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What does "LOL" mean in this context?

I've googled it, but it's hard to find the appropriate meaning, since search results seem to focus on the "laughing out loud" sense... "Limit of Liability" was the closest meaning I could find on the Wikipedia disambiguation page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOL_(disambiguation) ), but it doesn't seem to fit in this context.

Best translation I can think of: "ha ha only serious"

He is using it as the word that the Laughing Out Loud initialism became, which has slightly different usage and meaning. (e.g. in the common phrase "I did it for the lulz.")

Oh ok. I'm not a native English speaker, and I thought from the context that it was an abbreviation related to business / investing which I didn't know about. Thanks!

I think it means Laugh out Loud in this context.

Yep. It didn't seem to fit the context upon first read, but I think you are right. Thanks!

BTW: If Tim Cook can show that Apple can succeed without Steve Jobs (e.g. by launching something amazing in the next couple months), the stock could easily double, because it has been discounted by the predicted effect of Jobs leaving.

Good thing Steve stepped down just before the fall line up! Genius move.

Yeah, when Apple ships something in September the press will say "I guess they can survive without Steve" even though those products have been ready to go for a while.

It could actually be that Steve's health has not changed radically but it's a move he needed to make sooner or later and he has huge confidence in the upcoming product cycle to cement Tim's new role.

I don't typically like to spread rumors, but I work as a bartender in Walnut Creek, CA and a guest that claimed to have close mutual friends with Steve said it was defintely because of his health. I obviously can't substantiate her claim, but she seemed extremely sad and elaborated quite a bit.

I definitely hope she is wrong and wish him the best.

@Steko: I saw a supposedly new, and saddening, photo of Steve Jobs in which he looks emaciated. Maybe it is the way he is dressed that makes him look so much worse than what we are used to.

I found the photo: http://ll-media.tmz.com/2011/08/26/0826-steve-jobs-02pcn-cre...

I am no knowledgeable stock analyst, I'm not in that industry at all and I believe you could just as well pick stocks by flipping a coin or letting a parrot pick. And I am in no position to give and stock advice at all and you should just skip this and definitely not listen to it.

That being said, personally for me I do not see AAPL going anywhere but UP in the long run for the simple reason that I take my colleagues and friends for my "guesses" rather than "technical" analysis or nervous traders dropping shares when Mr Jobs says "boo!!". Those peers and subjective impressions were good enough so far when all of a sudden everyone wanted an iPod back in the day before iPhones and sure enough suddenly Apple got all successful and continued to grow.

Now I see the same situation with the iPhone and iPad - I see people here who never heard of Apple some 5 or 10 years ago going crazy over those products and they cross-buy into the Minis and Airs and iMacs and all those other products.

I do understand very well that the stock market is completely unpredictable and very random and good sales numbers can mean nothing but... my bottom line is: all those non-techs and former PC+Windows users jumping on the "ohmygod apple is so awesome!" train for some time now and everybody loves Apple here and they have built an excellent company and generally have a very good and positive public image as an innovator and they do not stop to amaze people with little awesome details and continue to do so in their Apple stores and on top of that I am convinced that they single-handedly CREATED the iPhone-smartphone market and tablet/iPad market[1] and I don't see that changing any time soon. And now with the "Mr Jobs" uncertainty out of the way and his very DNA and spirit woven so closely with that company on ALL levels and him still being on the board, I am not worried the slightest bit and just regret I don't have more money to invest right now.

[1] I realize there were smartphones long time before the iphone and I know there were kinda tablet-thingies before but in my book, Apple created products that simply did not exist before and oh boy did they get it RIGHT and thereby they created two completely new markets and now the masses are buying into it like crazy - none of this existed before. Those are Apple markets and you can see how similar any competitors' products are to Apple's products, no matter how good or bad those "clones" might be. Apple created those markets and they have displayed an excellent and sell-able understanding of both.

I actually wonder if instead, Apple might be peaking.

I remember seeing, in academia, a lot of macbooks appearing around about when Mac OS X 10.1 first came out. This then later seems to have spread.

In a possibly similar way, I now see a lot of grumbling about macs, people going back to windows and linux, and android phones popping up everywhere. Not a guarantee of failure, but I think a lot of people are getting annoyed, particularly by the limitations of the iPad, which feels increasingly crippled the longer you use it (can't just quickly edit a LaTeX file, run LaTeX on it, and then submit it to svn).

This is just one tiny sample, at one university. It will be interesting to see if it spreads, or dies.

