Companies

The news of Jony Ive leaving Apple came as no surprise, as he has been less involved in products over the past four years. Given Ive’s iconic contribution to Apple’s success, the takeaway from yesterday’s announcement has been largely overlooked.…

When we wrote about why Apple deserved a one trillion dollar valuation in May 2017, we argued that “design remains [Apple’s] unique core competency.” That core competency — the one thing that Apple does better than any other company —…

Apple has confirmed an Axios report that they have acquired autonomy startup Drive.ai. Apple has hired “dozens” of Drive.ai hardware and software engineers and will receive some intellectual property and hard assets, including vehicles. Drive.ai, which has been seeking a…

WWDC and Google I/O set the direction for developers for the upcoming year and give insight to the trends Apple and Google are actively moving forward. The developer conference keynotes are the newsmakers but are only one event in a…

It’s still too early to determine how the US/China trade dispute will impact Apple. That said, since the May escalation of the US/China trade and Huawei disputes, we’ve been monitoring Apple-related Chinese online media to gauge the frequency of negative…

Toys facilitate the imagination. They replicate and blend some elements of reality and some elements of fiction, equipping us to pretend. We’ve been considering the benefits of toys that incorporate novel technologies, from playful robots to LEGO sets with augmented…

Lost in the breadth of this year’s WWDC announcements was an update to CarPlay. That’s to be expected, given just under 1 minute of the 136-minute keynote and only 1 of 153 developer sessions were related to CarPlay. Despite the…

We’re updating our estimates for stand-alone smart speakers and tuning our model based on more historical sales figures. Bottom line: this market remains in high growth mode. We estimate more than one-third of all US households will have a smart…

Walmart recently announced InHome Delivery to bring groceries directly to customers’ fridges, the latest example of Walmart closely following the Amazon playbook. Amazon announced in-home delivery with its Key service in 2017. While the fast follower approach may seem prudent,…

Tesla hosted its annual shareholder meeting today. Here are our takeaways: Musk was calm, confident, and articulate in a way that we haven’t seen in his last several public appearances. He was less combative and more measured in his remarks…

Retailers are racing to provide faster, cheaper, and more personalized service. In early June, Amazon announced Prime Free One Day shipping, a move that will again raise the bar for consumer expectations on delivery. Four days later, Walmart announced InHome…

In May, Samsung was the first manufacturer to ship TVs with Apple TV integration. Vizio, Sony, and LG have also signed on to this effort and are expected to release TVs later this year. Our takeaways: Four years ago, our…