Every year, I watch the technology world gather around Apple’s latest iPhone as though civilization has been waiting twelve months to discover whether the camera bump has achieved a new spiritual dimension. The reviews arrive. The comparison charts multiply. People zoom into photographs of brick walls to evaluate detail no normal human being would inspect unless the brick were suspected of a crime. Analysts debate colors, battery life and whether a button has migrated three millimeters toward destiny. I understand the ritual. The iPhone remains Apple’s largest product category, its most recognizable device and the front door through which millions of customers enter the ecosystem. A successful launch still matters enormously. But when I think about what makes Apple valuable as a business, I increasingly believe the most important asset is not the next blockbuster iPhone. It is the installed base already sitting in pockets, resting on desks, tracking workouts, storing photographs and qu...
For years, I treated Amazon’s retail business as the world’s most elaborate customer-acquisition program for AWS. That was the accepted story: Amazon retail created scale, loyalty, Prime memberships, and an ocean of consumer data, while Amazon Web Services produced the margins Wall Street actually loved. Investors tolerated the thin economics of shipping millions of low-priced objects to millions of impatient people because AWS made the consolidated income statement look civilized. Then something inconvenient happened to that tidy narrative. Amazon’s retail operation started making serious money. Not “nice little improvement” money. Not “the holiday quarter went well” money. In the second quarter of 2026, Amazon’s North America segment generated $9.1 billion in operating income, up from $7.5 billion a year earlier. The International segment added another $1.7 billion, compared with $1.5 billion in the prior-year period. Together, those two commerce-heavy segments produced $10.8 billion...