Connect with us

Published

3 years ago

on

In this article

Second-generation Apple AirPods with wireless charging indicator
Todd Haselton | CNBC

When AirPods were first released in 2016, they were a marvel of miniaturization.

To ditch cords and go wireless, Apple packed several chips, microphones and speakers into each headphone, which weigh about 4 grams. Without a cord, the earbud gets its power from a tiny cylindrical battery that has about 1% of the capacity of an iPhone’s battery.

But lithium-ion batteries, like those used by the AirPods, wear out the more they are used.

Some owners have noticed that, after a few years, used AirPods eventually will last only an hour or so before needing to be recharged — a big decay from the four-to-five-hour battery life they have when new. Because each AirPod is so small and so tightly packed into its housing, it’s almost impossible to swap out the old battery for a new one. Most people give up and just buy a new pair.

The limited lifespan of AirPods is exactly the kind of problem that the “right-to-repair” movement wants to fix. Repair shops and lobbyists that support repair reform want lawmakers to implement a variety of rules, including increased access to manuals and official parts and consumer protections around warranties.

But one of their most important requests is for companies to design products with repair in mind, instead of packing gadgets with unlabeled parts and sticking them together with glue, forcing users to use a knife to take them apart.

This desire puts repair advocates at odds with hardware companies like Apple, whose business models depend on customers upgrading to the latest model every few years. When Apple offered cheap iPhone battery repairs a few years ago, it hurt sales as consumers were able to hang on to their old phones for longer instead of upgrading. Apple also charges customers for repairs and extended warranties.

“We design our products for durability in order to minimize the need for repair,” Apple wrote in an environmental report earlier this year. “But in the instance a repair is needed, we believe our customers should have convenient access to safe and reliable repair services, to get their product back up and running as quickly as possible.”

The right-to-repair movement gains steam

Policymakers have started to engage more closely with right-to-repair advocates in recent years. State-level bills have been introduced in a majority of states, but electronics companies have lobbied against them and none have passed.

In May, the Federal Trade Commission released a 56-page report on repair restrictions, concluding that repair restrictions have “steered consumers into manufacturers’ repair networks or to replace products before the end of their useful lives” — exactly the problem users are running into with their AirPods.

The Biden administration on Friday ordered the FTC to write new regulations targeted at limiting manufacturers’ ability to hamper independent or do-it-yourself repairs as part of a sweeping executive order. New repair rules have not yet been drafted.

“Tech and other companies impose restrictions on self and third-party repairs, making repairs more costly and time-consuming, such as by restricting the distribution of parts, diagnostics, and repair tools,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet about the order on Friday, linking to a story about fixing Apple products. Apple declined to comment on the White House executive order.

The FTC has not said what it plans to do, but repair advocates want a few key policy changes, as detailed in its May report. They want companies to be required to make official replacement parts available. They want access to tools that could make repairs easier without reverse-engineering the tools or parts themselves. And ultimately, they want products to be designed with longer lifespans.

Apple is not the only company that would be affected by these policies. Much of the recent pressure is on medical device companies and tractor manufacturers. But given Apple’s ubiquity, it has become a poster child for repair, especially because it promotes its environmental efforts as a corporate value.

Apple has launched a program it calls the “Independent Repair Program” which gives repair shops the option to enter into a certification process and contract with Apple in order to get access to authentic Apple parts, tools and manuals.

Apple has also reduced the price of its battery replacement for iPhones, and recent models have been designed to make it easier to replace a battery or cracked screen, according to iFixit. Plus, compared to other consumer electronics companies, Apple has a large existing network of stores and authorized repair shops.

Still, many Apple products remain challenging to repair at home or as a business with no contact with Apple.

The only AirPods battery replacement company

iFixit, a company that provides disassembly instructions and sells replacement parts for gadgets, gives AirPods models a score of zero out of 10 for repairability. According to iFixit, repairing these earbuds involves soldering, hot air guns and slicing through glue — that is, if replacement battery parts are even available. In the end, a would-be home repairer would have to put the four-gram computer back together again.

