as ever text messaging. As an enthusiast, I wish Apple would focus on that and, for example, permanently disband its entire automotive division. How many electric automakers does the world need?

Is TikTok the answer?

Especially when it comes to communication between people, TikTok has proven to be a phenomenon. When it seemed like the social media market had been completely nailed shut by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with Snapchat and Twitch as boutique stores, dances appeared on this originally Chinese app that were emulated worldwide. For dance requires no spoken language, only a sense of rhythm or a glaring lack of embarrassment.

Meanwhile, TikTok has become so big that Wired wrote an extensive profile on the company's Singaporean CEO, who had to answer to the US Congress for the second time last week, with a senator going out of his way to appear as racist and anti-Chinese as possible to his constituents. Incidentally, the Singaporean Internet responded within 24 hours with a hilarious video.

I'm curious what a TikTok app on the Vision Pro would look like and what you could do with it. Dance together, or watch movies together, so that using the Vision Pro at least becomes a shared experience?

Or is it Joe Rogan?

Once upon a time, the world's most popular podcast maker Joe Rogan hosted the TV show Fear Factor, a derivative of Now or Neverland. In that tv-show from the Netherlands, home of the cheapest television forms where the talent does not get paid (remember Big Brother or The Voice?), contestants from the Netherlands and Belgium had to complete tasks such as jumping out of a building while holding an egg that was not supposed to break, or eating worms while the host yelled at them "do it for your country, eat those worms for the Netherlands!

Joe Rogan, the American Hans Kraay Junior, signed a new contract with Spotify this week that will net him as much as a quarter of a billion dollars. Interestingly, it is not even an exclusive contract with Spotify, so Rogan will be seen and heard on multiple platforms.

Rogan's podcasts are recorded representations of the most basic form of communication since the dawn of mankind: two people talking to each other. Rogan's success lies in his curiosity.

He is actually interested in his guests and never tends to want to be clever at the expense of his guests. Maybe he's not that smart, which is always the criticism of him, but perhaps that's exactly what makes his podcasts accessible to a wide audience.

I would not be surprised if there are millions of people who, with an Apple Vision Pro on their heads, want the feeling of sitting at the table next to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, or Quentin Tarantino or Lance Armstrong, as a third person. Not even to participate on equal footing, but to experience an interesting conversation up close. The mere fact that this kind of application is relatively easy to make is a reason to conclude that the Vision Pro is underrated.

Because it may quietly take five years and three versions of the Vision Pro before the device finds its killer apps combined with a good price, but then Apple will have a new successful form of personal computer on its hands alongside the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Losing seventy billion in market cap the week the Apple Vision Pro hit the market? Investors should be ashamed of themselves.

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AI crypto technology

'Minister' makes the Netherlands look utterly ridiculous in Asia

Asia Tech Summit 2023 in Singapore

'Be curious, not judgmental.' That's the message of my favorite Ted Lasso series. Mindful of that credo, I attended the Asia Tech Summit in Singapore this week, followed the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, the magic glasses of glasses, and tried to get to the bottom of the lawsuit filed by U.S. authorities against crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase. Unfortunately, things already went wrong during the first hour of the Asia Tech Summit, in which Secretary of State Van Huffelen was overcome by an overdose of unfounded self-confidence. 

Dutch pride abroad, 'minister' of digitization Alexandra van Huffelen

The Asia Tech Summit is particularly interesting because it brings together business and government institutions, with the idea that both sides develop an understanding of the challenges facing the other. Singapore Finance Minister and incoming Prime Minister Lawrence Wong provided the kickoff, after which Kaja Kallas (Estonia's first female prime minister) and Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand's youngest ever prime minister) paved the way for the first substantive panel, on the opportunities and threats of AI. Participating in this was State Secretary Van Huffelen, along with the president of Microsoft Asia and Nvidia's board member who deals with AI.

As the only other Dutch speaker, I was above average in my interest in Ms. Van Huffelen, and Google learned that she had a typical resume for a Dutch administrator: having been an alderman (sustainability in Rotterdam), director of a semi-governmental body (GVB in Amsterdam) and as State Secretary of Finance, she had inherited the Supplement affair, from which it is difficult to judge from a distance how adequately she had handled this painful dossier.

