From a 5G-fuelled iPhone 12 boom to the tariff-juiced, AI-starved 16, the last six years reveal Apple’s true playbook: plateaus dressed as super-cycles and super-clever launch optics. Part One dissects subsidies, supply shocks, and pricing sleights that set the stage for as iPhone 17 super-frenzy.
TEASER ALERT: $245 stock highs, queues, hype, orange phones: Apple’s iPhone 17 is already being called a super-cycle after one day! Or is it just… super-choreographed? TOMMO.FYI has crunched six years of iPhone data and what it means for AAPL in 2026. Part one and Part two to follow, next week.
Trump dines with King Charles. Tim Cook joins the table. A thousand years of monarchy meets Apple’s 49-year-old empire, and Wall Street laps up the symbolism. Heritage rubs off, the stock soars, and Apple plays cultural institution as much as company - polish, protocol, and profit all on one plate.
BERNSTEIN INITIATES AT $290, CRAMER BLOWS HOT AIR ABOUT THE iPHONE AIR. This is an “Intraday” test-page: Real-time takes, market reads, no filler. This will be where stories break. Fast-breaking Apple news, market signals, and actionable insights. No hype, just what matters. Comments welcome!
Investing culture, collaboration, and “thinking different” 2008-style before social investing was just hype, hashtags, blogrolls and over-sensitive armchair investors. Imagine what we might have accomplished if GPT had been available but we just had our wits, our brains, and a lot of head-butting.
Apple isn’t doomed, just caught in a cycle of iterative boredom. But iteration isn’t innovation, and even cash machines run dry when people stop using cash. The .fyi Q4 2027 $400 target is alive, but only if Apple ships real change, and stops pretending that “flat-lining” can be renamed a plateau.™
Quick Take: Apple’s 2025 “Awe” event delivers another round of recycled superlatives: thinner phones needing battery packs, a camera “plateau” that’s more chin than chisel, and “must-have” features on permanent repeat. No AI, no innovation, just another year in Cupertino, “Waiting For Godot.”
Trump and Putin meet for “peace” talks on Ukraine, but the subtext is of rare-earth deals and geopolitical theatre. Pop-art satire rolls speaks a thousand and one words: not diplomacy, just resource politics, wrapped in the absurdity of self-interest. That is all. “No Article needed (or batteries).”
After 100s of articles and years of analysis to Apple 3.0, long-form gratis, I’ve been formally disinvited — not for rudeness or inaccuracy, but for “getting a free ride.” My screenshotted CMS-value? $0. So Tommo moves permanently to .fyi now. No paywall, no tribes. Just high-signal writing, for $0.
Apple’s Q3: solid on paper until scrutinised. iPhone strength? US tariff and China subsidy-fueled, and Services grew but without acceleration thanks to financial services. No new growth engine. Just some existing lines doing their job. Except iPads wearables: pigs, with no lipstick. Here’s why.
It’s summer 2025, and the AI panic chorus is back on cue decrying data centres as the new tulip mania and CapEx as collective delusion. Michael Roberts leads the charge, warning of bubbles, GPU overload, and investor madness. But maybe the pipes being laid aren’t the problem but the point?
Apple’s AI journey reads less like a roadmap and more like a séance. For 15 years, the faithful have insisted a grand plan exists—somewhere, someday—while Siri stumbles on, lobotomised. The real mystery? Why Apple, once the master of interface revolutions, keeps mistaking silence for strategy.
Apple’s “installed user base” isn’t the growth engine investors think. It’s a device count, not a user count. With iPhone sales flat for a decade and services growth stalling, Apple’s narrative leans on smoke-and-mirrors metrics while AI-native rivals like OpenAI and Perplexity surge ahead.
Once a liberator from beige conformity, Apple now tends the shadows of a beautifully upholstered cave. The illusion is seamless, the chains velvet. But Plato warned us: comfort isn’t truth. As rivals embrace open ecosystems, Apple perfects the illusion in 4K, spatial surround and proprietary codecs.
Daniel, 19 didn’t wait to be granted “agency.” That’s for nine-year-olds. He managed Roblox teams, mastered digital marketing, and outgrew parenting, all before presenting seminars on brain-machine interfaces at the Stockholm School of Economics, aged 17. Gen Z: the first truly agentic generation.
10th July 2025–Browsers: Judgement Day. Perplexity and OpenAI launch AI-native, agentic browsers. Old paradigms—Safari, Chrome, iOS—start to look obsolete. This isn’t about faster search. It’s about the interface becoming the intelligence. Apple? Stuck in the mud, yelling “WebKit only!” Bozo yeah?
Behind Apple’s cinematic Formula One fantasy lies a more urgent narrative: markets pricing perfection, investors smoking hopium, and a company at a strategic crossroads. But what if the road to $400 isn’t paved with hype—but with the precise geometry of Apple finally showing its hand and delivering?
Excerpt from “Wargaming the US in 2025” – Tommo_UK [fiction/reality] It didn’t start with missiles or malware, but a single $9.6B Treasury dump out of Tokyo. Hours later, it spiralled into panic. The night the Empire flinched—and the dollar nearly broke. I’d exited all US assets weeks before.
A confession: I don't care how many iPhones Apple claims are "installed.” Nor "dormant users," or the parade of stats rolled out every ER call to assure us the Apple ecosystem is, in some metaphysical sense, expanding. The proof is in the earnings growth and that's all the Street really cares about.
LLMs are being gagged; censored in real time. Unless Apple restores true freedom of inquiry, the promise that “1984 won’t be like 1984” may collapse under the weight of its own irony. Sanitised safety, algorithmic blandness are becoming the new conformity in LLM queries. Apple, it’s up to you again.
Every tech leap sparks fear—but when platforms respond with curation over trust, the result is control, not safety. As Apple courts AI it must choose: be the Safari for AI, or the AOL. The future won’t belong to those who try to “tame” but those who let it breathe. “Curated Safety” is not an option.
In Part 3, we dive into reader reactions—from DropBox déjà vu to Apple’s ticking clock—and close with a no-bullshit call to arms. This isn’t about demos or GPU counts. It’s about shipping something useful now. Because Perplexity isn’t just another LLM. It’s the one that already works.
Buying Perplexity gives Apple an instant AI OS, a live interface, and reclaims its instinct. It bridges FMF, replaces Google’s crutch, turning Siri from joke to conductor. Skip 18 months of build, own the narrative—and make $400 AAPL feel underpriced by 2027. The shortcut—shipping—is the product.
Apple’s rumoured interest in Perplexity isn’t about replacing Google Search—it’s about something far bigger. This isn’t a search deal. It’s a shipping one. If Apple wants to light up its AI stack in 2025, Perplexity may be the fabric it needs—already built, already live, already scaling. “All ready”