Apple’s Foldable iPhone Is Coming, Qualcomm Lands Amazon AI Deal

Zaid Admani (0:00)

Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Tuesday, September 8th. In today's episode, we'll preview Apple's iPhone event this week, and break down why Amazon just took a $4 billion stake in a company that makes Android chips. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Microsoft is about to put a monthly time limit on cloud gaming. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go.

Stocks are coming off a quiet but winning week. The S&P 500 was up 0.1% last week, while the NASDAQ was up just 0.4%.

So pretty small moves, and overall the stock market has been kind of quiet for the last few weeks, which is pretty normal for August. But we are now in September, Labor Day is over, and there is a lot for investors to consider moving forward. The big news last week was the August jobs report, which came in way stronger than expected. The US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, which is roughly tripled of 55,000 that economists were expecting. And the reason that's key is because with the labor market looking strong, it could give the Federal Reserve a reason to hike interest rates at their meeting next week. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has been talking tough on inflation. He wants to get it back to the Fed's 2% target. And that's why traders are now pricing in a 60% chance of a rate hike at the next meeting. So we'll see what happens on September 16th. Now the other big news I can play into this is the rising oil prices. Fighting in the Middle East is escalating again. Iran fired missiles at US. Navy ships over the weekend. The US responded by striking Iranian oil tankers. And now energy facilities in Saudi Arabia are being attacked again, which is forcing Saudi Arabia to halt operations at some sites. So all that chaos is pushing up oil prices again. Brent crude is trading around $100 a barrel, while WTI is trading around $94 a barrel. Now I gotta say, for most of the summer, I feel like Wall Street was more obsessed with AI earnings and kind of looking past the war and all the macro stuff. But earnings season is over, school is back in session, and investors are realizing that there are still some real macro headwinds. So you know, it's possible the macro headlines like oil prices, inflation and rate hikes could have the most impact on how the stock market does in the last four months of the year. Now we should learn more about the macro picture this week. The August wholesale inflation report drops on Thursday morning. And then the CPI inflation report drops on Friday morning. We'll cover both those reports. And beyond just the Macros stuff, there's also an Apple event on Wednesday, where they're going to show off the new foldable iPhone. And who knows, maybe one of these AI companies might surprise us too this week. So we'll have a lot to cover this week. Definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already and tune in every day to stay in the loop.

Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Apple. Tomorrow is the annual iPhone event and this one could be the biggest one in years. Now for one, Apple has a new CEO now. John Ternes took over from Tim Cook back on September 1st. And for this event, Tim Cook will actually be sitting in the audience and not opening the keynote with his iconic folksy good morning intro. And the other reason this event is going to be important is because Apple is expected to release their first foldable iPhone. There's been a lot of hype building about this phone. There was a great write up in Bloomberg this morning from friend of the show, Mark Gurman, about the development of the foldable phone. Apparently, it was something that Tim Cook pushed for after a trip to China in 2020, where he saw a ton of people using foldable phones. So Apple's been working on this for a few years now, and they're very late to this market. Samsung has been selling foldable phones since 2019, and Google and other Android manufacturers have been doing it for years as well. Now, foldables are still a niche product. They accounted for less than 2% of global smartphone sales last year, likely because they're very expensive, but they are the fastest growing segment in smartphones. And by the way, this new foldable iPhone is also going to be very expensive. The estimates are anywhere between $2,000 and $2,500 for this phone. Personally, I think Apple will likely price it on the higher end. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes out at $2,500, because regardless of what the price is, Apple fanboys will buy this. In fact, Morgan Stanley estimates that Apple will sell 7-8 million units in the second half of this year. That'll be an extra $14-plus billion in revenue for Apple. I feel like most people don't really upgrade their iPhones very often these days. Every new iPhone pretty much looks the same as a previous year's iPhone, and the cameras have gotten so good now that it doesn't really make sense to upgrade for like three to four years. But the iPhone Fold might give people a reason to upgrade sooner because it's a new product. So that could be a boost to Apple's revenues in the second half of the year. Let me know in the comments on what you guys think. What do you think the price for this iPhone Fold will be? Are you gonna buy it? And what do you think the Apple will name it? Are they gonna go with something basic like the iPhone Ultra or will they go outside the box? Drop your thoughts in the comments on Spotify and YouTube.