Look, I'll be straight with you: I went after this Apple news about the new MacBook Air with the M5 chip, clicked the Google News link, and you know what I found? A cookie page. That's right. The damn original article was basically a wall of "accept our cookies" in 47 different languages, including isiZulu and ລາວ.
And that, by itself, tells you everything you need to know about the state of financial journalism in 2025.
But fine. Let's talk about what actually matters.
The Machine That Never Stops
Apple launched the new MacBook Air with the M5 chip. If you've been following Tim Cook's company's annual cycle, this is about as surprising as the sun rising in the east. Every year it's the same ritual: new chip, better benchmarks, longer battery life, an event with beautiful people in black turtlenecks speaking in a tone that sounds like corporate ASMR.
And the market? The market applauds. Every. Single. Year.
Apple (AAPL) is worth somewhere around 3 trillion dollars as you read this. Three. Trillion. To put it in perspective: the entire GDP of Brazil fits inside Apple with room left over for lunch.
The M5 Chip and the Illusion of the Perpetual Upgrade
The M5 is the natural evolution of Apple's in-house chips, which started with the M1 in 2020 and revolutionized the laptop market. That's a fact. The M-series chips are an engineering masterpiece — brutal performance with ridiculously low power consumption.
But here's the point nobody in the tech circus wants to discuss: the marginal difference between each generation is shrinking.
It's the same story as smartphones. Remember when upgrading your iPhone felt like ditching a horse-drawn carriage for a Tesla? Now it's like trading a 2023 Toyota Corolla for a 2024. Nice, sure. Necessary? Debatable.
The MacBook Air with the M3 was already absurdly good. The M4 was a little more absurdly good. The M5 is going to be... a tiny bit more a little bit more absurdly good. It's the law of diminishing marginal returns that David Ricardo described back in the 19th century, just applied to aluminum laptops.
What This Means for Investors
Now, if you're looking at this as an investor — and you should be, because that's why we're here — the real question is: is Apple still a growth machine, or has it become a glorified cash cow?
Warren Buffett kept Apple as his biggest position for years. Then he started trimming. The Oracle of Omaha doesn't say much, but when he acts, pay attention.
Apple has obscene margins, an ecosystem that operates like a cult — in the good sense, if there even is a good sense to a cult — and a customer base that would buy a brick if it came with the apple logo. All of that is real.
But revenue growth is decelerating. The Chinese market is getting increasingly hostile. Artificial intelligence, which is the big game of 2025, isn't exactly Apple's strong suit compared to Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia. Apple Intelligence so far has more "Intelligence" in its name than in practice.
The MacBook Air M5 launch is the kind of news that sustains the narrative, keeps the brand at the top of the headlines, and locks in another quarter of solid sales. But it doesn't change the game.
The Reflection Nobody Bothers to Have
Nassim Taleb would say: watch out for the company that depends on doing the same thing slightly better every year. That works until the day it doesn't. Ask Nokia. Ask BlackBerry. Ask Kodak.
I'm not saying Apple is the next Nokia. Far from it. But I am saying that paying 30x earnings for a company whose big event of the quarter is a laptop that's 15% faster deserves, at minimum, a second of reflection before you hit the buy button.
Are you buying Apple because you analyzed the discounted cash flow, or because the apple logo gives you that warm fuzzy feeling in your chest?
Think about that before you open your brokerage app.
