Liberty

The lilac guidance doesn't include CWC because it hasn't closed, but on the call they give more details.

Interesting read by someone who seems to know what they're talking about: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645 Also, did the FBI change the account's password? Why was it changed after they had the device? http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists-appleid-passcode-changed-in-government-cust#.gsQbREQdB More here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/02/19/paczkowski-apple-id Snowden, who knows a thing or two about surveillance and security:

They clearly guided to double-digit EBITDA growth when CWC closes, and there are many more targets after that. But you can sell them if you want. Malone might be on the other side of that transaction, you never know... He seems to want those shares, he opted to convert his CWC stake to LiLAC rather than LGI.

I think the law can force them to give information that they have. But they don't have the key to that phone. I don't think the law, as it stands, can force them to hack into their own system by creating new software to do so. As far as I know, tech companies can't be enrolled by force by the government to write hacking tools to be used against their own products. The risk here is that if they can be forced to do so in this case (which the FBI obviously picked carefully so that it's as clear-cut as possible so that it's hard to fight, to create a precedent), then that software can eventually leak and make all iPhones insecure. The government can over time start to make requests for less and less clear cut cases using the newly created precedent, or force Apple to give over the software tools to be used at the government's discretion. And other governments can follow the US' example and then you have chinese intelligence, Saudi secret police, Russia's FSB, etc, all asking Apple to help them crack phones/read iMessages/access GPS location/etc. Either everyone has secure devices, or nobody does. There's no such thing as a security hole that only "good guys" can exploit.

Another way to see this - a more economically correct way IMO - is to say that Amazon has found ways to reinvest everything they make internally, but Apple's capital needs and opportunities aren't that big. If Apple could somehow redeploy 70bn/year internally and expense that, they might also show zero accounting profits, but that wouldn't mean that their activities are uneconomic. The question would be, what kind of return are they getting on that investment? Buying back stock is a different way to reinvest in the business, in a way, from a shareholder's point of view... Or said another way, Amazon shows zero accounting profits, but I don't think it's true that they take zero percent of the retail industry's profits. If amazon didn't exist, we could quantify how much more money everyone else would be making.

iTunes is kind of a mess mostly because of the "legacy support" issue also faced by many others, especially Microsoft. The problem is that after a while if you are successful and run a software long enough, you have many users who depend on feature X or Y so it's very hard to change or remove them. Every little button of feature or interface item has its own constituency that will complain if you touch it. So you tend to keep piling up on top of the growing pile of code until it becomes complex and buggy. How long did Microsoft have to keep support for DOS software? With 1 billion iOS devices out there, you can be sure that there are tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people using all kinds of parts of iTunes. I'm sure many still have old iPods that they synch with a wire, some have bought a ton of songs and TV shows/movies that they want to play, etc. So when Apple adds something like Apple Music, they try to add it on top of the existing stuff that was coded years ago and it becomes more and more complex. iTunes has tens of billions of dollars flowing through it, it's not an easy things to change on the fly and anything you do has big impacts. And any changes you make immediately goes out to hundreds of millions of people. When Spotify started out its music streaming, it had few users and fixed bugs as it went along; few people saw those early growing pains. When Apple released Apple Music, it immediately had tens of millions of people on the free trial and all kinds of bugs and edge cases that are hard to test for showed up for a vast number of people. That certainly doesn't help with perception. I'm pretty sure that Apple is aware that iTunes needs an overhaul and that they are working on refactoring it. But it's harder to do than even the iPhoto/Photos app that they recently completely refreshed because there's a lot more dependencies with iTunes than with Photos. You can't strip it down and rebuild it as you go like they did with the iWork suite and with Photos, because whatever you strip out will leave millions of people stranded. What might be slowing progress is that Apple's software resources are spread thin between maintaining and evolving 4 operating systems (depending how you count: OS X, iOS, Apple TV OS, Watch OS) + many first-party apps + all the new products that haven't been announced yet (electric car, VR, whatever). If they only had the Mac to deal with, iTunes would be a higher priority, but they have to allocate resources where they will be the most useful, and iTunes isn't at the top of the list. Despite it's many frustrations, it still works well enough to be one of the biggest and fastest growing online stores in the world. Part of me thinks they should never have made Apple Music and focused on other things, but I also think that it's hard to have the iTunes platform be viable long-term without streaming. I think what will probably happen is that in a few years Apple Music and iTunes will have been rebuilt and Apple customers will be glad to have them as option for their media needs rather than have to go to third parties that might have different kinds of problems that Apple can't do anything about. A more full-featured media platform will also be important for the Apple TV as it evolves.

Apple's resources are an advantage because they are set up in a way to make good products. Microsoft had all the money in the world, tons of engineers, and started before everyone else and couldn't make anything happen in mobile.

Q4 http://www.csisoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/PR_Q4_2015.pdf http://www.csisoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/SR_Q4_2015.pdf

Interesting take: http://www.asymco.com/2016/02/16/priorities-in-a-time-of-plenty/

Why do you assume no buybacks? They did $2.3bn of buybacks in the past 12 months, and with the 1bn of cash that they'll receive from VOD, they can possibly accelerate that further at the current depressed prices. They've guided to 4bn of buybacks by year-end 2017.

