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2020 MacBook Air with M1 chip
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Apple is holding a launch event on Monday to announce new products, like a redesigned MacBook Pro.

Apple has a chance to drive continued momentum to its Macs ahead of the holiday shopping season, especially since it’s expected to announce more computers that run on its own chips instead of Intel’s processors.

Recent computers that run on the company’s powerful M1 processor have “fueled” Mac growth, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in June. In the most recent three quarters ending in June 2021, Apple sold $26 billion in Macs, up nearly 33% from the $19.59 billion it sold in the same period last year. “In fact, the last three quarters for Mac have been its three best quarters ever,” Cook said in June.

Before the pandemic, which drove new computer sales, many customers and analysts worried Apple was neglecting the Mac in favor of newer, faster-growing businesses like its Apple Watch and iPhones. But Mac computers remain essential for Apple. It’s only possible to develop iPhone apps on a Mac through Apple’s Xcode software, for example, and Mac remains a larger business than iPad.

Last month, Apple announced and subsequently released new iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, leaving Apple’s line of Macs as the remaining major product line that hasn’t been updated this fall. The larger 16-inch MacBook Pro, Apple’s highest-end laptop, hasn’t been updated since 2019 and currently uses Intel processors instead of newer Apple chips.

Here’s what to expect on Monday.

A completed transition

If Apple announces new MacBook laptops on Monday, it will be the culmination of a two-year transition to completely revamp the entire Mac lineup.

Since 2019, Apple has been replacing Intel processors inside Macs with its own processors, called M1, which provide longer battery life and allow Apple to more tightly integrate its hardware and software. Apple’s chips also enable new features while still providing enough power to run demanding applications.

So far, Apple has released four different Macs using its new chips: The MacBook Air, the Mac Mini, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the redesigned 24-inch iMac.

Apple is likely to emphasize the advantages of its own chip, as it has done during the past several Mac launch events. Expect a new name for the M1 chip if Apple makes significant performance improvements. It could call it the M1X or M2, depending on how Apple wants to market the processor improvements.

Apple has reportedly been prepping a redesign for its high-end MacBook Pros with its own chips and new ports, including space for an HDMI cable to connect the laptop to monitors, and a magnetic charger, according to Bloomberg. Also in the works is an iMac with a bigger screen and a Mac Mini desktop with more power, according to the report.

On Monday, Apple is also likely to provide a release date for macOS Monterey, the latest version of the Mac software, which was announced in June but has not yet been officially released.

More ports

Touch bar on the 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Apple’s Mac growth has also been driven by changes the company has made to address some longstanding consumer issues with some products.

Between late 2017 and the second fiscal quarter of 2020, Apple reported eight out of 10 quarters of flat or negative annual growth in its Mac business. Growth started taking off in 2020.

In 2015, Apple introduced a thinner keyboard design for its laptops, often called “butterfly keyboard.” In the coming years, the thinner keyboard became standard in Apple’s line of laptops.

But the keyboard was plagued by reports that it was unreliable, and that crumbs or dust could make certain keys “sticky” and fail to register or type certain letters twice. Apple has an ongoing service program to fix malfunctioning butterfly keyboards manufactured from 2015 through 2019 for free. It’s also facing a class-action lawsuit over whether it knew that the keyboards were defective.

During this period, the biggest new feature addition to Apple’s laptops was the Touch Bar, a strip of touchscreen that replaced the function keys. However, many users found it frustrating and less useful than regular keys. Software developers never flocked to create software for the touchscreen, and Apple’s recent M1 MacBook Air doesn’t have it.

Simultaneously, Apple significantly reduced the number of ports on its laptops, streamlining them into a few USB-C connectors. Users complained that they needed adapters, often called dongles, to attach things like mice and external monitors to the laptops, which sometimes used older USB-A connections. The dongles that Apple made were expensive, often costing more than $20 per adapter. The company temporarily slashed prices on adapters in 2016 after users complained.

