Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Thursday August 22nd and I'm your host Kim Kahn. Our top story so far.

Apple is reputed to be working on a foldable Macbook computer, but some technical challenges

may have pushed back the release date, a widely watched analyst

analyst Ming-Chi-Quo said, due to technical challenges with the display and mechanical,

the Assembly mass production schedule has been pushed back from the first half of

2026 to the end of 2027 or 2028.

Quo added that the final display size for the photobled computer has been confirmed at 18.8 inches and that the company

cancelled a design with a larger screen size.

Back in May, Quo said the estimated shipments of the aforementioned two sizes of the

foldable Macbook could top 1 million units.

On the economic front, the last piece of labor market data that Fed Chief J. Powell gets

before its Friday Jackson Hole speech came in a little dovish. Weekly initial jobless claims

rose to 232,000, slightly less than expected. The report suggests the jump in

underlying claims that got underway in mid-April in June has been broadly sustained over the past

month or so, but that underlying claims have not crept any higher since then, according to

Pantheon macroeconomist Oliver Allen. The upward impact on Florida claims from Storm Debbie probably has a bit

further left to run, but many of the same indicators that pointed to a jump in

claims earlier this year have started to turn more recently, suggesting that underlying

initial claims will either plateau or fall back a bit over the next couple of months.

The claims, along with a smaller than expected drop in the July PMI composite, pushed expectations for a rate cut of 50 points in September down again.

The odds of a half point cut slipped below 30%.

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