Mm.

So I said at the top sound quality is gonna be really important to me because I have to think about this also as a replacement device for some other gadget in my home.

Again, I keep coming back to this coming home to watch some YouTube thing.

It's gonna be a laptop or a tablet that's gonna sit somewhere around your living room, right? And this is what this device is supposed to replace.

I think it can, and especially because of that price point.

Like, I think that's gonna be the most compelling thing.

And Mark made the point, um, this is going to be more of an AI entry point rather than a smart home organizer.

Yeah

I do expect them to keep doing these sort of under-the-radar, smaller layoffs across a number of engineering departments to get to a more engineering-driven culture.

It strikes me as almost old-fashioned for Apple to be conscious about doing layoffs.

When-- Because when I was thinking about John Turness, I was also thinking, what does it mean to be a good CEO in the modern era broadly, not, not just within Apple? And the fact is, he's not going to be Steve Jobs or Tim Cook because those, both of them scaled up the company.

I don't think that there's a prospect of scaling up the company ten X from where it is today.

His point today is exactly what you're getting into, is how do we become more efficient? How do we become quicker about what we do rather than trying to scale up yet again? But the other competitors, when you look at Google, Microsoft, and Meta, most, most notably Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, have made really significant, in the thousands of people, layoffs.

They've made really harsh cost-cutting exercises.

And maybe- To your point, you may take a PR hit on day one, but ultimately, you make that significant change, and you get on with it.

But the fact that the CEO of the company is prioritizing design for this era of Apple is a huge deal and should be extremely exciting to, to Apple fans and, and customers as well as the whole consumer space.

I'm saying like it would make a lot of sense at $200, $300, but this memory situation could push it up.

That's right.

And likewise with these new iPhones, I will say when John Turner's came out, he gave four priorities at Apple's event about the future of Apple.

And I actually love them.

Well, three of them.

AI is one of these priorities which companies now just say in the same way that people on LinkedIn say, I'm really passionate and excited about accounting.

It's like, you just got to say it, right? You want to do some business, so you say, I'm excited about AI.

These are questions about your technology and your products that go beyond what's your favorite color.

Where do things stand now, uh, given so many of the vulnerabilities that we've been tracking over the last few months?

Right.

We, we paid very close attention, obviously, to that, uh, state summit between China and the US.

I did myself take notice of the fact that Sam Altman, the OpenAI leader, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, two of the other prominent AI leaders were there at that summit, and Amodei's absence was notable.

I would say, um, putting the pieces together, we may, uh, surmise that the plan was for them to have Donald Trump and Dario Amodei to have this dinner on Sunday, and they did need to thrash things out.

Um, they both have made public proclamations on the matter.

Amodei himself authored that essay that turned into effectively a lightning rod or a manifesto for anybody calling for a slowdown on AI development in order for risk mitigation and safety measures to be able to catch up.

Where do you see the, that pendulum swinging right now?

How significant is what we heard from Amazon, first of all, and how did it go down with investors?

I mean, it is completely unprecedented.

It's on a scale that needs historic precedence.

Some of our colleagues in the US tried to put this in some sort of reasonable context, and they went back to the railroad age, that level of investment, that level of infrastructure development.

And honestly, the sort of spending that is in line with those $29,000 a night holidays, there is nothing like it that was previously seen.

Understandably, the market finally found the level at which it's spooked by the excess spending.

Amazon in extended trading dropped.

So how should we see the size of these announcements as a whole?

So if the supply of memory is being constrained, I'm wondering whether Chinese firms like SMIC are benefiting.

Yeah, the opportunity right now is in fact for the Chinese manufacturers of memory chips.

You have YMTC and some other players within China.

They have the opportunity because they don't have the cutting edge, the HPM technology that Hynix and Samsung are dedicating all their attention to.

So for them, they can fill in the gap because Hynix has already said 2026 memory capacity is already booked out and sold.

And you're seeing these things emerging.

When you look at the consumer prices, if you want to build your own PC, prices have more than doubled for RAM sticks.

So I'm curious to get your take, Vlad, on where Apple is right now in trying to reduce its reliance on China as a manufacturing center.

So if the supply of memory is being constrained, I'm wondering whether Chinese firms like SMIC are benefiting.

Yeah, the opportunity right now is in fact for the Chinese manufacturers of memory chips.

You have YMTC and some other players within China.

They have the opportunity because they don't have the cutting edge, the HPM technology that Hynix and Samsung are dedicating all their attention to.

So, for them, they can fill in the gap because Hynix has already said 2026 memory capacity is already booked out and sold.

And you're seeing these things emerging.

When you look at the consumer prices, if you want to build your own PC, prices have more than doubled for RAM sticks.

So I'm curious to get your take, Vlad, on where Apple is right now in trying to reduce its reliance on China as a manufacturing center.

So if the supply of memory is being constrained, I'm wondering whether Chinese firms like SMIC are benefiting.

Yeah, the opportunity right now is in fact for the Chinese manufacturers of memory chips.

You have YMTC and some other players within China.

They have the opportunity because they don't have the cutting edge, the HPM technology that Hynix and Samsung are dedicating all their attention to.

So, for them, they can fill in the gap because Hynix has already said 2026 memory capacity is already booked out and sold.

And you're seeing these things emerging.

When you look at the consumer prices, if you want to build your own PC, prices have more than doubled for RAM sticks.

So I'm curious to get your take, Vlad, on where Apple is right now in trying to reduce its reliance on China as a manufacturing center.

First, let me get your reaction and what you're hearing among Hong Kongers now that follow the tech space.

Well, the interesting thing about DeepSeek is it's a company that has rocketed to global renown and recognition today and over the past week.

But it has been known about ever since its beginning in 2023.

It's one that our Bloomberg Intelligence colleagues have been taking a close look at because it is developing such a hot area of new software technology.

as AI, it has been developing its own models.

So people here have been aware of it, it has been on the radar, but really the thing that has happened is it hit a certain threshold of recognition.

Part of it really was Silicon Valley people, venture capitalists, they took an interest, they tried it out, and they found out that it is indeed, like you mentioned, as competitive as the company itself says.

Are we likely to see some type of fragmentation within the artificial intelligence industry, which is to say that you have certain products that have been produced at low cost, being rolled out at lower prices, and maybe those products will see greater adoption, and some of the more sophisticated elements of artificial intelligence you'll have to pay a premium for, and that segment of the market will be controlled by very few companies?