Why I'm Bullish Apple

I've been spending a lot of time digging in to Apple ($AAPL) the past few months, as it has long been my benchmark against any other investment. 

Do I think owning this stock is going to outperform Apple in the next ten to twenty year?

If I think yes, then I do a much deeper dive. If not, then like most investments, I just throw it off to the side. 

This week Apple held their World Wide Developers Conference and announced a bunch of updates and new product releases. 

On the back of Microsoft investing $10BN in to OpenAI, Meta leaking (having been leaked?) their AI product LLaMa, Google with a connected to the actual internet right now Bard (LLM), NVidia murdering investor expectations and becoming a Trillion Dollar company in the matter of seconds...

A lot of people were excited to see what Apple might bring to the table.

A new LLM that replaces Siri?

A native LLM to Safari Browser?

An LLM?

Nope, here's some $3500 Ski Goggles fam! 

Also, don't wear them skiing.

Apple released the AR (Augmented Reality)/VR (Virtual Reality) that Tim Cook has been talking about since 2015. 

Apple Vision Pro.

That being said, we're talking about Apple here. They are not going to rush to market with a new technology just to compete with anyone else on the same technology. 

Apple quietly manufactures their own chips for their own products. 

In fact there are 8 of Apples own chips in the Apple Vision. 

But what really didn't get the attention the AI hype "me too" attention that everyone was looking for was 

Apple announced their new M2 Ultra chip...

You might have heard how hard it is to build and work on these Large Language Models and how resource intensive it is to do AI research?

From Ars Technica (emphasis mine)---------

During the WWDC keynote, Apple unveiled its most powerful Apple Silicon chip yet, the M2 Ultra, which features up to 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores, and a 32-core Neural Engine that reportedly delivers 31.6 trillion operations per second, which Apple says represents 40 percent faster performance than the M1 Ultra.

Interestingly, Apple directly said that this power might come in handy for training "large transformer models," which to our knowledge is the most prominent mention of AI in an Apple keynote (albeit only in passing):

"And M2 Ultra can support an enormous 192GB of unified memory, which is 50% more than M1 Ultra, enabling it to do things other chips just can't do. For example, in a single system, it can train massive ML workloads, like large transformer models that the most powerful discrete GPU can't even process because it runs out of memory."

This development has some AI experts excited. On Twitter, frequent AI pundit Perry E. Metzger wrote, "Whether by accident or intent, the Apple Silicon unified memory architecture means high end Macs are now really amazing machines for running big AI models and doing AI research. There really aren't many other systems at this price point that offer 192GB of GPU accessible RAM."

While everyone is blown away by these LLM's doing new and exciting things every day, Apple is doing what Apple does. They use the best technology, best design to deliver a product to their user that performs exceptionally. 

In one event, without even saying it blatantly, Apple:

• Took all the hype about AI and quietly added them to their products without saying AI.
• Released a computer (chip)  capable of doing high level AI research under $2k, without saying AI.
•  Fixed the ducking autocorrect function in iMessage for ducks sake

Google mentions AI 140 times in Keynote

Microsoft, Google and Meta mention AI 50 times on earnings calls

Mixed reaction to my poll. 

If you are looking for a reason to take profits on Apple, this week was obviously the place a bunch of people had the same thought. 

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