Apple is too desperate to be making demands. You confuse the Apple of yesterday and of today. Things change fast and things have changed.

You’re right, Apple only has 68 billion dollars in cash, up 40% since last year. Definitely on their last legs.

mgambati an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Free cash? Crazy. I think I can live with the interest of that in the bank.

	▲	nxtfari 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		you could live (100k a year) with the interest of 0.004% of that in the bank.

I remember the infographics of 5-10 years ago. They had 200 billion. What happened? Sinking ship?

	▲	malshe 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They never had $200 billion in cash in any quarter. Not at least since 2014. Besides, how much cash to hold is an executive decision. If the cash balance went down, it doesn't mean their business is not doing well. Cash can be used for Capex, like what the hyperscalers are doing right now. It can be used for buying back equity.

mandeepj an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Apple is too desperate to be making demands

They don't give a F about AI or any new AI model that was announced this morning. Wasn't there news a while ago about them buying Perplexity?

dofm 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They didn't buy Perplexity and it indeed rather seems like Perplexity may have damaged the deal by blurting.

Whether things are different now I don't know, but Prism would potentially be a good acquisition.

This is not the first Bonsai model from Prism using this technology, and they've also applied this technology to an image model.

The model isn't that significant (even in this news), because it is Qwen. Prism's technology might be valuable, and their team could well be.

And they very evidently do care a lot about efficient on-device AI; they just don't care about developing frontier cloud models.

They do, they are low key panicking.

	▲	dofm 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I do not believe they are panicking, not least because I don't think they've finished adjusting Apple Silicon for the task; it will be very interesting to see what happens in the M6 and M7. I think their strategy is broadly correct, actually; I think there's still a bit of scope for "sit and wait and do it right" here. But acquiring more edge AI tech and edge AI people would potentially be in their interest.
	▲	trollbridge 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And if they aren't, they should be. They ship some of the cheapest, most capable, and easiest to buy/set up AI hardware out there, and then don't ship any AI software worth speaking of. Apple needs to fix this.