Paul Stenhouse: Apple acquired Q.ai and beat Wall Street's revenue expectations, and Amazon let 16,000 people go

Apple makes a surprise acquisition   Apple isn't known for being an M&A machine, but has made a $2 billion deal (according to the FT) to purchase an AI company – surprise, surprise. Q.ai is a four-year-old startup in the speech detection space, which can understand whispered speech and improve speech detection in noisy environments. They also have a patent to read your lips and understand micro-expressions on your face. I'd expect to see this new tech deployed on the Vision Pro and the AirPods. Q.ai has 100 employees – that's $20m of value per employee.     Apple beat Wall Street’s expectations   They announced $143.8 billion in revenue for Q4, which was about 4% higher than expected. CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone 17 was seeing “unprecedented demand”. The stock didn't pop, with fears around memory prices surging, supply chain issues, and Apple's seeming lack of AI strategy.     Amazon let 16,000 people go  A staggering number, and it was done by email. Some woke at 3am to a text telling them to check their email. They say it's to remove layers of bureaucracy and “increase ownership”. Amazon has 1.57 million staff across its businesses, and this was in their corporate division of 350,000 personnel, meaning a cut of about 4.6%.    LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.