Nothing wrong with that, I thought, in the spirit of Ted Lasso, stay positive! After all, with the Supplements affair still in the back of her mind, hopefully she had taken a ride in Singapore on the phenomenal subway (clean, fast, cheap and safe, only resembles the GVB subway from very distant places because it is also transportation on rails) and would surely show some humility and modesty? So I expected and hoped, but nothing could be further from the truth. The state, which for incomprehensible reasons is heralded abroad as Minister of Kingdom Relations and Digitalization, went in with a straight leg almost from the kickoff.

Strategic action plan

For those with a strong stomach, the entire session can be watched back here, but the gist is that Van Huffelen sees mostly threats in AI and noted disappointment at the very beginning that nothing more has been heard of the idea of stopping AI development for six months. This is especially strange because the Dutch cabinet produced a policy paper as early as 2019 under state secretary Keijzer of EZ, which mostly sang the praises of AI. Participating in that cabinet was D66, Van Huffelen's party, and she even joined it as state secretary in 2020. There is a NL AI Coalition(NL AIC), in which government, business and knowledge institutions work together, and there is an AINed foundation that may spend 204.5 million Euros of government money to stimulate AI in the Netherlands.

In 2019, a policymaker thought a baby wearing VR glasses from Lidl had something to do with AI

Van Huffelen did not say a word about this and pretended that AI is viewed exclusively with a critical eye in the Netherlands. Her substantive contribution can be summarized as a series of clichés that the citizen comes first (gosh) and should not be forgotten (boy) and that there is more to life than making a profit; the latter she must have learned from the tens of thousands of victims of the Supplements affair.

For me, the moment at the very beginning was crucial, when it became apparent that Van Huffelen is either particularly ignorant or particularly underhanded. A combination of the two I would not rule out after her performance. After 1 minute 50, Van Huffelen literally said:

" We have seen many problems with AI, I have seen that in my country, even the AI that the government used turned out to be very biased."

state secretary Alexandra van Huffelen

Excuse me, to dismiss the Supplements affair, which has ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people, in which over 2,000 children were placed out of their homes and on which the cabinet fell in which Van Huffelen, nota bene, was himself responsible for this dossier, as a result of AI, is downright disgraceful.

Therefore, this brief refresher for Ms. Van Huffelen, who seems to have no active memory of the Supplements affair:

  • until 2019, dual citizenship was a selection rule in the Tax Department. That is a policy decision made by *people*. These victims were extra checked, for years, without knowing it, and could not appeal the inclusion in this group of extra checked. This was Kafka for anyone with a foreign last name.
  • The Personal Data Authority concluded that the Tax Authority's processing was "unlawful, discriminatory and therefore improper" which constituted a serious violation of the AVG. The Dutch Tax Authority itself violated Dutch law! (It is therefore downright bizarre that as recently as January 17 of this year, this article was published on the Belastingdienst's site, reporting that everything went perfectly by the book).
  • Officials at the top of the Inland Revenue stopped benefits from people even though they knew they were entitled to them. Up to the highest level, it was decided to continue this unlawful approach for years .
  • Inland Revenue officials demanded punishment for executives, but none were punished.

In short, the Surcharge Affair is an accumulation of wrong and evil policy instructions. It has nothing, but nothing, to do with AI. Because AI is precisely about machine learning, computer programs that get smarter as more data is added to them. Whether the Surcharge Affair was in part due to institutional racism or racial profiling I leave to sociologists and activists, but in any case it was "just" the work of incompetent and scummy people.

Ms. Van Huffelen apparently wanted to score with party colleagues tens of thousands of miles away. Perhaps the next D66 newsletter will contain a glowing passage about how their state lectured the big bad Microsoft. In any case, it will be bonus points in certain circles if Van Huffelen aspires to a job in Brussels and wants to further profile herself as a fighter for civil rights against tech capitalism. After all, she certainly wanted to profile herself.

