Consumer agent lessons for $CSU

Something very important about NVIDIA that I’ve been wanting to write about for some time- so taking the time now to share Many / most people with prestige on this app by virtue of the economy we’ve had for the past 20 years have a SWE background. Their experience is based on manipulation of bits I feel blessed to have worked as a Global Sourcing Manager (GSM) at Apple. The only big tech company prior to AI that was Supply Chain driven I saw first hand what happens with compounding at Apple in their supply chain, a concept many people, not even @dylan522p really understand- about why Nvidia is likely to compound its dominance Go back to 2007. The first iPhone released, very popular, exciting product etc. At the time, and this is a very important point, the landscape of consumer electronics was split up into different product categories. Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry were in the cell phone category. Dell, HP, Lenovo in the PC space . Apple came in and did something peculiar- it was a PC company that shipped a cell phone *wow* - at face value, it’s interesting but so what People realized about the software and ecosystem and all that stuff way later, but thats not really why Apple won so hard. At least its not the only reason Really what happened was something more relevant to today- and here’s what people who haven’t seen Apple supply chain up close probably cannot understand, including Dylan Apple became a demand aggregator. The profit margins from phones and laptops went into the same bank account, funded the same pool of R&D, and went into the same inventory budget, and Apple was very careful about SKU expansion. They knew that one of their superpowers was concentrated spend with suppliers, a giant carrot and stick A unified reference design, running a unique operating system, with a focus on co-design between its product categories. While Dell, Lenovo, Nokia, and Motorola were big businesses by any standard, they were fragmented relative to Apple, and over time suppliers began to allocate increasing dollar share of their R&D budget to supporting Apple So Apple, with one unified reference design, a focus on co-design between it’s products, turned into a unified stack which suppliers could put huge, concentrated effort behind, and see product quality and volume go up and up as inevitably polish begot polish Dell, HP, Lenovo never stopped being “big” businesses by most standards, the phone landscape shifted towards Samsung away from Nokia and Motorola, but the important thing is that today we don’t really even view as DELL as a competitor to Apple, we recognize that due to many factors comparing the two is Apples to Oranges (pun intended) In the same way, I’m highly confident we’re going to look back on NVIDIA relative to custom ASIC programs much the same way. TPU, like DELL will likely remain a “big” business- but will be incomparable to NVIDIA because of this compounding. We’re going to forget we ever seriously viewed the two as being close competitors. Lenovo like Tranium is still a “big” business, but again, no comparison at all to Apple / NVIDIA The takeaway is in physical businesses, Supply Chain advantages are all important, and they compound. Suppliers who can lean into a single reference design inevitably leads to more polish, higher volume / more growth, more R&D dollars, and executive focus. Over time those factors compound and become overwhelming because in the world of atoms, momentum is not a button click away. Inertia is insanely powerful, especially if the leader is hungry and pressing their advantages

Sounds like Apple is expecting further memory chip price hikes in the coming quarters: Apple earnings call: "Let me back up and talk about memory in general, because I know this is a subject on many of your minds. If you look at, as I'd said on the last call, we paid more for memory in the March quarter than the December quarter. As I alluded to last quarter, we expected to pay significantly more in the June quarter than the March quarter, and that is what happened. It was partially offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory." "For September, we expect to pay even higher memory costs, and we're able to offset partly by a few factors, and let me walk through kind of what they are. The first is, as you would expect, we have a benefit from some carry-in inventory in the September quarter. However, we believe we'll see decreasing benefit from this over time beyond the September quarter." "On the pricing front, we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. We did it because we're in what I would characterize as a 100-year flood on the memory pricing, with exponential increases in memory prices."

From Apple Earnings Call: "Crédit Agricole, France's leading retail bank, is using on device AI and MacBook Pro to streamline regulatory workflows, reducing manual processing time by over 80%."

Seth Klarman on the five traits that made Warren Buffett a successful investor (Must read)

Starbucks spends $400 million a year on software. Yesterday they announced they're moving off IBM and Microsoft to build their own custom systems in-house. IBM dropped 3% and Salesforce dropped 4% on the news. And honestly this is, unequivocally, the biggest signal I've seen since OpenAI and Anthropic launched their consulting arms back in Q1. The largest companies in the world are done paying for software that half fits how they work. We saw this coming about a year ago. Moved everything we build off Airtable and low-code tools and went fully custom. Already paying off, and it's only going to compound from here. This is the opportunity right now. You get all of a company's data into one system. You build out a single operating system for the entire business. You cut out bad, redundant processes. Then you layer AI on top of it, under the correct processes. That's the core of AI consulting. Helping companies actually operate better. There are a lot of fly-by-night offerings circulating right now when it comes to Ai Services. For example, 'second brains'. Throwing scattered data into a second brain while the processes underneath stay broken does nothing. The companies who will absolutely destroy their competition over the next 5 years are rebuilding how they work from the ground up. Starbucks is showing you what other companies will be doing over the next several years. Your job is to position yourself to facilitate that process for as many companies as you can.

BREAKING: Apple is suing OpenAI and alleging a misappropriation of trade secrets, as per newly disclosed court records.

Harris acquires restaurant management and point of sale biz used in 16K restaurants (TouchBistro) $CSU.TO