Kobe Steel Surprises

I wonder if any auto manufacturers experienced surprising crash test results that can be explained by the Kobe Steel misstatements.

Apple's i

I woke up this morning thinking about the Dustin Curtis tweet suggesting that Jony Ive said: "he believes Apple will be a health company in 20-30 years".

I wonder if this is less speculation than a very specific path Apple is working on.

Aging populations and health: If there is a market that is set to grow and is underserved, it is the health and wellness needs of an aging population.  It's a large market - one large enough to move the needle even for an Apple.  Apple is focused on health.  Apple is also focused on "where the puck is going to be".

Technical sophistication:  Some products require integrating the full stack, including custom silicon.

Camera experience:  By some measures, Apple is the most used camera in the world.  They certainly take cameras very seriously.

Augmented reality:  Apple is all-in on augmented reality and machine vision.  "Understanding" and simplifying images to pull out key elements is hard.  I think the A11's neural engine is a first step there.

Privacy:  An omnipresent product, especially one with insight into your life, should have a reputation for privacy.  Many potential competitors would be hard pressed to credibly show that they have privacy as a primary concern.

Manufacturing:  Apple is a hardware company.

An artificial eye could bring these elements together.  A trustworthy camera that will need to interpret images on the fly to present a simplified version of the world for the millions of people who will be facing weakening eyesight as they age.

For fun: just look at the shape of Apple Park!

More fun:  they can just call it the "i" and drop the mike.

physiological constants and constraints

I wonder how much discontinuity is created by physical, in particular physiological, constraints?  And I wonder how much those discontinuities are exploited in investment decisions and forecasts.  I'm thinking about things such as body sizes, minimum sleep periods, and elimination functions and their relationship with economies of scale and extrapolation of product sizes and uses.  For example, cars have a hard time getting smaller than a certain limit because people generally fit within a certain band (and so you get oddly proportioned vehicles such as a Smart).

American Political Parties and Trump

Political party affiliation in the U.S. is a funny thing.  The fluidity with which people can switch parties and the lack of any requirement beyond indicating one's current preference mean that being a "member" of a party is really based on personal integrity.

Which brings us to the funny situation of the Republican party not being able to use expulsion as leverage over Trump (unclear if they would want to expel but not even having the tool is a handicap).  Trump, of course, is not a Republican (or a Democrat) but, more importantly, as someone without personal integrity, the traditional constraint on abuse of a claim of membership falls away.  And so he hijacked the Republican party machinery and nomination rules to become president.

I raise this because such a threat of expulsion (during the election or now, during the presidency) could spur the creation of new parties (with new platforms and alignments) but, unfortunately, because the threat cannot be invoked, that creation remains unlikely.

And so, we will have a populist democrat president in three years who will likely be just as inept and destructive (albeit in different forms and perhaps less obvious forms) as Trump.

local politics and residential real estate funds

How much will the increased presence of residential real estate funds in some neighborhoods affect local voting?  And what are the likely changes in voting patterns for things like tax increases for schools?

Wearables

To get a sense of what Apple's "wearables" business might look like, I think of:

1) the Watch as an iPod;
2) AirPods as an iPhone accessory; and
3) Beats as transient.

From that view, given that iPods sold about 40-50 million per year from 2006-2012, it seems plausible that the Watch could sell 40 million per year.  As noted before, the Watch is cheaper than most iPods were and is far more versatile than any except the Touch.

Airpods have a meaningful cost but are not outrageously expensive relative to other truly wireless headphones.  If I treat any headphones (including Beats) with a W1 (which is really the key to the AirPod) as being an "AirPod", I can imagine 10% of iPhone buyers also buying AirPods.  Approximately 200m iPhones are sold each year so this is about 20m AirPods a year.

I think Beats sales (actually, sales of all expensive large headphones, of which Beats is the largest brand) are a bit of a fad so, except for those that include the W1, I assume Beats withers away over time.

Based on this and an average Watch price of $300 (this excludes accessory sales) and AirPod price of $150, we see easily $3.7b per quarter in revenues without any significant advances over what is out there today (some incremental advances over time of course, but no sharp breaks).  Assuming that accessories, Beats, AppleTV and others in Apple's "other products" segment are non-zero, it seems reasonable to think there is well more than an additional $4b in revenue a year from the Watch and AirPods.  Or, as one might think of them, from the S and W series chips.

international soups

Just realized that miyeok guk is a close cousin of caldo verde.