Ready steward at the Evening Walk

Each speaker received in advance an explanation of the dress code, "business casual (for gentlemen: suit, no tie). I don't know what her letter said, but I'm sure it wasn't "ready steward at the Evening Four. Van Huffelen's yellow dress and particularly ungainly appearance by Asian standards stood out more than her substantive contribution.

If someone in Asia makes a comment on a panel with which you disagree, you don't say, especially as a representative of a country, 'that is not true.' Then you say, for example, 'I have a different viewpoint.' Or: 'another way of looking at this, is xyz'. In the audience, people wondered aloud whether Van Huffelen was wearing a beach dress and whether she had confused her islands, because 'the yellow of Cory Aquino was in the Philippines, not Singapore.' An ill-mannered Dame Edna is not what you want to portray as the Netherlands in one of the largest global markets.

The most embarrassing moment, although I wonder if Ms. Van Huffelen caught it, was when a real minister, Josephine Teo of Singapore's Ministry of Communications and Information, announced the creation of the AI Verify Foundation. Not a policy paper without clear goals, but a foundation in which business and government jointly establish tests that companies and governments worldwide can use to test AI applications. Teo emphasized that AI is so important especially for small countries like Singapore because it can increase a country's efficiency and production without additional human labor. No question.

Quantum computing near, threatens cryptography

There were more interesting announcements at the Asian Tech Summit. First, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat reported the creation of the National Quantum-Safe Network Plus (NQSN+). That's a mouthful and requires some explanation, this site reports:

'The National Quantum-Safe Network (NQSN+) focuses on establishing a national platform and testbed for a systematic build-out of quantum-safe communication technologies, by evaluating security and demonstrating the integration of quantum-safe applications, best practices and use cases.

The main goal is to deploy commercial quantum-secure technologies for trials with government agencies and private companies; to conduct in-depth evaluations of security systems; and to develop guidelines to support companies in adopting such technologies.'

Singapore aims to secure the crucial banking sector for the long term, hence the creation of this quantum-secure network. Indeed, the importance of quantum computing will grow rapidly in the coming years. The most engaging moment during the panel I participated in, on the future of Web 3.0, was when IBM Fellow Ray Harishankar explained (starting at 25.30) why quantum computing is crossing the path of the modern Internet and will be able to retroactively crack current cryptography.

Harishankar expects that between 2030 and 2035 quantum computers suitable for specific applications will become available. His message is as simple as it is ominous: to be ready for quantum computing in 2030, organizations must have their cryptography in order now because no password will soon be safe.

Singapore is collaborating on security and standardization with South Korea, which last month announced as much as $2.6 billion dollars to invest in quantum technology research. I already can't wait to hear what Secretary of State Van Huffelen has against quantum technology. 

Apple Vision Pro better device than expected, but for what?

What woman spends $3499 on ski goggles that mess up heur hair?

Apple finally announced the Apple Vision Pro, the first step toward a completely new form of computing. Marques Brownlee explained in this particularly good video what the Vision Pro excels at and where the challenges lie for Apple. I was surprised that the introductory price is still $500 higher than expected: $3499 is not the price buster of the month. For that, though, the Vision Pro is packed with high-quality sensors.

As an Apple fanboy, I was pleasantly surprised by the all-new interface: nothing keyboard and mouse, but delicate eye-tracking. Look at something and the glasses see it. Blinking becomes the new buying 😉 Even though it will probably take a decade for Apple headsets to generate a significant portion (more than 10%) of sales, it's great to see that Apple is finally trying something big and hard again and not spending billions on stock buybacks.

Zuckerberg responds

Mark Zuckerberg was smart enough to take extensive time (nearly 3 hours!) right after Apple's announcement to comment with Lex Fridman. He had a strong argument that the Apple Vision Pro seems to be made for solitary use and not for communication with others. For the Apple Vision Pro and its successors, that indeed seems like the next step, as users of the iPhone but even the Apple Watch use their devices primarily to communicate, in the case of the Apple Watch as a receiver.

