Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.
I’m not sure how you are calculating equity but they have $240B in plain cash. They have so much in IP, and extremely low interest loans.
Market cap does mean something, it’s literally the most meaningful value the world puts on a company
I wish this was true, but I think you’re severely overestimating Apple’s competitors... In the last 5 years, noone has even approached them, neither in hardware nor in software, even though the formula is painfully obvious (high quality hardware that keeps working/updating, and non-annoying easy-to-use software that’s friendly to powerusers).
A competitor could replace most of Apple's current products in 5 years, but where will Apple be in 5 years? They'll be five years ahead.
This always happens with big companies, Nokia, Ericsson, Yahoo, they are replaced by new companies.
5 years ahead for the big company means no progress.
Apple is where it was 5 years ago in terms of innovation. They havent done anything new that was meaningful and only reap the benefits of what jobs invented 15y ago.
It is, and not only just on HN. Because Apple has $220B in revenue, not $50.
A company's value is the free cash flow available to owners from now to kingdom come discounted back to the present.
In the book Ed Catmull wrote that Steve Jobs would say regularly "as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills."
Gives you some pause to realize how quickly Apple's business could be relegated to the trashbin with no new products to pick up the baton.