tv Squawk Alley CNBC December 14, 2020 11:00am-12:00pm EST
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new york city and 11:00 a.m. here and quaxwak alley is live. ""squawk alley" is live." >> good monday morning, welcome to ""squawk alley."" it is a historic day in the u.s. beginning covid-19 vaccinations. you're looking at video of sandra lindsey, an intensive care nurse receiving the first vaccination at long island juici
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jewish medical center in new york. but the big news in tech after the biggest week for ipos with doordash and airbnb pricing before the average, we have reaction you see from a market crash. two big ipos that were expected this week affirm and roadblocks say no thank you, we'll wait until next year. we spoke with affirm ceo earlier this year on that company's path to an ipo. >> at some point your investors start to make hints and elbow gestures. so at some point, yes, i'm not in a huge hurry. the biggest curse is go public at a valuation that somewhere between 20 and $25 billion. once you clear that, the stock becomes a little more stable. the volatility you take on as a $2 billion stork, yck, you wake and you're happy. volatility is the reason that companies like mine are hesitating. >> volatility of a different kind. i don't think i've ever seen
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anything like this. is the ipo window open so wide that startups are getting cold feet? >> that's interesting, jon. even today we're getting some data on the number of ipo companies with negative earnings, something like 80% which is getting close to the 81 that we saw in 2000 and 2018. leslie picker has more on affirmed roadblocks and what that might mean. >> the biggest question in the ipo ecosystem right now, whether there is too much froth to go public on one hand you think that's a good thing. doordash and airbnb were able to get higher valuations by raising range ands pricing ipos above the ranges. but on the other hand, to borrow a phrase from jon fortt, huge pops like we saw last week can be hard to sustain if they're too detached from a company's intrinsic value. that brings us to affirm and roadblocks. i'm told by three source that's they were undergoing back and forth with the sec for final
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signoff. and now regardless after principle of law, they're no longer aiming to rush out deals before the end of the year. i'm told that roadblocks hesitation stems from a tender offering for the employees which would allow them to sell into the deal at the ipo price. now you can imagine what it would do to morale if that stock doubled on day one and employees were the ones selling at the lows. so the online gaming platform is going back to the drawing board. they're going to try to fix this i p. o pricing process that has plagued some of the earlier ipos of the year. in a memo to employees over the weekend, ceo said that company planned to work with advisors to see how they can make such improvements work that will continue over the holidays and push the listing to early next year. sources close to affirm expect about the same time frame for that deal as well. but not all ipos are waiting for the markets to calm down bate. the parent company of wish, an inexpensive mobile shopping platform is expected to list this week. it will be the latest test of
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what appears to be just in seichable appetite for the ipos. >> big april tights around the holidays are expected. this is a new thing. thank you, leslie. great setup to kick off our conversation with our next guest, plexco capital's partner and former m & a banker at goldman sachs iris choy. i'll start with you, lo. what do you make of this environment? i mean, it defies conventional wisdom when investors are excited about ipos. people usually like to have ipos. but maybe not so. zblfr interesting. i think what we're seeing is that a couple things i'm focusing on this side of the business, the consumer side, both the pandemic has created a lot of tail winds to be able to adopt consumer behavior to this new normal that we're experiencing right now.
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on the business side we're seeing billions of dollars put into infrastructure that is necessary for them to be able to work remotely. and so i think, you know sh these are a couple of drivers, you know, when you think about what we've seen historically, i think going back to, you know, 2016, kind of the private market valuations, we're really close to what we saw when companies went public. but starting at about 2017, 2018, we saw that the total valuation of these unicorns, once they went public, was about 50% higher than the last private market pricing. and in october, that's accelerated to above 100%, kind of speaking to some of the pops that we've seen doordash in excess of 80%.
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so i think there is obviously the art of trying to price an ipo which the bankers do based on what they're seeing from institution alibiers. but what's really interesting is -- >> this is something we haven't seen before. >> that's right. the retail buyers. >> just doing something totally different. i want to get iris in here. give us your perspective on whether anything like this has happened before. and have these companies gone a different route whether it's spac, direct listing, would they be getting a different kind of benefit from what we're seeing from investors here? >> i think it's an interesting question. i think you have to consider given that unity does take more of a hybrid approach. they try to have more control over the process. yet, you still saw quite a big pop in their stock price the first day. i think it was up by 50% when they were actually priced out and started trading.