The complete integration of the Apple ecosystem between Mac, iPhone, Apple watch and Vision Pro will be fascinating to follow. Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see what applications Apple develops to try to make the Vision Pro a mass-market product. I remain convinced that the biggest obstacle will be getting women excited about putting on a device that messes up their hair and makeup. Then the utility or fun of an Apple Vision Pro would have to be enormous.

Zuckerberg himself, meanwhile, has the greatest possible difficulty motivating and enthusing his people. The Washington Post reported that even before the latest round of layoffs in May, which brought the total number of layoffs at Meta to as many as 21,000 jobs, confidence in his leadership among staff had fallen to 26%. Even for a Dutch politician, that would be pathetically low.

Notable links

First, two reading tips for any person interested in AI and for "Minister" Van Huffelen:

  • Why AI will save the world. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, particularly successful as an investor this century, explains in a lucid speech why AI has mostly positive aspects.

Further:

  • Interesting video in which Twitter founder Ev Williams talks about how he feels about Twitter under Elon Musk. An interview that gives the impression that the demise of his brainchild really hurts him.

Spotlight 9: The SEC goes wild on crypto exchanges

Sleepless week on stock markets, except for crypto exchanges

It was a soporific week in the stock markets, with the old school S&P 500 outperforming the tech funds. All the negativity about Bitcoin was apparently already priced in, as BTC barely dropped amid all the uproar over the announcement that the U.S. SEC has filed charges against Binance.

Last year I wrote about Binance's lack of commitment to combating money laundering. More surprising is the charge against Coinbase that the company sold shares without having the necessary licenses. In doing so, the SEC takes the position that at least some cryptocurrencies should be considered shares.

At the same time, it is not conclusively established that the SEC has the authority to pursue charges if elected representatives of the people are drafting legislation in the area the SEC is just now moving into. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Casey, now the editorial boss at Coindesk, wrote a comprehensive analysis of the legal battle unfolding in the U.S. at the intersection of crypto and politics.

The shadow that the FTX debacle cast over the crypto sector has global repercussions. Also in Singapore, where unlike the Netherlands, failures do have consequences. Employees of sovereign wealth fund Temasek who invested in FTX and lost $275 million dollars (still less than one percent of invested assets) saw their salaries cut.

How much was not disclosed, but although investigations showed that all procedures had been followed, the fraud and theft by Bankman-Fried and consorts, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund managers was severely punished. I find this heavily punished, because in the end Bankman-Fried simply stole from his investors and customers, but maybe I am too Dutch and used to incompetent souls rolling from one cabinet to another.

Categories
AI NFT's technology

The Apple Vision Pro is going to fail and that's fine

Among all the news on AI, you would almost forget that in two weeks, Apple is expected to announce its first new device since the Apple Watch in 2015. It will be mixed reality glasses that could cost as much as $3,000 (three thousand!). All the omens are that the Apple Vision Pro will be a flop - a flop by Apple standards, that is. But that's not a bad thing at all. At least Apple is trying to develop something new again, and that's better than unimaginatively buying back its own shares for hundreds of billions, as it has in recent years. Apologies in advance for this long speech below, but I felt like it.

Beautiful render of the Apple headset by Marcus Kane, creator of beautiful renders and lucid analysis. Another stunning render was created by Denis Lukianenko.

What can Apple's ski goggles do?

The glasses, likely to be called Apple Reality, are expected to feature an internal screen for virtual reality, while outward-facing cameras will allow users to view the real world inside the headset with augmented reality overlays. This combination is known as mixed reality, or blended reality.

Angry tongues claim that the first pair of glasses Apple is expected to release late this year is a poor compromise between these two visions, with external video cameras thus capturing the environment and displaying it on the screen in front of the eyes when users switch the headset from VR mode to AR mode. In technical terms, video pass-through.

What does this mean in normal Dutch? Bassie (of Adriaan) would say that the glasses allow you to see the inside of your eyes. Because the first function is that of "regular" virtual reality glasses, giving you the experience of standing on stage next to Beyonce or at the top of Mount Everest. But the second function offers the user the chance to simply look through the glasses at the real world, in which mom asks if you've taken out the trash yet. Possibly supplemented by information projected over that sad reality (augmented reality), showing, for example, that the garbage truck won't arrive until the day after tomorrow and you can continue gaming in peace.

