Today's Above Avalon daily update includes the following stories:

Apple Car and the Last Mile
Revisiting an Apple Campus Shuttle Service
Thursday Q&A

We kick off today’s update with my thoughts on CNBC’s report that Apple’s initial Apple Car will be aimed at addressing the last mile in transportation. The discussion goes over the concept of last mile and why Apple won’t be focused on food or package delivery. The update then turns to a story from a few years ago about Apple thinking of launching a fleet of autonomous vans for its employees. We discuss the idea of how Apple can test Apple Cars before a public launch and why going forward with plans of a private fleet of autonomous vehicles for Apple employees isn’t a bad idea. The email concludes with a new installment of Thursday Q&A. I answer the following questions from Above Avalon members:

Given strong iPhone sales trends, do you think the iPhone refresh cycle is stabilizing? Is there any way to guestimate the trend?
As we anticipate the upcoming dividend increase (presumably in April), even keeping dividend expense the same, what kind of dividend increase can we expect, and then if we look at past growth (and even maybe factor in the difficulty they’re having clearing the balance sheet) what we might anticipate in terms of the dividend increase?
Do you think Apple might ever issue a special dividend (like Microsoft did quite some time ago)?

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