Apple provides “battery service” for AirPods, at the cost of $49 per earbud. But functionally, Apple simply gives you a replacement pair, and the old earbuds are recycled. It’s not a repair, it’s a replacement. And it’s expensive. AirPods originally cost $159, so opting for battery service costs more than half of the price of a new pair.

Apple sold about 72.8 million AirPods units in 2020, according to a CounterPoint research estimate, so tens of millions of consumers will face the same lack of choice in the coming years.

Replacement AirPods from PodSwap
CNBC

PodSwap is a Miami company founded by Emma Stritzinger and Emily Alpert which aims to keep AirPods “out of the landfill.” They’re not associated with Apple.

They believe they’re the only company performing AirPod battery replacements, although other companies “refurbish” old AirPods, the founders told CNBC. The company was formed after the founders experienced dying AirPods themselves and thought that upgrading or replacing them would be wasteful and impractical.

I recently replaced a pair of AirPods that were only holding a charge for 45 minutes — too short to complete a phone call. I paid $59 on PodSwap’s Shopify site and a few days later received a replacement pair of AirPods with new batteries. They weren’t my old AirPods, they were another set that had their batteries replaced.

Along with those new pods, PodSwap includes a box and a return label. It wants your old AirPods back. It then cleans and sanitizes the old pair, puts in new batteries and sends them out to the next person who wants to change the battery in their old AirPods.

But PodSwap faces many challenges that show why repair advocates want new rules. Alpert said the design of the AirPod makes it challenging for repair shops or companies like theirs to do a lot of battery replacements. PodSwap’s process uses both robotics and manual labor, the founders said.

“The process was developed through trial and error and a large number of units were ‘sacrificed’ and ultimately recycled. One major challenge we faced was overcoming the uniqueness of this product. Each AirPod is assembled with slight differences, which creates complexity in the disassembly,” Alpert said.

PodSwap includes a box to send old AirPods back.
CNBC

PodSwap plans to soon offer service for the AirPods Pro, a newer model that costs $249 and are, surprisingly, powered by a standard-sized coin battery.

But the AirPods Pro have many of the same problems as the first model — tight tolerances, potential damage while taking them apart, a lack of replacement parts, and a design that suggests the product was always designed to last a limited time.

“We have found the AirPods Pro’s batteries to be more difficult to replace,” Alpert said. “The ergonomic design and tight unforgiving tolerances make it exceptionally challenging to replace the batteries repeatedly, with a high degree of efficiency.”

PodSwap wasn’t totally seamless for me — I got sent a combination of “first generation” and “second generation” AirPods. They caused my iPhone to send error messages, but I sent an email to PodSwap and a day or two later I got a second replacement set, which worked.

After that, I sent my first replacement set and my old AirPods back. The AirPods I received look and work like new.

I plan on trying to get another four years out of them.

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Technology

Apple remains Buffett’s biggest public stock holding, but his thesis about its moat faces questions

Published

1 day ago

on

May 3, 2024

By

Apple remains Buffett's biggest public stock holding, but his thesis about its moat faces questions

Tim Cook and Warren Buffett

Getty Images (L) | CNBC (R)

Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett was still using a flip phone as late as 2020, four years after his investment behemoth started amassing a huge stake in the company that makes iPhones.

“I don’t understand the phone at all, but I do understand consumer behavior,” Buffett said last year at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.

He’s emerged in recent years as one of Apple’s top evangelists.

At the end of 2023, Berkshire owned about 6% of Apple, a stake worth $174 billion at the time, or about 40% of Berkshire’s total value. That’s about four times bigger than Berkshire’s second-biggest public stock holding, Bank of America, and makes Berkshire the No. 2 Apple shareholder, behind only Vanguard.

As Berkshire investors and fanboys of the 93-year-old Buffett flood Omaha this weekend for the 2024 annual meeting, Apple is likely to be a hot topic of discussion. The tech giant on Thursday reported a 10% year-over-year decline in iPhone sales, leading to a 4% drop in total revenue. But the stock had its best day since late 2022 on Friday due largely to a $110 billion stock buyback plan and increased margins that result from a growing services business.

