Moorhead said it in a speed round on Apple's change of chief executive, having already called the incoming leader a continuity pick in an interview back in April and seeing no reason to revise it. His read is that the appointment protects an advantage Apple already has rather than betting on a new direction. Newman spent the following turns on the outgoing CEO's buyback record instead.
I mean, that's not too far from the truth, or you've already been on.
That is not true, by the way. I'm just fudging. I'm just fudging. There's plenty of room for the both of us.
Yeah. So amazing, you know, Frontier launches right now. We're on a weekly cadence. And it's funny, the scarce thing is no longer the intelligence. It's a benchmark anyone trusts, right? Which, again, the weird, again, sorry, I was clinging this out. Astra, artificial analysis said, same performance, 62 on intelligence score between it and its predecessor. So 5.6 sold. That makes absolutely no sense. So another proof point that benchmarks need an overhaul here. Hey, this can be a speed round here. John Turnis officially takes over as Apple's CEO, probably the first hardware bet in the AI era. You know, I don't think Apple, Apple didn't hire a visionary. It really promoted the engineer who built the moat. That's the hardware company that's around the moat. And I've been considering Turnis a continuity pick on my CNBC interview back in April. That's exactly what I called him. And by the way, continuity is not bad. Tim Cook took all of Steve Jobs' ideas and monetized it and scaled it and did an amazing job on that, but didn't come up with any new products that weren't dreamt up by Steve Jobs that actually hit, right? Vision Pro, failure, self-driving car, failure. And Apple next week is about to launch a folding phone that Samsung has had for. For four or five years. But as you always like to say, Daniel, and remind us, we're still using our iPhones and our AirPods. I don't switch because I don't want the green bubble. And it's just too much of a hassle at this point.
Yeah, I mean, welcome, John. I appreciated him jumping on X right away. I also got a good laugh on Tim Cook's updated profile. He took all, you know, he just keep it simple, stupid, just went chairman Apple, you know, from having all his descriptions. But also, like, you know, it's a new era. I think we went from a product guy in Steve to a ops guy that absolutely crushed it at milking the existing product. Like, but I did say this on when I was on CNBC, I actually said there is some flaws in the record. Like, first of all, he was only like the fourth or fifth best performing of the Mag 7 in that period of time. And actually, it would be fifth, but Meta hasn't been public as long. So it didn't have three or four of the years. He had to compound his earnings. But the other thing that was really interesting was his buyback record. I think it was like $867 billion in buybacks. Do you know that is more in total buybacks than the entire Mag 7 combined during that same period of time?
Amazing.
So his engineering is also second to none.