That could change on Monday. Apple’s new MacBook Pro design could include an HDMI port for connecting the laptop to external monitors or TVs, an SD card port for photographers, and a new version of its MagSafe magnetic charger, addressing many complaints from professional users, according to Bloomberg. Apple’s 2017 MacBook Air was the last laptop to feature MagSafe charging, even though customers liked it.

Apple has started to reverse some of the Mac design decisions it made over the past decade. The M1 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro now have a more traditional keyboard with deeper keys. Both computers have received positive reviews. The laptops still use USB-C ports for charging, but Apple’s new iMac desktop, the first redesign since 2015, has a new kind of magnetic power adapter.

A surge in PC sales

Apple iMac M1 2021
Todd Haselton | CNBC

Apple’s Mac business has been boosted by a global surge in PC sales during the Covid-19 pandemic as schools, businesses, and individuals bought new laptops and desktops to go to school or work from home.

Earlier this year, at its peak, PC sales (including Windows) had their highest year-over-year growth in 20 years, according to research firm Gartner. Research firm IDC said PC sales jumped 55% year-over-year in the first quarter. Analysts covering the PC industry and component makers said at the time that they were optimistic that there had been a permanent shift in PC sales trends.

But the pandemic-related PC surge may be coming to a close. In the third quarter, typically a boom time because of back-to-school sales, the U.S. PC market shrunk for the first time since the first quarter of the pandemic, according to market researcher IDC.

Apple’s computer shipments grew 10% during the third quarter, according to IDC, but the pandemic trends that lifted all manufacturers seem to have slowed significantly. Before the pandemic, PCs were one of the slowest-growing tech markets, with several years of flat growth in the past decade.

Apple hopes shiny new Macs can buck that trend.

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AppLovin and Robinhood added to S&P 500

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AppLovin and Robinhood added to S&P 500

Robinhood finally wins spot in S&P 500

Shares of advertising technology company AppLovin and stock trading app Robinhood Markets each jumped about 7% in extended trading on Friday after S&P Global said the two will join the S&P 500 index.

The changes will go into effect before the beginning of trading on Sept. 22, S&P Global announced in a statement. AppLovin will replace MarketAxess Holdings, while Robinhood will take the place of Caesars Entertainment.

In March, short-seller Fuzzy Panda Research advised the committee for the large-cap U.S. index to keep AppLovin from becoming a constituent. AppLovin shares dropped 15% in December, when the committee picked Workday to join the S&P 500. Robinhood, for its part, saw shares slip 2% in June when it was excluded from a quarterly rebalancing of the index.

The S&P 500 already has a heavy concentration of large technology companies. Datadog and DoorDash entered earlier this year.

It’s normal for stocks to go up on news of their inclusion in a major index such as the S&P 500. Fund managers need to buy shares to reflect the updates.

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AppLovin and Robinhood both went public on Nasdaq in 2021.

Robinhood has been a favorite among retail investors who have bid up shares of meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment and GameStop.

AppLovin itself became a stock to watch, with shares gaining 278% in 2023 and over 700% in 2024. As of Friday’s close, the stock had gained only 51% so far in 2025. AppLovin’s software brings targeted ads to mobile apps and games.

Earlier this year, AppLovin offered to buy the U.S. TikTok business from China’s ByteDance. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for a sale, most recently in June.

At Robinhood’s annual general meeting in June, a shareholder asked Vlad Tenev, the company’s co-founder and CEO, if there were plans for getting into the S&P 500.

“It’s a difficult thing to plan for,” Tenev said. “I think it’s one of those things that hopefully happens.”

He said he believed the company was eligible.

Shares of MarketAxess, which specializes in fixed-income trading, have fallen 17% year to date, while shares of Caesars, which runs hotels and casinos, are down 21%.

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AppLovin and Robinhood ytd stock chart.

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FTC commissioner questions status of Snap AI chatbot complaint: ‘People deserve answers’

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FTC commissioner questions status of Snap AI chatbot complaint: 'People deserve answers'

FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump's latest attempt to fire her

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter raised questions on Friday about the status of an artificial intelligence chatbot complaint against Snap that the agency referred to the Department of Justice earlier this year.

