It’s interesting that Tesla’s CFO had an abrupt departure from the company just before the quarterly earnings were announced.
 
More than any other function within a company, the Accounting and Finance group has accountability to the board of directors. The CFO is hired by the CEO and reports to him, but he works for the board of directors as well. As such, the accountants have a fiduciary responsibility to adhere to generally accepted accounting principles whether the CEO agrees with them or not. 

​One of the reasons I love my 9.7" iPad Pro is because it can do things better than either my iPhone 7 Plus or my MacBook Pro. One of those “things” debuted with the original iPad but can be further improved. That would be reading books. 

​So the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the next flagship iPhone may move to a USB Type C connector versus today’s proprietary Lightning. The question isn’t whether or not Apple would move the iPhone to USB-C, the question is why does the iPhone need any ports in the first place?

When the Russians hacked the DNC I said that it didn’t matter where the info came from because it didn’t change the nature of how the DNC conspired against Bernie Sanders. And when the leaks showed that Mike Flynn lied about speaking with his Russian counterpart I had the same attitude. Leaks or not, Trump had to let him go.

​I didn’t understand the doom-and-gloom last January. As growth funds started selling their positions in Apple (AAPL) when it became evident that the iPhone had suffered its first ever decline, writers were freaking out as if Apple stock was on a long ride to zero. They totally ignored the fact that Apple had a steady business, high margins, and a good management team. Their pessimism didn’t make any sense. 

Should Apple (AAPL) get more involved in vetting the real from the fake in their news? That’s a tough question. Defining fake news is kind of like trying to describe exactly what is pornography. Easier said than done.

Above Avalon's Neil Cybart had written a piece this week discussing his rationale for why he didn’t think that Netflix made sense for Apple (AAPL). If you look at Netflix (NFLX) as simply augmenting Apple’s service side of the business, then I would agree with Neil. However, if you model a scenario where Netflix is able to boost Apple’s smartphone market share, a Netflix purchase makes perfect sense.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims backs up my contention that it is companies like Apple (AAPL) or Google which are the more important force behind changing the world compared to companies that move pounds like Tesla or Amazon:
 
Almost every day when they get home from school, Gracie, age 16, and Sarah, age 14, open the app Houseparty, where they can video chat with to up to seven of their friends at once. The sisters, who live in Danville, Calif., use it to socialize and collaborate on homework, for 15 minutes to an hour. When they first open it they may be chatting with just one friend, but everyone they’re connected to on Houseparty gets a push alert that they’re “in the house,” and, soon enough, the room fills up.
 
It may not necessarily be a change for the better, but it is true social upheaval. No car necessary.
 
Physically moving objects is still all about eliminating friction. The potential for changing where we go or what kind of products we use is limited.  
 
Moving data is changing the way people live. Our habits are changing, our friends are changing, and the kind of products we use is changing. The Android app Houseparty is just one small example of many.

​I heard Elon Musk theorizing about how in the future so much of manufacturing will be automated that governments will need to consider moving society onto some kind of guaranteed universal income. The problem with Elon’s statement is that he’s forgetting about the law of unintended consequences. And there will be some very real consequences to automating manufacturing. 

​Michelle Jones writing for Valuewalk is reporting that Apple’s (AAPL)sudden stock movement is putting the hurt on short sellers who had bet against Apple prior to the latest quarterly earning release. I even read about one investor last week who had put every dime he owned betting that Apple stock was going down. That was a bad bet.

Apple (AAPL) just came out with an iPad Pro ad campaign that doubles down on their view that for a large segment of the market, the iPad Pro can replace the laptop. The campaign seems aimed specifically at Windows PC users, which makes a lot of sense. Windows switchers have been coming to Apple via the MacBook Pro and ending up with an iPad in the end. Why not short circuit that route and just send them directly to the iPad? This would yield a lot more switchers going for the iPad Pro, which starts at $599. Judging from the ad campaign, Apple obviously sees the iPad as more than a leisure-time device for reading magazines.

Noah Smith at Bloomberg is writing about how monopolies may be worse than we thought, and Apple (AAPL) is used as an object lesson.
 
A recent paper by David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence Katz, Christina Patterson and John van Reenen speculates that tech might have enabled the rise of a few “superstar” companies in each industry. The fact that leaders in more concentrated industries also tend to have higher productivity supports this hypothesis. Technology might have simply changed the nature of markets so that the winners take most of the profits.
This could happen because network effects have increased. For example, iPhones are popular in part because of Apple’s large app store, and the app store is large because developers want to write apps for popular phones. Or in finance, having a larger network of counterparties could be more important to banks in the internet age.

