Patrick McGee

The fact that they haven't spent and are not spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers is looking pretty smart right now as the market gets pretty worried about how much spending is going on at basically every other company.

So if they can just be the hardware vehicle for other AI systems to operate on, then they're going to be looking pretty for quite some time.

The risk, of course, is that AI really is the biggest thing since the web, if not bigger than the web, bigger than the personal computer.

And if that's the case, then it's sort of a disaster that such a creative, forceful, and $4 trillion company is basically just relying on others to do the innovation while they focus on hardware.

So

Honestly, that's a tough decision.

I'm sort of skeptical of anyone who has a strong opinion one way or the other.

I think it's a big unknown.

I can give you my like unhinged, you know, fanciful wish, which is like Apple spends more than $100 billion a year on share buybacks and dividends.

The buybacks alone are more than $100 billion.

That's such a hard number to comprehend.

I have to give you an analogy.

If you take all share buybacks at Wall Street's top seven banks, it's a little bit less than what Apple spends.

Apple is enormous and it's hard to get one's mind around it.

I think if Apple were to take a quarter of that and even better, half of that to have a fund that builds resiliency into their supply chain, that would be my dream press release.

I would absolutely love to see that Apple is making major investments to some extent in America.

But realistically, iPhones aren't going to be made in Pittsburgh.

It's going to be in Karnataka.

It's going to be in Tamil Nadu.

Maybe it's going to be in Mexico.