[tyleo]

I find all this hyperbolic. Apple is dying because they are the third most valuable company in the world rather than the first? That’s a hard sell for me.

I’m sure they could have done some things better but they are hardly a dying husk at this point. Many argued the same for Microsoft as Ballmer laid the foundation for Azure and Enterprise that propelled them back to the top nearly a decade later.

[protimewaster]

Logically, if the (formerly) most valuable company in the world was dying, somewhere on the way down they'd probably be the third most valuable company in the world. I guess the question is at what point they're "dying". Even if Apple dropped to the 50th most valuable company, they'd still be huge, but, at some point it might feel like evidence that they're dying even if they're still huge.

[thomassmith65]

The argument is that if short-term thinking brings a company immediate success, that success comes at the expense of the company's future.

In terms of the stock market, a trend is more important than an absolute. For example, investors don't much care if a company lost money this year if there's a clear trend moving rapidly in the right direction.

Apple moved up-and-to-the-right ever since Steve Jobs returned. The video argues that Apple has passed the zenith.

[acdha]

Looking only at trends is how people convince themselves they’re sophisticated enough investors to make huge mistakes. You need to look at the rest of the market, too. Apple is still making very popular phones, computers, tablets, headphones, watches, etc. Their execution is solid in a proven market, modulo sabotage by the American president.

The reason they’re not the most valuable company in the world any more is not that they’ve stopped being good at their core business but rather that investors have given enormous amounts of money to Nvidia hoping that AI will start replacing jobs compellingly enough that every business in the world will start buying it at a premium. This seems like the people who’ve been pumping TSLA up for years in the hope that they’ll have a moat, ignoring both the difficulties of actually delivering on that promise and the lack of a moat for competitors. If the most bullish AI boosters are right, the economic impact of mass unemployment is going to be enormously disruptive; if they’re not, the amount of money being paid to train models is going to decline to the level which the actual shipping capabilities warrant (neither zero nor money geyser), and in all cases competition is going to eat into their profits – not just AMD but also Chinese alternatives as their government sees being frozen out as a strategic risk. Nvidia is still likely to do well, of course, but investors like to pretend that the boom stage will never end.

None of this directly affects Apple unless AI causes people to stop buying phones and computers, or Google builds AI features into Android which are both highly compelling and not available from anyone else. The most likely scenario is that companies continue to ship things normal people don’t care about for a while and Apple either builds something internally which they’re happy with or buys something built by an AI specialist, similar to how they were way behind on portable audio players, phones, or tablets until they weren’t.