​I find it increasingly perplexing that ten years after the birth of the modern smartphone movement, with Apple’s (AAPL) launch of the iPhone, automakers continue to refuse to accommodate the masses with mounts built into the dash. Sure, they’ll provide you with all manner of ways to charge your iPhone, lay it flat in an out of way cubby hole, or even connect to it so you can access media. But will they allow you to mount it so you can see the screen? No. 

​I have first-hand experience with how horrific the display business is. If all you have to offer is a dumb display, then good luck with that. But even I will acknowledge that there are strategic situations where it makes sense to be in the business of displays. The iMac is a good example. At the time, there was no good way to get a 4K monitor paired with a desktop computer unless you did what Apple did and bypass cables. 

​When an organization has a string of amazing success over a long period of time, the chatter usually shifts away from the individual players and onto the management. Who setup the system that drives the success and how does it work? 

​Unlike macOS, iOS is already well entrenched in the enterprise world. The iPhone is the defacto mobile standard in business. So it makes sense that when Apple contemplates a full-scale assault on enterprise that they start with their Trojan horse. Windows will probably continue to own the enterprise space for the foreseeable future, but if Apple could get to 20% penetration, this would be many times larger than their current entire Mac business. 

​It’s funny that Apple’s (AAPL) future lies with the products that cause the press the most concern amongst both Wall Street Analysts and the tech press.

​In Apple’s Q1 earnings release this week there were some disappointing sales figures for the iPad. Compared to the same quarter last year sales were down 19% to 13 million units. That’s a drop of 3 million units compared to last year.
 
The logical question posed in light of these sales figures is whether or not there will ever be a shift from laptops to tablets. 

On Saturday I was disappointed to see that John Gruber of The Daring Fireball had a crass post that tried to paint Peter Thiel as a moron. It was both in poor taste and incorrect. John took exception with Peter’s assertion during the election that you shouldn’t take Donald Trump literally. I have no problem calling out Peter Thiel when he’s wrong, but on Donald Trump he was right on the money. 

Writing for Mashable, Lance Ulanoff makes the excellent point that Apple (AAPL) took the high road in regards to Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note 7.

The company has surely benefited from Samsung’s astounding Note7 flameout, but thankfully not by using that company’s hardships to drive people to Apple’s alternatives. Tim Cook never mentioned what happened to Samsung, perhaps smartly recognizing that the high road would allow Note7 refugees to come willingly to Apple’s shores. --Lance Ulanoff
 
I’ve always considered it a huge blunder by Samsung to poke fun at iPhone customers the way they did in some of their commercials. It’s one thing to go after a company but to poke fun at potential customers is counter-productive. These ads may have worked with the Android faithful who enjoyed seeing the jabs on TV but with iPhone owners? Not so much. As they say, you catch more flies with honey and the last thing Samsung needed to do is insult a huge potential market. Especially now that the great smartphone land rush has come to a close.
 
If Apple and Samsung’s roles had been reversed, I don’t doubt for a minute that Samsung would have created humorous ads where iPhones were catching on fire. 

​I had written Tuesday about one possible reason that Apple’s (AAPL) Mac Pro is in the state that it’s in. Like everyone else, Ben Thompson was sharing his own Mac Pro theory on The Talk Show with John Gruber this week. He theorizes that there must have been some kind of design flaw inherent to the Mac Pro that made it impossible from a financial standpoint to put any more money into that iteration. This would have resulted in a loss so large that even Apple couldn’t swallow it.
 
I have no problem with Ben’s theory since it fits the circumstances. But if this is what happened, it started me thinking about how organizations react to disasters. I mean big disasters. Like the space shuttle blowing up, aspirin killing people, or phones setting people’s houses on fire. Because how you bounce back from a disaster is ultimately what makes or breaks an organization. 

According to Patently Apple, more and more evidence is coming out that Apple is looking at the next major step in the iPhone evolution. Foldable screens. I’ve written recently about how this might impact the iPad.

But I continue to be amazed at all the Apple writers in the echo chamber who continue to spout the party line that the iPhone doesn’t need to get any thinner. Yes it does. Otherwise you can’t have a foldable phone that is comfortable in your pocket. 

​Apple has some of the brightest minds in the tech world pontificating on what people really want from their iPhones. Do they want intelligent assistance via Siri? Do they want to play games? Do they want to watch and share videos? Do they want to social connection via social media and texting apps?
 
Apple needs to do some hard thinking on this topic, because people can’t ask for something that doesn’t exist yet. But not only do they need to make a list of what people will want in their iPhones they also need to rank those items. Which brings me to my point. How high on the list does intelligent assistance rank? 

​Regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, computer companies always maintain at least some manufacturing presence in the United States. That’s because there are two very large and very important customers who make it worth their while. Those would be the American Military and the Government of Israel. 

This guy may be on to something. Writing for TechCrunch, Adam Singolda puts forth the proposition that driverless drones may actually be the real leap forward that changes the status quo.