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i think it's really hard using the traditional ipo process to try to perfect the pricing. that having been said, i think that even when you have direct listings, there's going to be fluctuation in the price based on how much flow there really is. >> well, you know, barons over the weekend, i guess, not surprisingly started to draw lines between this environment and the late 90s. i wonder if you see any overall degradation in the quality of the business models that you are seeing coming to market. >> the business models are a lot more solid in terms of the fundamentals. what we're having right now is a much more rapid adoption of a lot of the technologies because the ability to access them by consumers and enterprises is much more readily available given that everyone has some type of device that has internet connectivity whether it is
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mobile, laptop. i think the fundamentals are a lot better. but the thing that is starting to become apparent is that, you know, this insatiable demand, especially from the retail investors, i think this robin hood generation of millennials and genz, they're focused on the iconic brands that they're familiar with. we're in such a low interest rate environment that folks are, especially on the institutional side, willing to take on a little bit morris to being drive those returns. >> yeah. iris, we're seeing insatiable demand for a lot of things. bitcoin, you have to include that in the mix here. what does that mean for investors overall? >> i mean, you know, by no means am i a bitcoin expert, but we can't kind of overstate the importance of the interest rate environment that we're in. not only for institutional investors but the retail investors as well. obviously, when we're in an environment where the interest rate is basically close to zero,
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a lot of these companies like doordash and airbnb, they can profitable in certain segments and quarters and tending to losing money. really what the adoption curve and also interest rates being so low, it's really pulling the cash flows that they're being valued off of. >> so then, iris, what do you do? do you stay away as an investor from the ipos altogether? >> i don't think so. i don't necessarily see the market going down within the next 12 to 24 months. i think a lot of that will be dictated by the fed policies and i think they have shown that chairman powell tends to give a plan, at least two quarters ahead of when they're actually going to implement change. >> all right. thank you both. i don't know what to say about what we're seeing here with this ipo market. but thanks for helping us understand it. carl? >> okay, jon. months of planning and
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investment in the cold chain has all led up to today. first distribution of that pfizer vaccine. frank has more on what we're going to witness. >> hey there, carl. more than 140 shipments of the vaccine will be delivered all around the united states today. many in 747s like this one i'm standing in right now and shipped inside containers like this one that you see here behind me. the first flight, they've been dedicated flights for vaccines. generally they'll be shipped with christmas presents and other items. one of the first deliveries was made at boston medical center by fedex. ups making one at the university of louisville hospital. both companies say they have the capacity and the technology to happened will fees and christmas preside presents being shipped at the same time and still deliver on time. >> they're both going together in the same network is not relevant here because the vaccine package wez have eyes on those and they're given priority. they are u p. s premier gold.
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and they're given priority in the network. as soon as they enter the building, its a vaccine. the pilots know they're carrying a vaccine and the drivers. so they'll be given priority. >> our front line team members, many of them are trained in dangerous goods and things like dries. but no one is asking us to open these boxes or tamper with the prus product in any way. they don't want to mess with the dry ice. there may be dry ice done post delivery. but our team members welcome asked to deliver these packages. the most important thing here is going to be able to have custodial control of them at all times and eyes on them. >> and ups' operation warn speed added another delivery on thursday. that should complete the 2.9 million doses that will be shipped around the u.s. in this first phase, a very hopeful sign of covid-19 cases topped 60 million in the u.s.
