In this podcast, Motley Fool contributors Travis Hoium, Lou Whiteman, and Rachel Warren discuss:
- Apple's new products.
- Does AI need new hardware?
- Are airline stocks in trouble?
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A full transcript is below.
This podcast was recorded on March 04, 2026.
Travis Hoium: Apple has new hardware and may have a hit on its hands. Motley Fool Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gem Seam. I'm Travis Hoium joined today by Rachel Warren and Lou Whiteman. Guys, Apple is in the news again. These announcements aren't quite as exciting as they were 15 years ago, but I did think that this new product announcements over the last couple of days we're meaningful because this is some new products that could be compelling, and we're in this new world of AI. Rachel, let's start with you. We have new MacBook Pros. We have new monitors. We have a new MacBook Neo, including Airs, I don't know if we need both of those things. What did you take away from all these new products announcement, do any of them move the needle for Apple?
Rachel Warren: I think it does. The MacBook Neo, I do think is actually a bit of a shift in Apple's strategy. The idea here is to directly challenge Windows PCs and Chromebooks in that more budget conscious consumer, as well as education sector. It's $599 for the MacBook Neo, 499 for education clients. It's Apple's most affordable laptop ever. It's about $400 less than the prior generation of MacBook Airs. It's the first Mac to run an iPhone class chip which is the A18 Pro, it delivers up to 16 hours of battery life. It's capable of on device AI tasks so that's pretty cool. The MacBook Air I think, still has a very clear place in the lineup. It's obviously a higher price than the Neo.
Travis Hoium: Nearly double the price even just for the lower end model.
Rachel Warren: It is. Well, and that's what's interesting. Apple has strategically differentiated the prices here to try to avoid total cannibalization. You also see that they actually increase the starting price of the new MacBook Air by $100 to 1,099. The MacBook Air recently was updated with the M5 chips, so you've got much higher CPU and GPU scores. I think this is an interesting move. The error is really the mainstream choice if you're a user that needs significant RAM longer battery life. But then the Neo, Apple's trying to target segments that they maybe had previously ceded to competitors like Alphabet and Microsoft. So I think you look, these entry tier devices, they're designed to capture millions of iPhone users who maybe have never owned a MAC, and maybe they're more budget conscious. I do think that there's something to be said for this.
Lou Whiteman: It's so on brand for them to announce a Chromebook killer that is 3x more expensive than a low end Chromebook.
Travis Hoium: Do you think that's really the market that they're going after? The Chromebook is such an underpowered product. My kids use it at school. When I saw the Neo, what was exciting for me was, this is the first Apple product that I could see. We could actually buy this for the kids, and it wouldn't completely break the bank.
Rachel Warren: That's the point.
Travis Hoium: Or giving them a 7-year-old PC, like we have that ultimately breaks. It fits a nice category for consumers. Maybe you're right that it doesn't fit in for school.
Lou Whiteman: Well, I don't think it does, period. Look, Chromebooks right now have 80% market share in the K-8 market. Really, I challenge you to go try and get most school systems to change anything about the way they do business, especially something that's going to be more expensive. If that was the goal, good luck with that. If it's not the goal, Travis, to your point, is there the risk of cannibalization? If you were trying to reach a new market with this, I think it makes sense. If you're trying to reach an existing market that, yes, maybe you will spur more sales. Maybe it isn't a one for one. Maybe Travis will buy his kid a new device where otherwise your family wouldn't have bought an Air so maybe it can expand sales that side. But if you were just adding a lower cost item to your lineup for your users, then it's not going to be a one for one sales game. Look, I think they intentionally stunted this machine. The eight gigs of RAM, I think, matter in terms of you're not really going to get the power users that way, even if they are just using web apps. I don't think this is a problem, but I do think, Travis, to your point, these used to be much more exciting. The stock is up less than 1% today. No longer is there visionary on stage in a black turtleneck announcing some brand new category. We used to talk about Apple cars. We used to talk about Apple TVs. Now, we're talking about Chromebook rivals. Again, Apple's a great business with Install Base, but I don't think anything says more about innovation at Apple 2026 than that.
Travis Hoium: We have not heard, at least yet about the Apple TV. I'm also looking for a MAC studio because that's what I would consider buying. Lou, I want to push you on one thing and I'm just looking at the financial numbers. I want to take this a little bit in a financial direction, not just vibes on their products, but a vast majority of Apple's sales from a segment standpoint goes to iPhones. That's really what you need to protect and then services are actually number two at $113 billion over the past year. If you're trying to build a mode around the business, that's it. The MAC, only $33 billion worth of revenue. If something like the Neo just expands that product, gets you using two Apple products, instead of one maybe you add that computer instead of buying a Chromebook or a different tablet for kids, for example, isn't that enough of a win, even if you're not necessarily setting the world on fire?
