Analysis of Apple's CEO transition and earnings call dynamics (Part 2)

But we are not there yet, but we're getting there. And I will take a step back and say if Tim Cook wasn't doing some hand holding, wasn't providing some training wheels early on in this new CEO's tenure, it would be irresponsible given how important Apple is to the world and how many pensions and such rely on company stock. But honestly, Mark, this is a luxury problem for a company to have. For anybody to sit down and be like, how is your performance on an earnings call? Because ultimately a whole bunch of people, myself included, we read the transcript, we're not sitting around dissecting the particular delivery. This is the. I mean, yeah, it is a part of the marketing of the products, but it isn't like if I'm an investor, if I'm deciding is this a viable company or not, I'm not thinking about the exact delivery or tone. So it's the MacBook Neo, it's the great upgrade with the iPhone 17 Pro, and it's the future of the iPhone duo. These are going to be the consequential things. I will say a couple things on this. Did you know that Steve Jobs only hopped on the earnings call once in a blue moon? I mean, I remember when we were covering earnings calls back in the day, he came on some call in like the 2010 era when he was just getting his win back coming from, you know, his second medical leave before his third medical leave. And he just went on there and just started destroying the competition when it came to tablets. Just, you know, pooping on the idea of an iPad mini destroying competitors, the iPad, just, just talking the most smack he could at the time about the competitors. And, you know, then we handed it back to Tim Cook and the CFO at the time, Peter Oppenheimer, to talk the business and the financials. But Jobs never went on there. Cook was doing that as coo. And so the fact that Ternus, who's not a business guy, who's not a sales guy, not an operations or supply chain guy, he's an engineer coming on the calls, representing Apple, being the face of these things, even though it's not his wheelhouse, I think he deserves respect for that. And we'll see if this is a long term thing across Ternus tenure, if he's the guy who's going to be leading these calls moving forward. A couple additional things I want to say on the earnings call. Apple still is continuing to make excuses when you see revenue declines. A couple, I want to point out, the iPad decline, they just came out and said the iPad declined because we had a tough compare to the launch of the A16 iPad a couple years ago. They constantly use these types of excuses. These ones weren't terrible.