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yesterday. what we know from the report is that treasury and unit of the commerce department that focuses oint net policy both of those agencies were hacked. the hackers had access to the e-mails. we also know that the attack led to a national security council meeting at the white house over the weekend. that's how seriously it's being taken at the highest levels of government. the investigation by the fbi and others is now in the early stages. but the cybersecurity firm fire eye which has experience with this, it was hacked and revealed that last week, fire eye says this attack is bigger than just treasury and commerce. this is a global attack. it's on public and private institutions. so private companies are involved in this hack attack as well i began by the spring of 2020. so it's been under way for some months now. the attack uses i.t. software and gathers information including getting into the systems and lying dormant for two weeks before starting to
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ex-filtrate the data. they would do that even if they did have something to do with it. and fire eye says they're not process, guys, of notifying companies and entities of all kinds if they have been the victim of this hack attack. so we're going to learn a lot more about this in the days and weeks to come. back to you. >> the journal story on this quoted a person familiar who said that campaign was a 10 on a scale of 1-10 in terms of severity and national security implications. i mean, does that kind of tone fit with your reporting? the danger is once you're inside, can you gather intelligence and information about everything that the u.s. government is doing. but then also you can take steps as a nation state fit was the russians that can actually get ahead of our decision making as they watch our policymakers e-mailing each other and making decisions. they can get ahead of that and foil u.s. efforts on the world stage in any number of arenas. so it's a really wide-ranging
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and potentially very damaging hack here, carl. >> maybe i'm asking a question that is too difficult to answer at this stage. is there significance to this hack being discovered as we're getting ready to transition from one administration to another? does it make it any more difficult to follow up? does it make it any more difficult for the new administration to get its feet on the ground? >> all the systems may have been compromised and it's unclear the extent of that. they need to get their arms around that as best they can. but i think sue gordon put it well on our air earlier this morning when she said -- former u.s. national security official said, look, you know, the problem here is that everybody was focused on the election hacking. and what happened was something very different. so you can be looking in one direction and the hackers hit you where you least expect it. there is a double take effect here. people are trying to figure out the scale of the damage that is happening.
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>> yeah. appears to be pretty extensive. thank you. >> we want to get to deidre with google experiencing outage. >> the outage took out more than a dozen google services including youtube and drive, lasting 40 minutes earlier this morning. now about an hour ago google cloud's twitter account posted today google experienced an authentication system outage for 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. this was resolved. all offices are restored. more simple terms, guys, this was not a cyber attack but an internal issue and we're told that no security was compromised. obviously this is also a reminder of the high stakes of the current moment that we're in. more people, companies, teachers, students than ever are relying on digital services amid the pandemic powered by the cloud. amazon, google and microsoft are the biggest. one school that uses google classrooms had to tell virtual
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students to sit tight. organizations that use services for voice calling over the internet, they had to use the actual telephone if can you imagine. that last time we saw such an extensionive disruption was amazon's aws outage. that's, of course, the cloud unit that powers the web sites and operations of many online services including roku, ring, and sirius/xm radio. that disruption, guys, lasted several hours. again, related to an internal capacity issue. we'll keep our eye out for more details on what happened. we'll have analysis similar to amazon. this is a point you talked about particularly in the last few weeks as that digital demand increases, surges, the back end of the cloud infrastructure and services in some cases is getting overwhelmed. you have things like this happening. >> all right. thank you for that. watching that outage from this morning.
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keep your eyes on tesla today. about $20 off the all time high that we saw last week. but, of course, some developments over the weekend. company shut down the model s and x production lines for about 18 days. that's according to an e-mail viewed by cnbc. employees were offered a week of pay to cover one of the weeks. and they have to take five unpaid days off or find work in other areas of the vary. ktwe ♪ ♪ digital transformation has failed to take off. because it hasn't removed the endless mundane work we all hate. ♪ ♪ automation can solve that by taking on repetitive tasks for us.
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a billion. the short form video platform will still continue to exist as a he separate platform and brand as well, carl. hard for me to see dub smash fitting into read it as they exist. will we'll see what they come up with. >> yeah. $58 billion in m & a announced in just 48 hours over the weekend, jon. it's been a lot to watch in gaming and financials and biotech. in the meantime, take a look at the markets here. the we're off the session highs. dow is up 279. somewhere shortly after the open. we did get a very brief all time high. but for now, up 129. this is decision tech.
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causes covid-19. it may help speed transmission but hancock still thinks vaccines will be effective against it. the formal process of electing joe biden as president is under way as electors gather in state capitols. this is what it looked like in tennessee where the 11 electors voted for president trump. he and the allied are suing but the president vows to keep fighting. for the first time the u.s. is formally blaming iran for the presumed death of retired fbi agent robert levenson who was abducted in there in 2007. reportedly while on an unauthorized mission for the cia. two iranian intelligence officials are being sanctioned by the treasury department. you are up to date. that is the news update at this hour. carl, i send it back to you. >> thank you. apple tv, meantime, pulling the plug on a show based on that
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blog website gawker america. they did a piece yesterday reporting on an e-mail from tim cook that prompted creators to kill the project leaving the question who exactly is deciding what stories get the green light on streaming platforms? joining us to discuss this morning, the co-founder and cnbc contributor kara swisher. good morning. >> good morning. how you doing? >> i'm pretty good. we know there is no love lost between tim cook and gawker for a variety of reasons. do we think this came from the top? >> i think ben is a great reporter. i heard the same story about what happened here. i think the issues are you don't think these people run their companies and actually they do. and so, you know, just like any mogul, whether it is owned by ge or whoever, they have influence over these things. it shouldn't come as a surprise that voeners want to do what the owners want to do, especially when putting out a product.