But for how many people are the potential applications actually relevant, informative or fun? The Wall Street Journal logically headlined: Can it be more than a nerd helmet? The expected primary applications of the Apple headset are FaceTime, Apple Fitness+ and gaming. Those are applications that already work well on computers, iPhones, gaming consoles and smart watches, such as the underrated Apple Watch.  

Is the Apple headset becoming serious business?

Among all the rumors about the Apple headset, I enjoyed the garbled listing of all the materials purchased by Apple, called the Bill of Materials. If correct, Apple has already spent $1500 on component purchases. More details here.

These expensive components are one reason that the much made comparison between the Apple Headset and the Apple iPod is completely flawed. Optimists point out that when the iPod was introduced in 2003, only 3 million MP3 players had been sold worldwide, compared to over 8 million VR headsets today. In other words, Apple is now entering a much larger, more mature market than back then with the iPod.

This ignores the fact that the first iPods cost $399 and $499 respectively in 2001, which for a device you use every day was expensive, but not insurmountable. Compare that to the whispered introductory price for the Apple Headset of $3,000 for a device you just don't use every day. A market for that kind of device in that price range does not exist and is not going to exist.

Apple hopes that like the iPod and iPhone previously, people will use the Headset for hours, if not continuously. But the applications to do so are lacking. That leaves you with nerds and gamers, and that seems like a great market. But not at these prices and especially not when there is little spectacular new content available. Before MP3 players, there was music. In fact, more music than ever before. The device feasted on the huge supply of pirated music that flooded the Internet via Napster, Limewire and Kazaa.

Because what is often forgotten is that MP3 players, including the iPod, benefited from the ability to listen to music by artists whose entire CDs you would never otherwise have bought. I am man enough to confess that How Do I Live by LeAnn Rimes was high on my iPod playlist for years, but I had never bought an entire CD of hers.

Content development for the entire VR/AR/XR market, on the other hand, is complex, expensive and time-consuming. The Apple Headset will have to run on legal content (read: no porn) and that costs money. So where the iPod was relatively cheap and played free content, the Apple Headset will be an expensive device with expensive content. And that suddenly reminded me of my graduate thesis and the huge failure of the Apple Newton.

In Search of the Holy Grail

The Apple Newton did just fine. As a bookend and dumbbell. Source: Ars Technica

Exactly thirty years ago, in 1993, Apple launched with much fanfare the Apple Newton, a handheld computer whose main asset was the possibility of handwriting recognition, which would make a keyboard unnecessary. That same year, Frans Straver and I graduated together on a study of success and failure factors of interactive media in the consumer market, entitled In Search of the Holy Grail. The conclusion after a year-long analysis of more than 600 scientific articles and pieces from the international trade press, was not shocking: interactive media that want to be successful in the consumer market must be cheap, easy to operate and preferably provide a hefty amount of erotic coziness.

In 1993, university professors asked how we had gotten this photo on the cover of our thesis. Video camera set on an old, painted flower pot. Idea of the brilliant photographer Morad Bouchakour.

Philips misread our conclusion and was kind enough to let us present the results at a conference in Ahoy. After I showed the picture showing that Philips' interactive compact disc player, the cd-i, would be mercilessly crushed between the PC at the top of the market and the game console at the bottom, Frans and I were thrown out before lunch.

What we ourselves and the brains at Philips overlooked at the time was that the Apple Newton suffered from exactly the same shortcoming as the CD-i: high price, no necessary new applications and no supply of pink content, as it was so nicely called at the time.

Wired published a great article 10 years ago about the failure of the Newton. CNET seems inspired by this and recently came out with this video in which it takes 8 minutes and 30 seconds to draw the parallel between the Apple Newton and the Apple Headset.

The best analysis I've come across so far on the chances for the Apple Headset is this video from the Wall Street Journal. Within Apple, there also seems to be division over the potential of the glasses, and executives are now keeping their appropriate distance from the project. Hopefully the tech gods will be merciful to whoever presents the Apple Headset on June 5. My guess is that it won't be CEO Tim Cook.  

