The capital return program was a massive own goal in my humble opinion. It will work for now but soon Apple will go through their Intel years because they spent too long sweating their (admittedly incredible) assets. Something like Harmony OS is going to eat their lunch and they will only have themselves to blame.

I imagine you're saying the capital return program is a mistake because they should reinvest the money in R&D etc.

I think the issue is there's diminishing returns to spending, and in some cases it can be outright negative. For example, one major thing you can do with money is hire more people. Hiring more people than you can handle is a great way to grind everything to a halt. You're basically making a bet when you hire that the additional capacity outweighs the danger of coordination failure.

Perhaps you could invest more money in fabs or something like that. I don't know, I'm a software person. But I did work at apple on software for 15 years, and I do not think throwing more money at software is particularly effective. The biggest teams at apple are often the least functional.

That is absurd. Nobody is arguing that Apple should deplete its war chest. Steve Jobs's infantile stance against dividends has fortunately been replaced by a proper return to the company's OWNERS.

And "Harmony OS" is going to threaten their ecosystem of hardware, software, services, and developers?