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>> right. to believe other wuz is naive. >> i mean this is what he's going to do. he doesn't like gawker. it's his network, he can do whatever he wants. it's not great. it's not a great look. it looks like you're petty and overly sensitive. the mark of a great network is put on stuff that is tough. but you're not going to see, you know, out of rupert murdoch network succession, are you? think about it. and so i think -- although that would be something if he did that. he put in lots of things. these people -- these networks are owned by powerful, wealthy people that have control over them. so it will be naive to say they didn't, you know, they don't have preferences. i'm sure the show will find the writer i happen to know is terrific. maybe they'll find another home or something else. but i guess he doesn't want to reward this particular publication. >> he wasn't the most sensitive
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to gawker compared to a lot of people. >> steve jobs? >> yeah. a lot more people really didn't like gawker than tim cook, i suspect. >> i wonder, care yashkara, how this -- we'll never know without talking to tim cook. something tells me he's not going to talk about this. how much of this is about not liking gawker and how much of this is about well if apple has any creative input into this, how could it not be seen as biassed one way or the other? if apple were to walk them to tell just gloves off story about how things went down, will apple's part of the story. in a way, doesn't that poison the well? >> i guess. i think these networks are owned by powerful people. they always exert influence on stuff. it's no the as parent. and been such a good reporter. it's just out there. i don't know. i don't know if this is any different than anybody owning anything. i think a lot of owners try to sort of stay away and we have this idea of, you know, this
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sort of church and state idea. but not with entertainment. it just isn't the case. and even in, you know, as you and i know, there is -- we have luckily not experienced a place where that doesn't happen and the owners don't meddle. it is common for them to meddle. if he they don't like it, dhoent like it. its no the a great look for apple. it certainly makes tim cook look petty. but it's his network. i don't know what to say. >> yeah. i guess i could be offended. i can't believe did he. that but i totally can believe he did that. >> it's interesting that they dove tail with the evolution of apple tv which has a sure fire hit. you would expect the sort of issues to come up, i assume, not less frequently. >> yeah. no, i don't think he's going to
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be sitting there deciding on all those thins. but maybe some things accident like. you know, who is it to say what didn't get on or didn't get on any network? they're so full of mystery and how people make decisions. and sometimes it's just luck, right? sometimes it becomes a hit. i don't know what to say. i don't know what to say beyond that. >> the article also raises which is what is possibly a much more significant issue, apple saying we don't want any shows that portray china in a bad light. what is a whole quat gory about serious content, documentary content, news related content. i mean, isn't that more of a concern? many, many years ago that happened with lots of media
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companies and lots of internet companies. and so it's just a question of how we look at apple and the power that these companies have over entertainment, whether it is netflix. netflix got into trouble if you recall pulling some stuff. they all do. they all -- every one of them does whether they're in a certain country. i'm totally blanking on the network. but it was an issue, i think in i india. so you're going to see this more and more by the owners, especially because nothing is hidden anymore. like these decisions before were made in the qui and the dark of night. the shows were gone and nobody said anything because of fear. now everyone is willing to speak up about them in some way. so they're the no going to make the decisions in the dark anymore, that's for sure. >> yeah. there was that. it's littered with them taking sides when it comes to certain markets. in china, for sure that,
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happened several times over the many, many decades. >> kara, your column is fascinating this morning on autonomous driving which it sounds like you really want to see work. you gave up your car a while ago. >> i did because this is amazon entering the picture. i have been following this for a while. i got a ride in a strange google clown car many years ago, 2014. we debuted it, we did the cold and then the conference. i've been very interested in the idea of fully autonomous cars, especially taxis and services. and so everybody is working on it. everybody thought it sort of members went up and then went down again. and everybody, chris moved on to create aurora. and then there is a bunch of auto ex, waymo from google. and so this is another one which i think is kind of different.