The bet on Apple and CEO Tim Cook, has paid off handsomely for Buffett, who said in 2022 that the cost of Berkshire’s Apple stake was only $31 billion. His firm is up almost 620% on its investment since the start of 2016.

Despite being a self-described luddite, Buffett has long had a coherent non-techie thesis for loving Apple. He’s seen how devoted Apple users are to their devices, and has viewed the iPhone as an extraordinary product that could keep its customers spending inside the Apple ecosystem. He calls it a moat, one of his favorite words for describing his preferred businesses.

“Apple has a position with consumers that they’re paying $1,500 or whatever it may be for a phone, and these same people pay $35,000 for a second car,” Buffett said at last year’s meeting. “And if they had to give up their second car or give up their iPhone, they’d give up their second car!”

Apple's stock could be poised for more run-up, says Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi

Data is in his favor. According to a study from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Apple has 94% customer loyalty, meaning that nine out of 10 current U.S. iPhone owners choose another iPhone when buying a new device.

Buffett has also hailed Apple’s ability to return billions of dollars to shareholders annually through share buybacks and dividends, a capital allocation strategy for which Buffett may have himself to thank. When asked in a 2016 interview with The Washington Post who he turns to for advice at pivotal moments, Cook offered up a story about his relationship with Buffett.

“When I was going through [the question of] what should we do on returning cash to shareholders, I thought who could really give us great advice here? Who wouldn’t have a bias?” Cook said. “So I called up Warren Buffett. I thought he’s the natural person.”

Apple has shown its appreciation for the Oracle of Omaha in other ways.

In 2019, the company published an original iPhone game called “Warren Buffett’s Paper Wizard” in which a paperboy bikes from Omaha to Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, California.

But with Apple’s business having declined in size in five of the past six quarters and with the company expecting just low-single digit growth in the current quarter, Buffett may face questions this weekend about whether he still sees the same power in the moat, particularly with regulatory pressures building around tech’s megacap companies.

Buffett trimmed his stake in Apple late year, though only by about 1%. Even after Friday’s rally, the stock is down 3.8% in 2024, while the S&P 500 is up 7.5%.

‘Very, very, very locked in’

Berkshire’s initial foray into Apple in 2016 was not Buffett’s idea. Rather, the investment was led by Ted Weschler, one of Buffett’s top deputies, and was seen as a passing of the torch to the next generation of Berskhire investment mangers.

But the following year, Berkshire started purchasing even more Apple, and Buffett began talking it up. He said he liked the stock and the company’s “sticky” product, although he didn’t use it.

In 2018, he said Apple users are “very, very, very locked in, at least psychologically and mentally” to the product and the ecosystem.

“Apple has an extraordinary consumer franchise,” he said.

At last year’s annual meeting, when asked how Berkshire can defend having Apple make up so much of its public portfolio, Buffett said, “It just happens to be a better business than any we own.” He also hailed Cook, calling him one of the “best managers in the world.”

A number Apple likes to use to tout the health of its business, despite the declining revenue, is 2.2 billion. That’s how many devices the company says are currently in use and points to the massive customer base available as Apple rolls out new subscription services.

“Once customers get into the ecosystem, they don’t leave. So it’s not a a speculative tech play,” said Dan Eye, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group, which owns Apple shares. “It’s kind of more like an annuity and I think that’s what Warren Buffett really sees as well.”

In addition to the drop in revenue, Apple faces new challenges from regulations and weak overseas markets, as well as from Microsoft and Google’s advancements in artificial intelligence. For regulators, the concern surrounds the very moat that Buffett finds so attractive, and whether its give the company monopolistic control in the smartphone market.

The U.S. government in March alleged that Apple designs its business to keep customers locked in. The Justice Department’s lawsuit claimed that products like Apple Card, the Apple Arcade game subscription, iMessage, and Apple Watch work best or only with an iPhone, creating illegal barriers to competition and making it harder for consumers to switch when it’s time for an upgrade.

However, the litigation is expected to take years, pushing any potential penalties to Apple and its products well into the future. In the meantime, there’s no sign that the iPhone is becoming less important as new devices like virtual reality goggles have found only niche audiences, while consumer AI products have failed to take off.

