Apple -- The U1 Chip -- June 20, 2023

Locator: 44988AAPL. 

On a down day for the Dow / NASDAQ / S&P 500, I never would have expected AAPL to hold its own, actually closing slightly higher at the end of the trading day. On such days, I expect and would expect AAPL to have a bad day.

I cannot explain what helped AAPL today -- obviously some analyst raised guidance, and/or the one-year target. 

Possibly, some early numbers / rumors are starting to come in suggesting the new iPhone and the new MacBook Air 15 are going to be huge sellers. 

Their two most important products -- the iPhone and the MacBook Air came out early enough this summer for college-bound / those returning to college this autumn. For the most part, the laptops did not increase in price -- certainly not when considering the new chips -- and iPhones are so heavily subsidized by carriers, the price of a new iPhone hardly matters. Don't take that out of context.

Having said that, I would hope that analysts are also actually looking at Apple's new products. These new products really are incredible.

I've had several blogs on these new products. Today, there was another article regarding the iPhone.

Link here.

From the linked article:

Apple's new iPhone 15 will feature at least one new upgrade aimed at the upcoming Vision Pro headset.

The new iPhone is due out in September, and Apple has said little about it. But as the release nears, more reports are leaking out from the company’s supply chain that indicate its features.

One of those may be a new “ultra wide band” or UWB chip that is looking ahead to Apple’s Vision Pro, according to a new report from reputable analyst Ming-chi Kuo.

The chip will allow the phone and the headset to be able to work together, he suggested, as part of a “more competitive ecosystem”.

“The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including the integration with other Apple hardware products, and related main hardware specifications are Wi-Fi and UWB,” he wrote on a post on Twitter.

“iPhone 15 will likely see an specification upgrade of UWB, with the production process moving from 16nm to more advanced 7nm, allowing for improved performance or reduced power consumption for nearby Interactions.”

The U1 chip is used give the iPhone and other devices better spatial awareness, so that they can find other objects more precisely.

Two things: we're going to be hearing much more about "spatial computing" from Apple for the foreseeable future, and yet another Apple chip, the U1.

Go to this wiki site to see the long list of chips being designed / developed by Apple's chip design division: Apple silicon. Yes, "silicon" with a lower case "s."

The list of chips and processors is incredibly long, and are divided into series:
A, H, M, R, S, T, U, and W. 

For example, the "Apple U1":

The Apple "U" series is a family of systems in a package (SiP) implementing ultra-wideband (UWB) radio.

The Apple U1 is used in the iPhone 11 series and later (excluding the second and third generation iPhone SE), Apple Watch Series 6 and newer, HomePod (2nd generation), HomePod Mini, AirTag trackers and the charging case for AirPods Pro (2nd generation).

Disclaimer: I self-identify as an Apple fanboy, Apple fanboy #3 to be exact. I am inappropriately exuberant about Apple. I care less about Apple as an investment opportunity than about the company as a company: its technology, designing, manufacturing, logistics, international relationships, thinking differently, and, especially, marketing. And so much more.