Let me tell you something about Apple that nobody in the financial circus has the guts to say out loud:
The most valuable company in the world has become an idea recycling machine.
Bloomberg dropped the bomb: the next MacBook Pro will have a touch screen and bring the famous Dynamic Island — that animated pill that showed up on the iPhone 14 Pro and everyone called "revolutionary" (spoiler: Samsung was already doing something similar years earlier, but whatever).
The Cupertino magic show
You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the guy pulls back the curtain and discovers the great wizard is just some old dude yanking levers? Yeah. That's 2025 Apple.
Ever since Steve Jobs died, the strategy has been basically: grab a feature that already exists somewhere else, slap a pretty name on it, wrap it in a keynote with epic music, and sell it like they invented fire.
Touch screen on a laptop? Dude, Microsoft has been doing that since 2012 with the Surface. Lenovo, Dell, HP — everybody's had touch screen laptops for over a decade. Apple spent 13 years saying touch screens on laptops were a stupid idea. Tim Cook literally said in an interview that it "didn't make ergonomic sense."
And now? Now it makes sense. Because Mac sales have flatlined and they need a new gimmick.
Where the real money comes in
Let's get to what matters: what does this mean for investors?
Apple (AAPL) is trading at multiples that would give Benjamin Graham a heart attack. P/E above 30, revenue growth in the low single digits, brutal dependence on the iPhone (which accounts for nearly half of total revenue).
The Mac segment represents less than 10% of total revenue. So this touch screen MacBook Pro news is, at best, noise. It doesn't really move the needle.
But the market loves noise. Big bank analysts love grabbing a piece of news like this and writing 40-page reports about a "new upgrade cycle" and "growth potential in the Mac segment." It's the circus running at full tilt.
Nassim Taleb has a concept I love: narrative is the enemy of data. The narrative here is "Apple innovates once again." The data is: real growth is in the services division (App Store, iCloud, Apple Music), not hardware.
The Dynamic Island and the art of selling smoke
The Dynamic Island is a clever solution to a problem Apple created itself (the notch on the screen). They turned a design flaw into a "feature." Brilliant from a marketing standpoint. But from a technical standpoint? It's a software animation that hides a hole in the display.
Bringing this to the Mac is the same logic: creating the perception of novelty where no real novelty exists. It's the financial equivalent of a company doing a stock split to make the shares look "cheaper."
What the smart investor does
Warren Buffett holds Berkshire Hathaway's largest position in Apple. That's true. But Buffett bought in at much lower prices and has an investment horizon that's basically "until I die." He didn't buy because the MacBook is getting a touch screen.
If you're looking at AAPL today, the question that matters isn't "will the new MacBook be cool?" The question is: at what price does future cash flow justify the current valuation?
And the honest answer is it's tight. Very tight.
The market prices perfection into Apple. Any stumble — a slowdown in China, antitrust regulation on the App Store, real competition in AI — and the house of cards shakes.
The real game
While the market gets distracted by touch screen news and Dynamic Island, the real game is somewhere else: the artificial intelligence race, the restructuring of supply chains outside China, and Apple's ability to maintain obscene margins in an increasingly competitive world.
Anyone buying Apple because "the new product is cool" is playing the wrong game. Anyone buying Apple because they understand the cash generation machine and the consumer lock-in ecosystem — at least they know what they're doing.
Now tell me: are you investing in fundamentals or buying the hype of the next keynote?
Because the market doesn't forgive those who confuse advertising with value.