DOJ's Apple suit not a reason to sell, says Satori Fund's Dan Niles

Buffett hasn’t voiced his view publicly on Apple’s regulatory hurdles, and this will be the first opportunity for investors to ask him about the issue since the DOJ’s lawsuit. But Buffett knows a little something about regulation — two markets where he’s most active are railroads and insurance.

In a note to clients earlier this month, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi didn’t go deep on regulatory concerns, but mentioned that he doesn’t believe the DOJ suit will “seriously threaten” the strength of Apple’s ecosystem. He also said that following Buffett’s lead on getting in and out of Apple is a solid strategy for making money.

“Despite his reputation as a long term buy and hold investor, Warren Buffett has been remarkably disciplined at adding to his Apple position when it is relatively cheap and trimming when it is relatively expensive,” Sacconaghi wrote. He encouraged investors to “be like Buffett.”

More money back

Odds are that Buffett was thrilled with Apple’s announcement this week regarding its expanded repurchase program. It’s a practice he’s long adored.

“When I buy Apple, I know that Apple is going to repurchase a lot of shares,” he said in 2018. 

And he likes to note how buybacks result in getting a bigger stake in the company without buying more shares.

“The math of repurchases grinds away slowly, but can be powerful over time,” Buffett said in 2021.

Apple also increased its dividend by 4%, and signaled that it would continue to lift it annually.

Buffett was effusive about Apple’s capital return strategy at the company’s annual meeting last year, pointing out that it helped Berkshire own a bigger piece of the pie. Unlike insurance company Geico and homebuilder Clayton Homes, which his firm owns in their entirety, Berkshire can continue to increase its stake in Apple, a fact he reminded investors of at the meeting.

“The good thing about Apple is that we can go up,” Buffett said.

WATCH: Warren Buffett’s stake in Japanese trading houses helps them focus on capital efficiency

Warren Buffett's stake in Japanese trading houses helps them focus on capital efficiency: Analyst

Continue Reading

Technology

Apple’s falling iPhone sales don’t bother Wall Street so long as margins, buybacks are increasing

Published

1 day ago

on

May 3, 2024

By

Apple's falling iPhone sales don't bother Wall Street so long as margins, buybacks are increasing

A 10% decline in iPhone sales sounds like a problem for Apple, considering the company counts on the devices for half its revenue.

But investors didn’t seem to mind Thursday, when Apple revealed the year-over-year drop in its fiscal second-quarter earnings report. The stock rose more than 6% after the market close, a rally that would be the steepest since November 2022 should it continue into regular trading Friday.

Instead of glaring too much at iPhone revenue, Wall Street chose to focus on the positive. Apple’s gross margin expanded to 46.6%, continuing an upward trajectory that reflects the company’s growing services business, which brings with it stout profits.

Apple also signaled overall revenue growth in the current quarter will be in the low single digits, after a 4% decline in the second period. Analysts were looking for third-quarter growth of 1.3%, according to LSEG.

Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster described the guidance as a “relief” given the recent trajectory of the business.

“I was expecting this was going to be flat, some investors were saying it was going to be down a few percent in June,” Munster told CNBC’s “Fast Money” after the report. “I think that was a big part of this move higher.”

But perhaps the biggest catalyst for the pop was Apple’s announcement that it had approved $110 billion of share buybacks, the most ever for a public company. For the past three years, Apple has authorized $90 billion in annual repurchases.

The after-hours jump shows how much investors are valuing Apple’s massive cash flow and the company’s willingness to return more of it to shareholders. It’s a shift in the way Apple has been viewed by Wall Street over the years, away from a hits-driven gadgets business and toward a financial powerhouse.

“Our free cash flow generation has been very strong over the years, particularly the last few years,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said on an earnings call.

Apple revealed earlier this year that it has 2.2 billion active devices, illustrating the mammoth reach of its customer base as the company rolls out new subscription services. Despite the 4% drop in revenue, Apple still recorded nearly $24 billion in profit, a slip of just over 2% from a year earlier.

