Ed Ludlow

Right.

The only observation I'll make in line with that is that this release also says nothing about the environment for memory chips.

Memory chip prices are very high.

But their margin was pretty good, right?

were pretty good and there's a scarcity and the principal difference is like, this is why it's so fun to cover hardware companies and it's a privilege to be a technology journalist.

When you get access to all these companies and speak to the CEOs, if you're a very big company, you have leverage with your supply base.

If a supplier has to choose, I've got this number of things, and I can only send them here, or I can send them there, or I can split, it helps to be Apple, is what I'm saying.

And there are companies that I've covered whose CEOs will privately just agonize over how difficult it is to convince suppliers to give them the things they need.

So on the call, that will come up.

The sell side are likely to ask about it.

Well...

It's not just that memory prices are high.

The reason that memory prices are high is that historically memory, DRAM and NAND, flash memory, is a very cyclical up and down business.

Boom and bust, you know, that's what Ian King would say, boom and bust.

Ian King leads our semiconductor coverage, right, at Bloomberg.

And it is correct that Apple's supply chain teams are its secret source.

That was Tim Cook's whole thing.

He was COO.

That's what he was good at.

But the reason prices are high is because of scarcity of availability.