Lou Whiteman: What I don't know here, maybe. I think it can be a win. It's not setting the world on fire. But how much of those incremental sales are people that just otherwise wouldn't have bought something, or are they at the expense of the iPad or something like that? Yes, there's probably add on, but if you are basically selling a add on device to an existing user, that's again, nothing wrong with it. I don't mean to imply that they shouldn't do this because I don't think it's a strong enough to really cannibalize their sales and you're right, the iPhone is so important. But again, I think the market has this right putting the stock up less than 1% because I think it's just if any other company did this, if Samsung did this, we wouldn't be talking about it. It's Apple, so we're talking about it, but I do think we're again, everyone's living in the past wanting those one more thing days to come back, and there is no sign that they're coming back anytime soon. Maybe later in the year, we'll see something more incredible, but this is very much just mature company does mature company thing.
Travis Hoium: That's true. The other thing we don't have an answer to yet, but something to keep an eye on as an investor, they did not significantly raise prices on most of their products. There's little tiny price increases, but with RAM costs through the roof, is Apple insulated because they have long term contracts? Are they going to eat a little bit of that so margins are going to come down in 2026? We will see how that plays out. When we come back, we are going to talk about the future of AI and the potential that we don't need a new hardware paradigm. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.
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Travis Hoium: Welcome back to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gems team. The other topic that I think Apple's new products brings up is, what does the future of hardware look like in this AI paradigm? What typically happens, Rachel, is you get some new technology that comes along. It leads to new hardware. Everybody adopts that, and then 10 years or so later, that gets disrupted again. We've seen that with PCs. We've seen that with mobile phones. Is this time going to be different where, you know what, AI is proliferating, but we're just going to be using the same devices we were using before?
Rachel Warren: I think the truth is going to be somewhere in the middle. We're seeing a clash between a couple different trains of thought here and one is the idea of hardware revolution. The idea that AI is going to be so transformative that the screen in your pocket, our smartphones are actually holding it back. Someone that falls into this line of thought believes that we're heading toward this idea where AI is going to live in smart classes and wearables. It's going to replace a lot of the devices that we know, say, a company like Apple for. If this wins, obviously, Apple's dominance would become more of a mainframe problem. They would own the old world, not the new one. The other train of thought, and the one that I tend to more fall into is the theory of hardware refinement. That's what you're seeing Apple move toward with, say, the MacBook Neo, which we were just talking about. Apple's betting that AI it's not a new device. It's a super feature that's going to be layered on top of what you already own. You think about it this way. The Internet didn't replace the PC, but it made the PC essential and I think that Apple is betting that AI follows this path. I think that what we're seeing with these, yes, not the most exciting announcements we've seen in terms of products, but certainly key innovations that could be growth tail wins. I think what they're saying is the hardware doesn't need to change shape, but just needs to be affordable enough for everyone to access the AI layers that they are building in. One final thing I'll note Apple, specifically, they designed the chips. They can process AI locally on your device rather than in the cloud so for users, that means speed, that means privacy. That can be a massive selling point if AI becomes more personal. That's what I'm thinking about when I look at this space right now.
Travis Hoium: Lou, does that fly in the face with some of the moves that particularly Open AI's made. They bought Johnny Ives company for $6 billion or so. They seem to be very interested in making a piece of hardware but is this really just a software layer?
Lou Whiteman: I was going to say, Sam and Johnny disagree. I'm skeptical till I see it because I don't know what that's going to be, but they are very much whether or not Sam Altman has incentives to try to say that they have something amazing coming that's neither here nor there. We'll see what they deliver. AI is off device right now, so it is a layer. There's talk of moving more of it on device. I think all of the data center spending might speak to the realistic, both of these things really can't be true. I do think a lot of the processing will remain. It's how are we going to interact with it? That is I think a problem that's been solved. Maybe I'm just showing my age. I am very skeptical that what we want is for primary devices, smaller screens, less visual.
Travis Hoium: They started in this direction, didn't they? Even the first iPhone, it was Samsung and companies like that that were making huge screens, and Apple was like, we don't want to do that and suddenly they had to follow suit a few years later.
