Summary
In their latest podcast, Doug McIntyre and Lee Jackson discussed Apple (AAPL) and why its stock has been unusually flat as of late. Making it even more bizarre is that this comes during one of the biggest tech rallies in years. As Doug explains, “If you said to me that Apple was gonna be flat during one of the biggest tech rallies in recent memory, I’d say that’s impossible.”
Doug and Lee argue that the company’s failure to capitalize on the current AI wave is largely responsible and that Apple is virtually the only major tech firm not engaged in the “circular trades” or partnerships driving AI investment. Doug criticizes Apple CEO Tim Cook for not putting Apple in the AI “sandbox” alongside Nvidia, AMD, and IBM, saying Cook has done a disservice to its shareholders.
Lee agrees, saying the excitement around new iPhones has worn off because the updates are incremental and no longer feel innovative.
“I don’t care if the camera’s better,” Lee explains. “I look at the new one and I go, ‘It’s 1200 bucks and I don’t need one.'”
He and McIntyre reflect that under Steve Jobs, Apple consistently introduced groundbreaking products, whereas now it seems to simply repackage the same devices each year. They also discuss how Apple failed to turn its vast cloud infrastructure into a business like Amazon Web Services, missing another key opportunity for growth. McIntyre remarks that Apple’s relationship with the government is now mostly negative, contrasting sharply with other tech CEOs’ high-profile collaborations with political leaders. The conversation ends with both hosts concluding that Apple has lost its innovative spark, leaving it vulnerable in a rapidly evolving tech landscape driven by artificial intelligence.
Transcript:
Doug McIntyre: Lee, one of the things that I’ve noticed is, you know, there’s a new iPhone out, little chatter around Apple, then Apple is really flat this year.
Lee Jackson: Yeah.
Doug McIntyre: If you said to me that Apple was gonna be flat during one of the biggest tech rallies in recent memory, I’d say that’s impossible.
Lee Jackson: I would’ve said the exact same thing.
Doug McIntyre: Only reason is AI. They’re, if you take all the tech companies, major tech companies, they’re the only people who aren’t involved in these circular trades. You don’t see them buying into Chico to, to me, the problem with Apple is not that they are missing a major AI component to the current operating system. It’s, they’re not in the sandbox at all. Everybody’s in the sandbox. Even jokers, like, you know, the jokers at IBM are in the sandbox.
Lee Jackson: They just had a big deal with AMD to carry on down the road.
Doug McIntyre: You’ve got, you’ve got the high tier guys like Nvidia. You’ve got the mid-tier sort of crummy companies like IBM. Apple, which is truly a high tier company, and they have enough cash to buying a lot of stuff. They haven’t invested a dime. They haven’t had any, no balance sheet transactions, no major investments in the chips, AI data centers, nothing. To me, the disservice that Tim Cook is doing to his shareholders now is significant. And that is having AI in an operating system that goes on all the Apple products is nice. It’s nice, but guess what? You can download great AI products right now on. You can forget it. Forget it’s, you can already get it at the Apple App Store for free. There’s like six AI apps I can download onto my phone for free. I can talk to them, you know, I can get my car and write software on ’em and everything else. Cook has not attempted to get his foot in the door at all.
Lee Jackson: Yeah, and the interesting thing is, is you know, now that we’re at iPhone 17, I guess they’ll put another one out every 11 or 12 or 14 months. But I mean now, now that I got a 16, which was good with the new operating system, unless they totally change operating systems, I’m not gonna buy a 17 or an 18 or a 19 or a 20 or I don’t care if the camera’s better, you know, and all this other, you know, semi items they’ve changed that they don’t affect, I don’t think a lot of people, certainly not people of our demographic.
Doug McIntyre: Look, I wanna know why Tim Cook, who went down and was at the President’s Tech dinner. Why isn’t he standing in the Oval Office with Larry Ellison and the SoftBank guys, and Altman, you know, you, he isn’t there for that photo op with the president and the rest of these players because he’s not a player.
Lee Jackson: It doesn’t appear like he is, I mean, you know, the only time he is in there is, is when he has to go to the principal’s office and stop building those damn phones in India, you know, or whatever, you know, Trump yells at him about, but you know, I mean, that’s the only time he is in there is when he is kind of getting paddled.
Doug McIntyre: Look, Apple’s relationship with the current administration is based on negativity. It’s based on getting spanked and rectifying some of your habits and behaviors so you aren’t spanked. That’s not what’s going on now. They’re not in the line of people being praised. They’re not in the, they don’t have that Willy, Willy Wonka factory. The golden ticket, right? They don’t have that golden ticket. They aren’t, they don’t have the golden ticket to get them into play the AI game. So I don’t think Apple goes up from here. I understand the market may go way, way down, in which case, obviously it’s going to gonna go down, but all things being equal, there’s not gonna be a rally in Apple stock.
Lee Jackson: I can’t see what would generate it unless last iPhone sales are just so incredible that we’re just blown away. But I can’t believe that’s the case, you know? I just can’t believe that’s the case. Yeah, with, with they, just, the one thing Steve Jobs could always do is he always was an innovator. He always came up with something new. It was all new. I, in fact, I have, and it still sits next to my bed. I have like a 20-year-old iPod. You know, the, the little ones that are about like cigarette pack size. I’ve read somewhere that it’s worth a lot of money, and I’m like, okay, well, I’ll keep that in, in, in mind, but he was always creating, always innovating. So there’s gotta be something that’s, you know, whether it’s gaming or something that’s in that universe that Apple certainly could, could take a, a hold of, but apparently not.
Doug McIntyre: I just don’t, I don’t see it. I just don’t see it going.
Lee Jackson: The innovation’s gone, that’s for sure. ’cause it’s, they just regurgitate the same stuff. New, you know, new iPad, new iPhone, new iWatch, new ear pods, you know, and stuff like that. But you can only regurgitate that so many times and people say, I don’t need ’em. I don’t need it. You know, so, and also I think that that. They had a lot of cloud storage business before music was a big streaming effort, which was odd that Jobs was never, why didn’t he, he invented the way to capture it digitally. Why did he invent a way to sell it? You know? But, um, it is gonna be interesting to see because why would anybody need cloud storage to store music anymore? It’s all on Spotify. You just go, you want to hear a Led Zeppelin, well just go on Spotify. You gotta pay Spotify. But you know, as it’s not $3 a month and 25 bucks a year, or whatever it is.
Doug McIntyre: If you go back historically, Bezos was a genius by taking his excess server capacity that he need needed during the holidays. AWS was born out of the fact that he had servers that were valuable at, at, you know, at a certain level at Christmas. Most of the rest of the, he had the same capacity jobs and then Cook had the same thing. They had to have a lot of what is now known as, as cloud operations, but they never took any advantage of it. They never turned it into an enterprise business.
Lee Jackson: No, they didn’t. And it’s, it’s interesting because now you know, you’re, you’re at kind of a point in, in, in technology where young people are determining more and more what is needed because when this all started to break 25 years ago, everything was needed, you know, because everybody had slow internet access and everybody needed a faster phone because we all had a little Nokia phone that was, you know, that big and all that. But that’s, that’s all been done in the last 25 years. Those products have been bought, sold, and improved a hundred percent, 200%. And now you’re stuck with trying to constantly pitch a new iPhone every year or whatever it is. And I mean, I look at the new one and I go, “It’s 1200 bucks and I don’t need one.”
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