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🚨 I'm curious about one question: Apple's earnings report is clearly quite good, so how could $AAPL still drop 7% in one day? $AAPL closed at $308.91 on Friday, down 7.1%. Revenue was $109.4 billion, up 16% year-over-year; EPS was $2.02, up 29%; iPhone revenue was $54.3 billion, up 22%. This can't be considered bad, you could even say it sold extremely well. I then looked into the inventory and next quarter guidance, and when I saw the inventory line, I kind of understood. Apple's quarter-end inventory was $11.1 billion, nearly double last September's $5.7 billion. Next quarter revenue growth guidance is only 9% to 11%, and gross margin is expected to drop from this quarter's 50.1% down to 47% to 48%. iPhone sales don't seem to be a problem at the moment. Mac revenue was $10.4 billion, up 29%; services revenue was $30.7 billion, also up 12%. What people are worried about now is how much profit Apple can keep from each unit sold. AI giants have been aggressively building data centers these past two years, driving memory prices higher and higher. Apple hasn't spent hundreds of billions in a single quarter on AI data centers like Microsoft, Google, or Meta, but still ended up paying an AI tax from afar. Cook himself said memory price increases have become extreme. Mac and iPad prices have already gone up, but iPhone prices haven't changed yet. This makes things difficult. If they don't raise prices, Apple has to absorb the cost; if they do, fewer people might upgrade. Whether Siri and on-device AI can actually motivate people to buy new devices hasn't been fully proven yet. But the memory bill has already arrived. Doubling inventory isn't necessarily all bad. Earlier demand was better than Apple expected, and supply has tightened, so stocking more is normal. As long as this inventory sells smoothly and gross margin holds, this drop might really be an overreaction. The real fear is if inventory keeps piling up and gross margin keeps falling. Then it would become a situation where iPhones sell like crazy, but Apple’s profits aren’t as comfortable as before.