In January, the FTC announced that it would refer a non-public complaint regarding allegations that Snap’s My AI chatbot posed potential “risks and harms” to young users and said it would refer the suit to the DOJ “in the public interest.”

“We don’t know what has happened to that complaint,” Slaughter said on CNBC’s ‘The Exchange.” “The public does not know what has happened to that complaint, and that’s the kind of thing that I think people deserve answers on.”

Snap’s My AI chatbot, which debuted in 2023, is powered by large language models from OpenAI and Google and has drawn scrutiny for problematic responses.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap declined to comment.

Slaugther’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump held a White House dinner with several tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

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“The president is hosting Big Tech CEOs in the White House even as we’re reading about truly horrifying reports of chatbots engaging with small children,” she said.

Trump has been attempting to remove Slaughter from her FTC position, but earlier this week, U.S. appeals court allowed her to maintain her role.

On Thursday, the president asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire her from the post.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who was selected by Trump to lead the commission, publicly opposed the complaint against Snap in January, prior to succeeding Lina Khan at the helm.

At the time, he said he would “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law” if the DOJ were to eventually file a complaint.

WATCH: FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter on President Trump’s latest attempt to fire her.

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Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined $21 trillion in market cap

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Google leads monster week for tech, pushing megacaps to combined  trillion in market cap

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.

Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images

From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors.

The resolution of Google’s antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple. Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla’s stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk.

Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry’s eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares.

Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, “there are no comparisons.”

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There was a certain irony to this week’s gains.

Alphabet’s 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant’s market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.

A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won’t be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors.

The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%.

Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling “removed a huge overhang” on Google’s stock and a “black cloud worry” that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google’s AI models.

“This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road,” the analysts wrote.

Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics.

New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google’s dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies “may yet prove to be game changers.”

On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.

Broadcom pops

Broadcom shares spike briefly on Q4 beat

While OpenAI was an indirect catalyst for Google and Apple this week, it was more directly tied to the huge rally in Broadcom’s stock.

Following Broadcom’s better-than-expected earnings report on Thursday, CEO Hock Tan told analysts that his chipmaker had secured a $10 billion contract with a new customer, which would be the company’s fourth large AI client.

Several analysts said the new customer is OpenAI, and the Financial Times reported on a partnership between the two companies.

Broadcom is the newest entrant into the trillion-dollar club, thanks to the company’s custom chips for AI, already used by Google, Meta and TikTok parent ByteDance. With Its 13% jump this week, the stock is now up 120% in the past year, lifting Broadcom’s market cap to around $1.6 trillion.

“The company is firing on all cylinders with clear line of sight for growth supported by significant backlog,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note, maintaining their buy recommendation and lifting their price target on the stock.

For the other giant AI chipmaker, the past week wasn’t so good.

Nvidia shares fell more than 4% in the holiday-shortened week, the worst performance among the megacaps. There was no apparent negative news for Nvidia, but the stock has now dropped for four consecutive weeks.

Still, Nvidia remains the largest company by market cap, valued at over $4 trillion, with its stock up 56% in the past 12 months.

Microsoft also fell this week and is on an extended slide, dropping for five straight weeks. Shares are still up 21% over the last 12 months.

On the flipside, Tesla has been the laggard in the group. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are down 13% this year due to a multi-quarter sales slump that reflects rising competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers and an aging lineup of EVs.

But Tesla shares climbed 5% this week, sparked mostly by gains on Friday after the company said it wants investors to approve a pay plan for Musk that could be worth up to almost $1 trillion.

The payouts, split into 12 tranches, would require Tesla to see significant value appreciation, starting with the first award that won’t kick in until the company almost doubles its market cap to $2 trillion.

Tesla Chairwoman Robyn Denholm told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin the plan was designed to keep Musk, the world’s richest person, “motivated and focused on delivering for the company.”

WATCH: Tesla board chair on Elon Musk’s pay plan

Tesla Chair Denholm: New pay plan designed to keep Musk motivated & focused on delivering for Tesla

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