Apple Headset will be a flop - by Apple standards

Reports are that Apple hopes to sell half a million to a million Headsets in the first year. Even if that market doubles every year for the next few years, which it won't, that's still change for Apple. Because that's the downside of a company heading for $500 billion in annual sales: it's unimaginably difficult at that scale to bring something new to market that has more impact on sales than, say, a marketing campaign for a new type of Airpods.

But I'd rather see a relative failure of a fundamentally new product, than more of those hopeless share repurchases that Apple has been peddling in recent years. Is there nothing better to invent, build or buy than spending $90 billion on share repurchases? That Headset isn't going to be it, but surely there will be products in development within Apple that can match the success of the... Apple Watch!

Because notice:

  • Apple had over 30% global market share in smart watches by 2022
  • that 30% market share led to as much as 60% revenue for Apple from every penny that went into the smart watch market (30% market share vs. 60% dollar share)
  • Apple will sell over 50 million Apple Watches this year
  • the annual growth rate of the smart watches market is nearly 20%
  • Apple has higher watch sales than the entire Swiss watch industry
  • Swatch Group, LVMH and Richemont collectively achieve lower watch sales than Apple
  • Rolex's annual sales are around $10 billion
  • Apple does not publish specific figures on Apple Watches sales, but with 50 million Apple Watches sold, Apple is at least twice the size of Rolex

Combined with the success of the Airpods, which, with the Apple Watches, fall under the Wearables division, with the emergence of the Services division, this leads to a dramatic change in the structure of revenue for Apple. See these excellent charts on Apple's revenue by product line and region over the years. Sales from Wearables now exceed those of the iPad and Mac. Apple is a computer company where revenue from traditional desktop and laptop computers is still only 8%.

It would make sense for Apple to organize revenue distribution differently, for example:

  1. computer hardware (Mac, iPad, Apple TV)
  2. services (Music, Movies, TV Shows, Apps, Books)
  3. wearables (Airpods, Watches, Headset)
  4. iPhone (you know)

I conclude about the Apple headset with the same consideration as when the Google Glass came out 10 years ago: over half the people on earth are women. Do you know one who will walk around with a device on her head all day, messing up her hairstyle?

News about AI

Notable links

Dutch photography marketplace Unveil unveils Early Access Card

  • Buyers of the Early Access Card (price under $100) will get access 24 hours earlier to purchase exclusive artwork through the Unveil platform.

Worldcoin raises $100 million via sale of tokens

  • The other startup by Sam Altman of OpenAI gives free tokens to people who have their iris scanned with a new device.

One million wallets hold at least 1 Bitcoin

  • It could be one person with a million wallets, but I don't think so.

ASML has no job openings for a week due to server maintenance

  • Holland's favorite tech company apparently has servers made of papier mâché.

Spotlight 9: Google again winner of the week

Alphabet stock was again the riser of the week and I have no idea why. Google is throwing generative AI at every product right now and experts say this is a very risky strategy for the company.

I can't possibly characterize the bizarre market right now any better than this article on Crunchbase:

"Suppose you would have invested $100 in a Nasdaq Composite Index fund at the height of the boom. That would have been on Nov. 19, 2021, when interest rates were low and technology stocks were very popular.

Today, that investment would be worth about $76. It's a disappointing return that reflects how technology ratings have steadily declined in recent quarters. But it could have been even worse.

Now imagine if, instead of the index fund, you had chosen a basket of promising, venture capital-backed startups founded in the past 15 years. You know, companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Rivian and Uber.

Let's say you had invested at the market high point in November 2021. And let's say you bought a share of the startups that launched the 19 biggest IPOs of the past 10 years. If you had held on until now, every $100 you had invested would be worth about $32. That's a much steeper drop than the drop in the technology-focused Nasdaq Composite Index and points to the public's deeper disappointment in mostly unprofitable new market entrants."

Two conclusions: profits are currently considered more important than growth. And investing in tech stocks is and remains highly risky. Because even Apple does not score on every try.

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