I think Apple's plan is to have a stream of new product categories. Already, the iPods make a shrinking contribution to revenue; the iPhone is being overtaken by android; but the iPad is still far, far ahead and growing. What will be next? And can they keep having a "next"? It's tough to keep on creating revolutions (but enormous fun if you can do it).

Going from macs to linux puzzles me, because the mac OS is unix (though not linux) underneath: you have the best of both worlds, usability + power.

The iPad is a simplified product (at present, anyway). Awkward for power users, but great for the huge mainstream who value simplicity over power. Apple is a consumer electronics company these days; a Sony. Geeks are a much smaller and less lucrative market.

While Mac OS X is unix underneath, Apple are not open-source friendly. They have not updated gcc in about 5 years, and even though they now provide clang, they still provide no C++0x support, unlike linux and windows.

The various package managers (brew, ports, fink) seem to often brake, and have packages broken for months.

iBooks? PowerBooks? There was nothing called a "MacBook" when 10.1 came out in 2001. The first Apple laptop with that name was released in 2006.

I'm not a stock advisor, or even a savvy investor. This is just parroting general stuff I've heard elsewhere. Don't take it as investment advice.

You could look at the P/E. It's certainly not the only thing you should look at (a company can boost profits by creative accounting, or by cutting research to make short term gains and boost the CEO's bonus, and there's other factors too), but if you want a back-of-the-envelope way to see whether the price is right, P/E is the obvious choice.

Apple and Microsoft: http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/pe_ratio#zoom=5&compCo...

Microsoft is cheap - under 10. People figure it will earn lots of dough, but gradually lose out. If you think Microsoft will reinvigorate itself, and start capturing large and profitable new markets, it may be underpriced.

Apple at ~15 is pricey, but not really high. People figure it will continue to grow (compared to Microsoft), but it's no longer a hot new thing with huge growth potential.

Then there's Dell, which is making money, but with a lower P/E people figure it's likely to be bled dry before Microsoft.

Of course, this is comparing three tech companies. The P/E of all these companies will be hit by broader market factors (which I don't understand). But by comparing similar stocks, you can ask which one the market seems to have been most wrong on. Will Apple go on strongly but not really grow much, while MS limps, and Dell fizzles?

> If Tim Cook manages to double the stock price, he'll have $700m. If it drops to $100, he'll have $100m. It's a big difference

Is it? I would imagine the lifestyle one could afford with $100M is identical to that with $700M.

You can't afford a decent jet, a yacht and houses on $100M. On $700M you can.

small jets start in the single digit millions. Decent jets (10+ people) are $50M easily, costing $1M+ a year. yachts can get extreme. Add in a few homes throughout the world and you've burnt through that $100M easily. Think of it as comparing a toyota to a bentley.

"Money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million."

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

he never had $700m though.

You can buy better toys but I very much doubt that the quality of life improves much. The difference between $100m and $700m is at any rate much, much smaller than the difference between $15m and $100m.

Maybe that’s why so much has to be payed. A million or so more doesn’t cut it.

I don't know about that. There's a lot of things I'd like to do that would be possible with $5b that wouldn't be possible with $500m. I could start a good ISP, or make a big stab at commercializing spaceflight, or attempt a viable and powerful mind-machine interface... Big Money buys Big Things, and if I were in Cook's position I'd care less about yachts and more about really damned cool things that I could do with that kind of cash.

$500m would be more than sufficient to do all of those things you've outlined. If you can put up 25% (random percent) of the money then you'd be able to get investors to put in the rest. Only a nut would invest the entire amount themselves.

But that aside, we're talking here about quality of life which does not equal being able to pay for the craziest most expensive ideas that you can come up with.

>Only a nut would invest the entire amount themselves.

Not everything I'd want to do would have an immediate commercial payoff, which would rule out investors. That, in turn, would rule out anyone else doing it, which is why having a wealthy backer is necessary.

>But that aside, we're talking here about quality of life which does not equal being able to pay for the craziest most expensive ideas that you can come up with.

If I'm retired, the ability to do those things would be a huge influence on quality of life for me.

> Not everything I'd want to do would have an immediate commercial payoff, which would rule out investors. That, in turn, would rule out anyone else doing it, which is why having a wealthy backer is necessary.

If something is a good idea, you can probably persuade some other people to contribute to it. If you can't persuade anyone, it's probably not a good idea. Even if $500M wouldn't get the job done, it'd be enough to fund a prototype or demonstrator that could attract more funding.