"The Final Smart Home Push: The final catalyst that pushed Apple decisively past the $5 trillion mark was the debut of its long-awaited HomeView smart home lineup. Powered by an upgraded, AI-driven Siri, the HomeView ecosystem expanded Apple's recurring service revenues from the pocket right into the center of the household.

Watching this closely. It's not easy to get reliable specs on the new devices yet, but if Siri can really handle voice control and HomeKit/Matter work well together, this will be a new category for AAPL. The Apple-branded line will establish the premium price point, and Apple will offer compatible products with different features and different price points through different channels.

Home will be the entry point for new customers to the AAPL ecosystem, which will offer them new kinds of devices and services. No other company can offer the same tightly integrated user experience across so many categories of devices and services, intelligent voice control, privacy, and secure 24/7 global access. GOOG, MSFT, AMZN, and META will try, and they will own a good share of the market, but if AAPL executes well, they'll serve as a safe, convenient front end to those providers (as well as ChatGPT, Claude, etc.), hold their loyal customer base and probably expand it significantly.

AAPL's inability to make its own chips is a vulnerability in this market, but it does have super-strong supplier relationships formed over decades. And as the Neo showed us, binned iPhone chips can do a lot of this easily, creating an internal chip supply when needed.

Next up will be robust, on-device identity verification using biometrics. Tablets, phones, watches, glasses, maybe rings and other things that can unlock everything and log you in everywhere. I suspect Ternus is the guy to pull this off, but he may need a new team to do it.

The good news is that the stores are indeed busy (I also need to upgrade some old devices), and the cool new devices aren't even available yet. I'm long AAPL.

abromber