TGIF -- June 21, 2024

Locator: 47852ARCHIVES.

Disclaimer: in a long note like this, there will be typographical and content errors. In addition, facts, factoids, and opinions will be interspersed and may not be easily discerned what is what. In the big scheme of things, this is just a bit of rambling and if you skip this entire page you won't be missing anything important.

Speaking of which, what did the market do today? Near the close, essentially flat for the day -- a good day for stock pickers and traders, perhaps not for investors.

Louis Rukeyser: Friday night, one half hour -- that was about all the investing / financial programming we got on live television decades ago. Now, we have 24/7 financial programmig if you include the internet. Does anyone compare with Louis Rukeyser today? Yup. Scott Wapner on CNBC's "Half-Time Report." Wapner is as good as / or better than Rukeyser, day-in, day-out for an hour every business day. And when he has the right panel he is just so much better. 

Pet peeve: when knowledgeable (?) financial analysts refer to "chips" as commodities. 

Tech: wow, things move quickly. 

It was very fortuitous that I did a "deep dive" into CPUs, GPUs, and all that jazz, back on April 29, 2024 -- wow, that was less than two months ago. In less than two months, we have gone from talking about 7-nm chips to talking about 3-nm CPUs, GPUs and NPUs, along with cores, and now we have performance cores and efficiency cores. And "they're" all chips. And anyone who says chips are commodities display a level of ignorance that is mind-boggling. I'm not saying that the success and failure of chip makers won't change over the years, but chip makers aren't in the commodity business.

Phones: is this what it comes down to? This needs to be fact-checked

• Apple iPhones: in-house chips, currently A-series; ARM-based.
• Android: Qualcomm Snapdragon; ARM-based;
• Huawei: Kirin series, made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC; a Chinese company), and Chinese-designed chips.

Battery: years (decades?) ago, Steve Jobs said his biggest challenge was batteries. 

To the best of my knowledge, there has not been a lot of advances in battery technology -- at least there are not many headlines.

My hunch, at some point, Apple pivoted. Realizing that solving the battery problem (SUPPLY) was not going to happen any time soon, they turned to DEMAND. And that meant specialized chips, more efficient chips, smaller chips, chips that can be placed together more closely, and chips that work better together (are optimized for each other). All of those factors could reduce DEMAND, and thereby lengthen the intervals between charging. The holy grail? Twenty-four hours of high demand use (gaming and movies) on the smallest iPhones (with a side benefit, less heat). 

Specialized chips: CPUs, GPUs, NPUs. More efficient chips: performance cores and efficiency cores. Smaller chips: 3-nm. Placed on one chip: SoC. Optimized: in-house synergetic software.

Robert Winnett out as editor at The Washington Post. Links everywhere.

• "Winnett has decided to remain at the Telegraph." -- The WSJ. 
• typo in The WSJ headline; "joint" vs "join." Doesn't happen often.
  

Glut? As predicted? Used car prices dropped like a rock. A recurrent theme on the blog in recent months. Link here. Maybe Carl Q will comment.