No Creds Notes #15
Behind Apple's eventful week and some exciting news on Cybercabs
Hey!
Welcome to this week’s No Creds Notes! Today, I’ll be talking a little more about big tech than normal, instead of the typical focus on little tech. Specifically, a big week from Apple and some exciting news on Tesla’s Cybercabs!
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An Apple (Product) a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
It’s been an exciting past month for Apple! After some initial concerns surrounding privacy/security with OpenClaw (fka ClawdBot), early consensus seems to be circling around the benefits of running a fleet of agents using a Mac Mini, leading to enough demand to cause shortages.
Adding on to that upswing, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, promised that this would be a “big week” for Apple and it didn’t disappoint. All in, they’ve announced 7 new products this week:
iPhone 17e, a new budget iPhone with an upgraded A19 chip, MagSafe, and improved 5G modem and storage.
A new iPad Air complete with their M4 chip.
An M5 MacBook Air
An M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro
An upgraded Studio Display
A Studio Display XDR with 120Hz refresh speed and mini LED
Lastly, a new budget MacBook called the MacBook Neo that runs on an A18 iPhone chip and retails for $599
While the new studio displays are cool I think the 2 major takeaways surround their push into more budget products and the stats on the M5 chips.
I just finished reading Apple in China (still need to update my reading tracker!) and, while the book focused a lot on manufacturing and the supply chain, another major takeaway I had was the extreme size and competition of selling to the Chinese market.
In my opinion, the launch of the budget products, while still being sold globally, is an explicit move to gain market share in China.
First, this marks the first time that Apple held a major launch event in China, gathering in Shanghai alongside simultaneous events in New York and London. Second, pricing the iPhone 17e where they did will qualify them for China’s 15% consumer electronics subsidy that was recently expanded to include smartphones.
Lastly, the MacBook Neo I think is less China-specific and more market conditions-related. There is a global memory chip shortage, driving up the costs of comparable devices, but Apple is circumventing that shortage by taking advantage of the scale of their iPhone supply chains to release a laptop that should outperform competitors and gain market share at the entry level price point.
Okay, now those M5 chips. The new chips deliver roughly 4x the AI performance of M$, powered by a new Fusion Architecture that bonds the CPU and GPU dies together on a single 3nm chip. The M5 Max tops out at 128GB of unified memory (which matters because unified memory eliminates the PCIe bottleneck that makes GPU-based inference setups so clunky. For the MacBook Pro, that’s already a meaningful upgrade, but the thing I’m even more interested in is what happens when this chip generation gets applied to the Mac Mini.
The Mac Mini M4 Pro has become the hardware of choice for running local AI agent fleets, with demand being strong enough to cause shortages like I mentioned earlier. Drop an M5 chip into there and you’re looking at an absolute step change in the complexity of models and number of agents that can be run concurrently, all at a (relatively) affordable price.
A lot has been made about Apple’s lack of product innovation in recent years, along with their lack of AI investment, but if they keep pace on chip development, they could end up pulling compute from hyperscalers to the edge.
2026 Gets a Little More CyberPunk
Tesla’s steering-wheel-less Cybercab has been in the works for long enough that you’d be forgiven for wondering if/when it would ever come out, especially after Robotaxi trials began in traditional Teslas. This week made it a little harder to doubt, with drone footage from Giga Factory Texas capturing over 25 Cybercab units rolling off production lines, along with a number of others already driving around the facility, without any steering wheels included for the first time ever.
Volume production is still scheduled to kick off in April, but Musk has been blunt about what to expect: “agonizingly slow” at first, before becoming “insanely fast.” The target is the fastest production rate in automotive history at 1 Cybercab every 10 seconds, with longer term goals to halve that down to 1 every 5 seconds.
The new car will debut Tesla’s Unboxing manufacturing process, which assembles major modules in parallel before combining them at the final stage. The result is ~50% fewer parts than a traditionally assembled vehicle, dropping the operating costs over the vehicle’s lifetime.
All in, this efficient production will lead to incredibly favorable unit economics. To put it in perspective, a typical Uber trip can cost ~$5/mile, owning and operating your own car costs ~$0.60/mile, Waymo operating costs are estimated to fall to ~$0.40/mile by 2030, while Cybercab operating costs are estimated to come in at just $0.20/mile on the same time horizon.
While safety still remains top of mind for most consumers, if Cybercab can push through that mental block, it seems poised to dominate the self-driving space.
No Creds Reading List
Wilson Harmond shared his thoughts on timeless principles in payments
Yoni Rechtman wrote on the durability of network effects, even in an AI era
Frank Flight, of Citadel, countered the Citrini piece with The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis
Stripe released its annual letter
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To get connected with me:
📧: matt [at] theuncredentialed [dot] com
LinkedIn: @matthewmjensen