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If we look at the GeekBench scores of the 6s in detail, we see clearly see where the improvements come from. Memory copy is roughly 45% faster, this indicates that Apple has done a good job improving the interface to the main memory. Taken together with the now 3MB of level 2 cache, it is no surprise that the LUA scores have made a huge jump, with the interpreter causing a lot less misses. The AES scores see the lowest improvement, since it is almost completely hardware accelerated, and so only profits from the increased frequency. It is also noteworthy to see the improvements in SHA1 and some of the filters; these indicate that Apple must have improved the pipelining of a few commands, reducing the stalls from waiting for a result to arrive. I believe these pipeline stalls are also behind Apples push to have apps stored in an intermediate form on the App Store, this would allow Apple to change the processor behavior even if it meant that code optimized for an older processor would run slower.

There is one number that leaves me scratching my head from the Apple Event: the 70% performance increase for the A9 processor. This is an astonishing jump in performance given that Apple was already using a 20nm process for the A8. It will be interesting to see how this increase is achieved. Possible avenues are more cores, higher frequencies enabled by better controlling leakages, and better optimized logics. Given that Apple has already caught up to Intel in performance per cycle and core, I would have assumed that Apple would have continued with the slower pace set by the A8. 

With slowing sales for the iPad, while the iPhone is going from strength to strength, Neil Cybart wonders if it has already plateaued, if it turns out to be a consumption device for the web and Netflix, and not a computer to replace the Mac. 

I actually believe that the iPad is loosing sales because the iPhone is supplanting it as the better consumption device, that the 6 plus is the device those iPad mini owners really wanted, and that the iPad has not yet improved to the point where you can do more complicated tasks easily.

While Apple will support running two apps side by side with iOS 9, it still has work to do to replace the collaboration that is enabled in a crude manner by the file system on PCs. Add to this that the App Store is not very supportive to financially support quality applications, not to mention the risk of censorship by Apple, and we are not seeing many new, great apps: iPhoto discontinued, and I do not remember any great new apps since Pixelmator, OmniGraffle, Paper. 

On the hardware side, I believe we slowly realize that the iPad is portable, but not mobile computing, and that it is therefore reasonable to trade a larger surface for better productivity, and accept a bit of extra bulk as the trade off. The trouble is that the threshold for something you can comfortably hold in your hands for longer periods is roughly 400g, maybe 500g. Once we are able to buy an iPad with whole day battery life and a 12″ screen area for this weight, it will replace most PCs and Macs in use.

The iPhone has a neat feature to reply to an incoming call with a prerecorded text. I find the standard texts pretty useless, and have them replaced with: Sorry, I’m busy. I’ll call you back in 30 minutes, plus variants for 2 hours, and tonight. I choose those because someone calling me typically does not want to know why I cannot respond, but when she can expect the call back. And I can explain the why in the phone call later, with more empathy.

David Smith feels the activity rings are too hard to read. I agree, they are hard to discern between almost closed and closed. But I feel a better way to show this would be to have the last quarter of the ring fade out, and then restore it to normal again once closed. This is because we are much better at seeing differences than absolute values, and with David’s suggestion you would be hard pressed to see the difference between three almost closed and three closed rings at a glance.

In order to find out how one would value Apple shares, one starts out by looking at the market potential of its products, iPhone, Watch, iPad and Macs. 

The iPhone has the widest appeal, and it is safe to assume that Apple will continue to be able to corner the high end market. As a rough estimate, I see the following numbers:

As the world gets richer, this number will slowly rise, and could reach a billion within two decades. 

For the iPad, I believe the market to be a bit smaller, since the 6+ size is good enough to fulfill most consumption roles, so let’s make that 450m users. The Watch has great potential, and as such I see two thirds of iPhone users getting one eventually, say 400m users. The Mac is more limited, as it appeals to professionals. Let us say that the market is 150m users. 

To get to the addressable market, we need to know how often users will replace their units. We have seen from the last iPhone upgrade that the age of annual performance doublings is over, and knowing that only 20% of iPhone users have upgraded in the last half year, I estimate that we will see a significant lengthening of upgrade cycles: 4 years for the iPhone and Mac, 6 years for the Watch and iPad. This leads me to the following estimates:

With 5.82b outstanding shares that would be an EPS of $11, with some extra profit from services. While there is a risk, that as the technology matures, we will see a longer replacement cycle, longer lifetimes will also increase the lure of purchasing a quality product. Even though everybody knows what people value with Apple, namely superior quality, design, customer service, and especially the experience of using the products, there has been nobody able to compete. So the chance that Apple will be replaced as the quality leader is relatively low, with Xiaomi being the greatest threat.