Globa and Vodafone merging in the Netherlands: http://www.libertyglobal.com/pdf/press-release/Liberty-Global-and-Vodafone-to-merge-Dutch-operations-FINAL.pdf

My point is just that it's a case of 'damned if you do, damned if you don't', so there's nothing more they can do, whether it turns some people off or not. If you don't support older devices with new OSes, people will complain about "planned obsolescence" and about lack of support. If you do support older devices that are orders of magnitude slower, people will complain about "planned obsolescence" because their devices don't provide as good an experience when trying to run modern software. *shrug*

I always think it's funny when people think that this is done on purpose. "oh, the latest iOS is getting slow on my 4-5 years old device, they must do it on purpose." http://cdn0.mos.techradar.futurecdn.net/art/mobile_phones/iPhone/iPhone%206S/Leaks/live-event-predictions/apple-live-event-iphone-6s-specs-420-90.jpg (and that slide is just for the A8, the iPhone 6S is even faster with the A9) GPUs have been improving even faster than mobile CPUs, and RAM and I/O (flash storage speeds) has also increased a fair amount. It's pretty much a miracle that Apple supports old devices as long as they do -- Android certainly doesn't. You can't expect to run software targeted to a certain generation of hardware as fast on hardware that is an order of magnitude slower with a lot less RAM, and its resource-intensive to go back and test on old hardware and optimize for it. If the Surface had been around as long as the iPad, I'm pretty sure that earlier models would struggle with the latest version of the OS and software too.

I disagree. I've owned the iPad 3, the iPad Air, and now the iPad Air 2, and I think each one has been a big improvement. The 3 was super slow and very RAM constrained, the first Air was much faster and thinner, and Touch ID made it a lot less annoying to constantly unlock, but it was just thick enough to be kind of annoying to use for long periods of time. The Air 2 just crosses that threshold of being light and thin enough to be useable for extended periods of time, and the extra RAM and multi-tasking in iOS 9 makes it a much more productive device. I'm not saying everybody uses the device as heavily as I do - if you just watch a few youtube videos, you won't care - but every update is a new temptation to upgrade for a portion of the user base. Not upgrading it last fall lost them that crowd (some of them still on early models, just waiting for something to tempt them enough).

One thing I've been wondering about is the impact on iPad sales of not refreshing the iPad Air last fall. They had the iPad Pro come out, which helped, but it'll always be a more niche device than the 9.7 inch form factor. That can't have been good for sales. I wonder if we'll see some catch-up when the iPad Air 3 is released, especially if it has lots of cool stuff (3D Touch? Apple Pencil support? 4 speakers? Touch ID V2? the new accessory interconnect? Variable refresh rate screen?)

Not necessarily by much. If the smaller phone has internals that are as fast or nearly as fast as the mainline, they probably won't be much cheaper. The 6s Plus is 130$ more than the 6S. I wouldn't be surprised if the smaller phone was just $100 less (and also a bit less expensive to manufacture -- smaller battery, smaller screen, etc).

No, the rumors are for basically an entirely upgraded phone, but the form factor would be similar to the 5. And also at a lower cost. Should help appease the bears claiming the iPhone won't be able to grow in Asia like it has in the rest of the developed world. But one can only hope this is Cook/Ive being smart with long-term strategy and not pure capitulation to sell-side analysts and others claiming the iPhone in its current form is doomed. I don't think they're doing this because of pressure from the outside, and these things have pretty long design/production cycles. This 4-inch iPhone would have been planned for at least a year, probably 2. I think it just makes sense. There's never been one-size-fits-all with smartphones. Some people will always prefer bigger or smaller, so it makes sense to offer a few models, like they now have 3 sizes of iPads.

No, the rumors are for basically an entirely upgraded phone, but the form factor would be similar to the 5.

Do you plan on being short through the Model 3 unveiling in March? Just curious. Pretty sure the stock will be hugely volatile at that time, but I have no idea in which direction...

What are the standards or norms for this? Management is -always- in possession of such info, so are there any examples of where they were found to have crossed some line? Have there been any recent court cases or SEC actions on this sort of thing? Maybe the material non-public info that they were refraining from acting on was that they knew they were going to have a flat quarter give ambiguously apocalyptic guidance? In that case, I'm happy they stopped buying and let the stock tank, assuming they are now active in the market. I'd guess the standard is similar to the level of materiality that would require a company to issue a press release and file it with the SEC (if anyone knows the exact rules, please correct me if I'm wrong). So for example, buying a tiny company wouldn't be material - they do that all the time and we never hear about it - but buying something bigger might trigger their lawyers to make them stop. I doubt issuing weak guidance counts, that's what the pre-earning blackouts are for. I guess in theory they could have decided to not buy a single share in December voluntarily, but that seems unlikely considering how much they've been buying back over the past year.

http://leancrew.com/all-this/2016/01/how-the-iphone-6-ruined-apple/

Munger nearly lost everything in the 1973-74 correction...he was down some 70%+. He learned from his own mistakes as well! Berkshire was lucky things turned out like they did after the whole Solomon's debacle...otherwise Berkshire would not be here today. Prem is lucky he is still standing after buying C&F and TIG and then being hit with 9/11 and Hurricane Hugo! We all make mistakes...don't be so hard on yourself. Cheers! Wise words. I've sure made many terrible mistakes, and I've tried to learn from them, but they still hurt, and I'm sure I'll make some more. I think one of the necessary - but not sufficient - qualities to do all right in investing is the ability to keep going despite setbacks, because there are many. To paraphrase Munger, if this was easy, everybody would do it. You also need to be disciplined and have the right mindset and strategy, etc... But if you have all that but can't get back up after you fall down, you still won't get anywhere.

http://i.imgur.com/DffHina.png It might not mean much, but Apple didn't buy back any shares in December, and probably not in January either (pre-earnings blackout period). They don't say why they didn't buy in December, but it sounds like it might have to do with some non-public material info. Maybe some bigger-than-usual M&A discussions..? Intriguing. In any case, I expect that they're restarting the program now unless they still are prevented like in December...

Agreed. What a wonderful archive of videos it would be if they had started in the early Youtube days..

Buffett will apparently webcast the annual meeting for the first time this year. Great move. http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/01/29/for-the-first-time-ever-warren-buffett-plans-to-webcast-berkshires-annual-meeting/