Lou Whiteman: But do you really think that that boils down to a screen that's just a little part of your glasses or something? I'm skeptical about that. I really am. There are some things that audio is good for. There's some things that visual are good for. I do think here that AI has the potential to help us evolve here. Better voice recognition and better just making that actually work. Maybe we don't need keyboard so there is incremental change. My guess here is the next five years or so in consumer tech are very similar to the last five years, refinements on existing designs, news complimentary devices, to supplement, but no huge radical disruption. If anything, I think there is a threat here. But really, what it is is that if AI is everything that they say, does AI become almost the entire device? Does AI become almost everything we interact with, and if so, does operating system matter as much? I think that is a real long term threat. I don't think right now, but I think that is the more interesting twist here than some new form factor that's going to spring up in the next year or two that puts the iPhone at risk. I think the bigger question is, does that walled garden fall if we use the operating system less?
Travis Hoium: The other question is, are we moving to a world of what you would call thin clients? Where like you said, the compute is in the Cloud, so you don't necessarily need a super powerful computer or mobile device in your hand. You just need something with a good Internet connection. Maybe the differentiation point becomes completely different. maybe that does eat away at the operating system. But then again, you have millions of people choosing that operating system, and they've been doing that for a very long time. When we come back, we are going to talk about the future of airline stocks now that oil prices are up, you're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money with the Hidden Gems team. Lou, your favorite airlines. Many of these stocks have been on fire over the past few years, at least relative to historical performance. They've optimized pricing. Valuations are relatively low, single digits, price earnings multiples, in some cases, but now we have skyrocketing oil prices. Oil is up about 15% in the past week as we're recording this conflict in the Middle East could turn us toward a recession. We talked about that yesterday and the potential impact the higher oil and gasoline prices can have on the US economy, which is already in a tenuous spot, especially for let's say, bottom 70 or 80% of consumers. What is the bear and bull case if you're looking at airline stocks and seeing these and salivating at these low multiples?
Lou Whiteman: First of all, it's worth noting that the actual business effect is very small. United is the largest airline to Middle East, but still it's less than 2% of their seat miles the way we do it for Delta and American, well less than 1%. There isn't really a business issue here. Oil is what we're watching. Now, it's good to know oil is a level playing field. Nobody is really overly hedged more than anyone else. If your oil cost goes up, if your fuel prices go up, you feel the pain everyone else does, that should lead to rational pricing. Figure it takes two or three months to pass along higher fares, so the biggest near term risk with oil is the quarter. Over time, they can adjust to this, but near term, it could ruin the quarter. For a long term investor, you shouldn't care about that. What I think you should care about, Travis, and the point you made is the bigger risk is what this does to the macro. It's not really the cost that these airlines are paying in fuel. It has to do with what the consumer is paying in fuel and other higher costs and whether or not that affects demand. Long term, the good news here is that all of this restructuring, it used to be that every time there was an oil shock, we'd lose two or three players. All of these companies, even the weakest ones, are more resilient now. We saw this in COVID. They got some help here, but even they can survive the oil shock. They can't necessarily thrive. I think if you want to buy airlines for the long term I'm not sure that's a good idea in general, but I don't think I would shy away from the best names in the business because of what's going on. I think I would, as they say, in the airlines, buckle up and brace for turbulence.
Travis Hoium: Rachel, when you look at this industry, how do you think about the costs and then the valuations because this is a very interesting different industry today than it was even 10 years ago, but very different than when I was a kid in the 80s.
Rachel Warren: It's evolved a lot. There's obviously cost pressures that can come from these changes we've been seeing. You have airlines like Delta that said in one of their recent annual filings that every $0.01 increase in fuel per gallon adds about $40 million in annual expenses. We know that the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has halted about 20% of global oil, liquefied natural gas supplies. There's this battleground between the record breaking travel demand, the sudden energy shock. On the bull side, it's fair to say that airlines have spent the last several years really transforming into leaner machines with massive pricing power. We've seen record travel, especially in those higher margin premium seats and so you do have companies that are coming into this crisis with cleaner balance sheets, tighter control over how many planes are in the air. The industry leaders like Delta are in a much stronger position to absorb some of these costs than they were a decade ago but the fuel squeeze is real. Obviously, if skyrocketing energy costs trigger a global recession, there's a real risk for the industry where their operating costs go up just as consumers are also cutting back on discretionary spending or business spending. I think when you're looking at the space, the operators that have remained the most efficient, I think if companies like Delta, like United are better positioned than say a business like American Airlines. But certainly, this is going to be a challenge in the near term for all of these players, no matter how financially agile.
Travis Hoium: One of the things I'll be watching here is, what does that demand look like? Because that's something we do here on a quarter to quarter basis. You can also look at this with pricing. We recently planned a trip with the family, and those prices got a little bit more attractive so maybe that means that that demand is coming down just a little bit for people who are traveling. We'll see how this plays out throughout the year. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows the Motley Fools editorial standards, and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our shows. For Rachel Warren, Lou Whiteman, and Dan Boyd behind the glass, I'm Travis Hoium. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow.