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it does look like a disney ride and it feels like a disney ride. i'm interested in the investment happening in the middle of the pandemic. aurora bought off uber as they had a long troubled history in its efforts. eep going back when i interviews the ceo. if you remember being there, he said the problem with his business is the person in the front seat. that was when he told the truth about, you know, these things. this idea of trying to get fully autonomous cars like taxis or things like that or private bus essentially. that is really interesting to me. uber is putting money into aurora and selling off the division or waymo really moving fast in this area too. also throughout china and gm with crews. there is a lot going on here. i thought i would write about the new market which is zukes. it won't be on the road -- none
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of this stuff will be on widespread roads for a long time. >> but one of the issues you do raise is whether or not the end game, at least in the medium term is moving people or stuff. >> it's interesting. we'll see with uber and in this case, the two people running it is really, they say it's going to be for a service that they're going to run. and not to sell cars. they could sell the devices to lots of places presumably and, you know, sort of white label them but they're not doing. that they want -- they're creating a car service or a taxi service. and they say that amazon is not displaying any interest in meddling with their goals and stuff. but i can't imagine this won't eventually be some sort of delivery. there is part -- this is a really -- this particular car is interesting. it pit together like legos, you know, pieces. and there are areas for storage, for sure. >> i want to go back to march
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2019 when you said owning a car will soon be as quaint as owning a horse. you mentioned you gave up your car. but since then, march 2020 and the pandemic, a lot of people are buying cars. >> yes, they are. well, no, i didn't expect the pandemic, jon. i still think it's a trend. because you didn't accept that. >> no, i don't. actually, you know what? i don't. i don't -- of course, i have to veil myself for delivery a lot more for heavy stuff. doing a lot more walking. i'm using electric bikes. i ride in uber a little bit. all kinds of ways to do it and i don't -- my son rides ash in his car. he can drive a car if he wants. but i don't -- i don't feel regretful, no. if i live in a city where it's easy, right? i haven't ridden public transportation that much. i just i goent anywhedon't go a pretty much. but when it comes to a pandemic, sure. yes. i don't wish i had a car also.
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here i am. i'm going to keep going. >> it's great. >> and hopefully the -- >> it's a great read. >> thank you. >> yeah. very nice. and, of course, your sway podcast is a much listen to this week as well. kara, thank you. we'll see you later. >> all right. thanks. >> still to come, apple fitness making the debut this morning. we're going to take a closer look at the new competitor to peloton. but first, brian sullivan is live from shreveport, louisiana, with a look at what is still ahead in the show. brian? >> yeah, jon, we're here waiting on the arrival of the vaccine to be distributed across rural hospitals in america. coming up on "squawk alley," we're going to talk about why this is really a delicate dance of both high technology, ultra cold, and ultra small and ultra important vials managed by human hands to get them out as fast as possible. we'll show you how it's all going to happen here. ♪
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fwh but this is an exact mock-up. this is 975 from morson dixon in shreveport, louisiana. this is a palette. it has to come off the pfizer truck. immediately you put it in one of these ultra cold freezers. negative 77 and negative 80 degrees celsius. incredibly important. these guys, by the way, $20,000 each. ultra cold and hot storage. this is where it gets really manual and why you need the expertise of 178-year-old company. comes out of the freezer like this. but a hospital may not need all 975 doses. to manually, they'll have a team that is going to put them into these smaller containers, put them into this cooler. by the way, it is not the normal backyard cooler. it's got a temperature gauge every ten seconds that is monitored and sent back to a
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control station because if in any part of this process the vaccine warms up or is out too long, you risk it. they have three minutes roughly to go from here into here into here. and then put it on their freezer truck to go to rural hospitals out across louisiana. it's hard to believe, guys, again this is not the vaccine but a two mill litre vile. there are five different doses in that. see how small that is? they have to wear gloves when they handle it. this is really both high-tech, "squawk alley" type stuff, right? the freezers from thermo and just the good work of men and women here that are going to go as fast as they can and they've been practicing to make sure that everything is exactly accurate to get it to the hospitals here in rural louisiana as fast as possible. >> yep. brian, fascinating stuff, especially in smaller towns. you're not going to have a huge volume of people. what are they going to do about efficiency and waste if they
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don't have as many medical professionals or older people to take the vaccine as they have doses? do they destroy it? do they give it to people who don't otherwise qualify? >> this is a hugely important issue, jon. 975. let's say that's why they're breaking them down into the smaller units. the hospitals -- let's say there are 300 people at the hospital that are front line health care workers or in need of a vaccine. they want to make sure that hospital gets 300 doses. what if they don't have the people and unwilling, don't show up? these hospitals also have a backup list. they can basically say, okay, mr. jones didn't show up. mrs. smith, you're up next. please be here because we want to use it. believe it or not, there will likely be situations across the united states as long as we have waited for this vaccine, guys, that there may not be enough people in some areas to take it and in some cases, it could end
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up literally in the garbage. hard to believe and everybody's doing their best to make sure that does not happen. that's why they're doing this kind of stuff to make sure all the planning is there and hospitals get exactly the doses they need not no less, not no more. it truly is perfect choreography between technology and human hands working quickly, guys. >> those backup lists a great detail the great reporting, brian sullivan. as we head to break, tough start for the week for airbnb and doordash, both down 9% today and around $20 from the price of the first trades last week. but don't cry for them. of course, both remain well above where they initially priced, above the range, by the way.
