Apple Drops Poor Man's Phone, Jensen Huang Gets His Star Trek On

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Good evening, 

In tonight’s edition, we have Tim Apple putting the “Great” in Great Value, and Jensen Huang wetting his beak on Photonics… 

Let’s get started…

- Tell me you're desperate to move products without telling me…

Tim Apple and the boys made some moves yesterday… and shocker… it has nothing to do with a new Siri. Apple rolled out the new iPhone 17e starting at $599… the kind of phone you buy when you don't feel like remortgaging anything. To be fair, it does come with 256 gigs of storage which… is genuinely not bad.

For context, the old e model made you pay extra just to store more than a weekend's worth of photos. Some analysts are calling the storage bump at the same price point an effective price cut, which is the most Apple thing ever… making you feel grateful for getting what should've been standard.

This all comes as memory chips hit nosebleed levels and Apple eats serious margin to keep the 17e competitive. But Apple is looking at global market share and deciding the land grab matters more than the per-unit squeeze right now. Under the hood, the iSheep are getting the A19 chip on 3-nanometer… a real upgrade for the budget tier. They also threw in the C1X modem (Apple's homegrown cellular chip… faster speeds, less battery drain, one more reason to stop paying Qualcomm). Oh, and MagSafe finally comes to the e-series, so congrats, you can now magnetically attach $40 accessories to your $599 phone.

Meanwhile, the iPad Air got the M4 treatment… $599 for the 11-inch, $799 for the 13-inch. Solid spec bump, zero surprises. The iPad line continues to be the product Apple refreshes like clockwork and nobody talks about at parties.

As for the thing we've all been waiting for, Google is officially in talks to host servers in its own data centers to power a Gemini-flavored Siri. The fact they're willing to let Google handle the AI backend tells you everything about where that internal effort landed. But no updates on when any of that actually ships. Because of course.

Shares barely twitched because none of this changes the actual math… it's an iterative cycle play, not a narrative shift. The real story is whether the 17e moves units where Android owns the mid-range, and whether Gemini-Siri ever materializes or just lives in "exploring" purgatory forever. Place your bets accordingly, friends. 

- "Tell your friends I don't want a lot. Just enough to wet my beak." Jensen Huang, probably

Jensen Huang has a fever, and the only prescription is to back up the brinks truck to get his Star Trek on. Obi-Huang-Kenobi & Co. (read: Nvidia) are cutting not one… but two… $2B checks to Lumentum and Coherent (both photonic companies) for multi-year strategic agreements with multi-billion dollar purchase commitments baked in, plus future capacity rights for advanced laser components. Money never sleeps, pal.

Y tho?

Nvidia's pocket book is going full send on these companies to build optical interconnect tech… systems that use light instead of copper to move data. When you're trying to build what AI mouth-breathers keep calling "gigawatt-scale AI factories," copper stops cutting it real fast. You need photons. You need Skrillex-type lasers. You need the companies that make them locked down before everyone else figures this out.

Lumentum is already spinning up a new fabrication facility for this partnership. Coherent is expanding domestic manufacturing to support what they're calling a 20-year relationship with Nvidia. As for the broader play, Jensen is getting to control the stack. GPUs, networking, interconnects, and now the optical layer that ties it all together. The leather-clad jacket AI-god himself doesn't just want to sell the chips… he wants to own the pipes, the light, and probably the electricity eventually.

As for Lumentum and Coherent shareholders… both stocks up 96% and 51% YTD, respectively… Christmas came early. Nothing validates a photonics roadmap quite like the most valuable company on Earth showing up with a briefcase full of billions and saying "build faster."

Which brings me to the real question: What does this signal about where the AI infrastructure bottleneck is headed? We've spent two years obsessing over GPU supply. Now Jensen's telling us the next constraint is optical… the physical layer that connects all those beautiful H100s and B200s into something that actually works at scale. And he's placing $4 billion worth of bets with purchase commitments attached to prove it.

But there isn't a bubble… right? 

The Team at Bullseye Trades