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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

> investors think more money will be in the future of AI instead of consumer hardware and software

No, first you are mistaking a bet on a single company for a bet on an industry. The obvious counterexamples being that there are no shortage of wannabe AI companies valued orders of magnitude lower than Apple, that doesn't mean wall street thinks devices beat ai as an industry gold mine.

Google is valued highly today because they print money today. They print money because of search and advertising. They are really good at this and that's why their market cap exceed's Apple's today.

These prices are not remotely rational. There's no serious investor that thinks Apple is going to shut the lights off inside 7 years which is what the current 'market cap' would tell you.

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... Google is valued highly today because they print money today. They print money because of search and advertising. They are really good at this and that's why their market cap exceed's Apple's today. ... That would be correct if they were value companies throwing off discounted cash flow but both Google and Apple are priced as growth companies. The market believes Apple has peaked in growth and that Google has a bit more potential. It's not clear why exactly from the earnings report of the holding company. Revenue for Google is 99% ad sales so it's not clear exactly where that bottom line revenue is going to come from. All revenue from the rest of the holding company was less then $500 million.

> That would be correct if they were value companies throwing off discounted cash flow but both Google and Apple are priced as growth companies.

AAPL's P/E ratio as I write this is 10.26. I would strongly make the argument that Apple is thus NOT priced as a growth company.

Which shows you how much the market knows. Apple's PE ratio was 11 back in 2009.

In fact the first years of the iPhone corresponded with a precipitous plunge in their PE ratio as their revenues rose rapidly, but their share price was dragged kicking and screaming along behind them.

Your numbers are off. I hesitated to respond because the actual numbers are still pretty immaterial (but technically material) overall, but it's more like ~$2b than $500m. That's significant, especially for GCP, which is growing quickly in an still very immature and very large market. Give it 2-3 years and GCP will have surpassed AWS.

wow

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