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have great products rye now and we've got some great power pc products still yet to come, as we look ahead, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don't know how to build it with the future. >> today is the day we are announcing that the mac is transitioning to our own apple. >> apple my be getting close to chip dominance, trying to reduce dependence on qualcomm. john, i remember those key notes and thofrts that didn't wos s t
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work? what's different now? >> apple is a $2 trillion glie yac -- goliath with the muscle to do this. to lead in chip design requires scale. nobody is making the fastest chips if they're only making a few of them. that's been the secret to intel's dominance for so long. they're the biggest and it takes this tremendous investment. apple can do that now. in the previous transitions, 15 years ago, 25 years ago, apple was a small player who required big muscle partners whose agendas just didn't align with the sort of product apple wanted to make. >> there's so many parallels here in things that apple has tried to do in the past. we're used to describing them as
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vertically integrated, software and hardware in general. they came out with apple store online and were able to -- aren't there huge profit benefits if they can pull it off. >> i think so. i don't think steve cook called it that. they were wanting to control the core technologies their products are most dependent on. and the chips are one of them. they never really had that under their control before. where they have over the iphone
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and ipad they did and where they didn't, like the mac, they didn't. i do think there's a tremendous profit up side to this because they can have the leading chips if they can make them and there's no skim off the top to pay to someone like intel or kwa qualcomm in the case of future 5g mode ems. >> that was the story last week. you're slightly right. thinking back to a media post that came along earlier in the month where someone wrote they're destroying them. are you surprised by the level of outperformance at this point? >> a little bit. i've been predicting -- my prediction would have been around 2018 so i was a little early on my prediction and i
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think they could have. i think that's why my prediction was wrong. i think they waited to a point where the difference was overwhelming and it makes it such a compelling upgrade. instead of being from one 55 mile-an-hour car to another 55 mile-an-hour card, you're getting in the fast lane now. if you guy one of these, you're getting battery life you cannot get on any other laptop. >> so what's the ecosystem of this going to be? if you're in the business of making pcs and operating systems, if you're in the business of making cpus and gpus, what are you going to have to do to succeed, microsoft, gool google have the potential to get close to what apple is doing here, microsoft doing that with surface, google doing it a
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little bit in phones, amazon a bit of a wild card. what do you think of that idea? >> well, i feel like it's intel and the companies like samsung and everybody else makes pcs who really are up against it and microsoft isn't that potent now with surface than google it. i feel like with google it's more archhobby. it's a state of where the windows platform should be today. they're just not there. it's a very similar formula where we really did expect with these portable machines, phones or laptops, you got fast ones that chew through batteries or
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you have long-lasting battery life that runs very slowly. with these m1 chips, apple is delivering world leading pms d performance and better battery life. >> very impressive. i am eager to see what the others will do. john gruber, thanks. >> that's a good hour. we'll see you later. back to "halftime" and the judge. >> the first person in the u.s. gets vaccinated against covid-19. what does it mean for how you should invest your money going forward? we debate and discuss with our investment team as we always do. let's go to the wall. before we begin our
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