Apple said iPhone sales suffered from a difficult comparison to last year, when sales were elevated after previous shortages. Still, investors are looking for future iPhone growth, and many analysts say a potential iPhone with artificial intelligence features could do the trick and help the company snag customers from Android. Annual iPhone revenue peaked in Apple’s fiscal 2022.

While Apple provided some guidance for total revenue, it avoided offering any sort of forecast for iPhone sales.

That’s a change, even for a company that’s been giving less forward guidance since the pandemic. Maestri typically provides trends on iPhone sales, and had for the past four quarters.

There’s no guarantee investors will be able to continue counting on increased buybacks from a company that’s been more aggressive in that department than any other. Apple says it’s trying to draw down its huge cash pile, which stood at $162 billion at the end of the quarter. When its debt is roughly equal to its cash balance — meaning the company is net cash neutral — Apple will evaluate what to do next, executives said Thursday.

As of the end of 2023, Apple had spent $658 billion on buybacks over the past 10 years, far ahead of second-place Microsoft, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

“For the last couple of years we were doing $90 billion and now we’re doing $110 billion,” Maestri said on the call.

In terms of what happens when Apple gets to net cash neutral, Maestri said, “let’s get there first. It’s going to take a while still.”

“And then when we are there,” he said, “we’re going to reassess and see what is the optimum capital structure for the company at that point in time.”

Continue Reading

Technology

Don’t rate Tesla’s Full Self Driving too highly, tech investor says: ‘By no means autonomous driving’

Published

1 day ago

on

May 3, 2024

By

Don't rate Tesla's Full Self Driving too highly, tech investor says: 'By no means autonomous driving'

People are shopping at a Tesla store in Shanghai, China, on Feb. 17, 2024.

Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

News of electric car giant Tesla’s progress toward rolling out its advanced driver-assistance feature in China isn’t as groundbreaking as investors are treating it, according to a top tech investor.

Mark Hawtin, GAM Investment Management’s investment director focused on investing in disruptive growth and technology stocks, told CNBC’ “Squawk Box Europe” Thursday that such expectations were misleading — not least because Tesla’s Full Self Driving service doesn’t offer full autonomous driving.

“We should say what they’re doing — everyone’s talking about this full self-driving capability,” Hawtin told CNBC. “What they’re going to be able to do in China is what they already do in the U.S. or U.K., which is sort of this assisted-driver capability.”

On Monday, shares of Tesla rose sharply, notching their best day since March 2021, after it passed a significant milestone toward the launch of FSD in China. Local Chinese authorities removed restrictions on its cars after passing the country’s data security requirements, Tesla said Sunday.

This raised expectations that Tesla’s FSD would soon be available in China. Tesla shares are up 6.7% in the last five trading days, largely on the back of buzz surrounding its roadmap to bringing FSD to China — plus, comments from CEO Elon Musk about plans to start production of more affordable models in early 2025.

But Hawtin said that the company’s so-called Full Self Driving service lacks the qualities that would make it an example of truly self-driving technology.

“It’s by no means autonomous driving yet,” he told CNBC. He thinks that a version of Tesla FSD capable of “true autonomy” is still five to 10 years away.

Hawtin said that Tesla’s reported deal with China’s Baidu is a bigger short-term win for Baidu than Tesla, adding that competition is intense in China with names like BYD, Huawei, Xpeng, Li Auto, and Xiaomi all supplying technology capable of Level 2 autonomy.

Tesla reportedly scored a deal with Baidu that would allow Musk’s firm to tap into Baidu’s mapping service license, a key requirement for offering FSD on Chinese public roads, per Reuters.

Tesla was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

Full Self Driving, or FSD, is an upgrade to Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistant. Tesla doesn’t yet make or sell cars capable of full autonomous driving. It sells “Level 2” driver-assistance systems, marketed under the brand name FSD.

“Level 3” assisted driving, otherwise known as “conditional automation,” entails systems that handle all aspects of driving, but a driver still must be present, according to the SAE standards-setting organization.

Tesla has offered its FSD technology in China for years, but with a restricted feature set that limits it to operations like automated lane changing.

GAM does not own shares of Tesla, and Hawtin said he doesn’t personally own shares either.

– CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report

Continue Reading

Trending