Disclaimer: The information provided in this newsletter is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute individual investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice. Nothing in this newsletter is intended to be or should be construed as individualized investment advice. All content is of a general nature and solely for educational and illustrative purposes.
As we established in our last deep dive, the rise of “vibe coding” is very real, and there are some huge beneficiaries to this trend, especially within the software space. However, up until this point, it’s been relatively difficult to find a hardware beneficiary to the trend. One of my good friends surfaced the $RPI trade a few weeks ago, which turned out to be a big hit, but the hardware I saw everyone and their brother buying on X was the Mac Mini (and to a much smaller extent, the Mac Studio).
And this preference is not just reflected by people on X either. I used our brand new Sentinalysis Research Platform to search for specific keywords in GitHub commits. Although total mention frequency is relatively small, the term “mac mini” has skyrocketed recently:
GitHub Commit Keyword usage by month for “mac mini”. Source: Sentinalysis Research
I then got a bit more niche with my searches, and I looked for GitHub Keyword commits for “brew install”. The idea here is that Homebrew is the leading package manager for Mac developers, and “brew install” is a command that takes a package name to install it. Effectively, this can be seen as a proxy for Homebrew (i.e., Mac) usage amongst developers:
GitHub Commit Keyword usage by month for “brew install”. Source: Sentinalysis Research
We also used the NPM package download feature on the Sentinalysis Research Platform to identify some Mac-specific software packages (with the help of my trusty friend Claude, of course) that would be a good proxy for Mac usage:
Additionally, the lead times for Mac Mini and Mac Studio deliveries have gotten a bit out of hand lately, specifically when it comes to builds that have large quantities of unified memory (a fan-favorite among builders on X):
Mac Minis won’t be delivered until early May!
Similarly, Mac Studios may have you waiting until mid-May!
There’s definitely something going on here, but there couldn’t possibly be an arbitrage opportunity here, right? After all, the Mac segment is an incredibly small portion of $AAPL ( ▲ 2.94% ) revenue, accounting for roughly $8B/quarter:
Mac revenue accounts for ~$8B/quarter for Apple, a drop in the bucket. Source: Qualtrim
Quarterly TTM Mac revenue over time, Source: Qualtrim
Well, in all honesty, there could be some potential upside here, just because the company’s been relatively stagnant for quite some time now. This stagnation can largely be attributed to the lack of a meaningful product release for a long time. While the recent iPhone release was well-received, another phone upgrade cycle likely won’t come around for several more years.
Additionally, as you can see above, the Mac market has been pretty much dead for the past 2-3 years. This means a little bit of growth, combined with the right story on the earnings call (one where Apple is touted as the “go-to” choice for local AI users), could help spin the right narrative and send the stock up a bit.
This narrative isn’t particularly interesting to me, though, so I decided to dive deeper down the rabbit hole…
Subscribe to Sentinalysis Premium to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Sentinalysis Premium to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
UpgradeSubscribing to Sentinalysis Premium gets you::
- Weekly In-Depth Breakdowns of the Top 5 Brands
- Weekly Chart of the Top 10 Brands over time
- Monthly deep dives on public companies