Apple is about to become the first $3T company | Hacker News Reader

Apple is about to become the first $3T company

cnn.com

32 pointspseudolus14 comments

I’ve seen some financial discussions about the large pile of cash that Apple is sitting on and what could be done with it. I would like to propose they publicly announce they will be putting a large effort into fixes and tweaks to all levels of their software, from iOS to especially the support documentation for developers.

On iOS, enough with this “it’s not a regression” leaving bugs that have existed for 3+ Major releases, while contracting featureitis.

Tim Cook has made it clear the future of Apple is services sales / subscription IAP, and they could really solidify their dominance by streamlining the ease of entry for developers, such as how convoluted App Store Connect is. I’ll give a perfect example: ASC on Safari doesn’t auto-fill 2FA code from iMessages, that works seemingly everywhere else.

> I’ve seen some financial discussions about the large pile of cash that Apple is sitting on and what could be done with it.

I believe if it is $200B we're talking about, you have small dreams. IMHO, Apple should first simply pay their damn taxes, and then promptly purchase North Dakota, a steal at $110B. [1]

[1] https://cool987fm.com/heres-how-much-it-would-cost-to-buy-ev...

Buying ND reminds me of that Netflix animated show: “We…want…Ohio”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveDeathAndRobots/comments/az8fyu/...

Fixing bugs is always good but can we at least acknowledge that iOS is one of the least buggy pieces of consumer software of its complexity?

I used to find most stocks including Apple to be overvalued a long long time ago. Even when Apple was worth 500 billion. Thank god I never shorted a stock in my life. Would have probably lost my shirt especially with Tesla. This is despite the fact that I knew that the Fed printing money would lead to an asset price inflation.

Adding 40% to the money supply and doing most of it via financials institutions is almost a guarantee of a rising stock market.

Apple seems overvalued. It took 42 years to reach a valuation of $1 trillion, and just over 2 years to reach $3 trillion. Que???

Overvalued based on what metrics?

Price/earnings ratio could be one, compared against its own history. However, the company is undergoing a structural change in how they generate earnings (hardware -> software -> services). And the brand is stronger than ever. And the products are stickier than ever. There are also adjacent markets for Apple to run it's iPhone playbook with very high probability of success (tvs, cars, etc). So perhaps a higher P/E is justified. And I give AR/VR a contribution of zero. I think Apple itself will grow into it's P/E quite well, but there are so many other stocks that don't justify their price. For that reason, I've sold out. It's the only position I had the last few years.

Yet Apple’s stock still has a total annual yield of 3.5%. 0.6% in dividends and 2.9% in share buybacks + voting rights. That’s still a better deal than FB, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Square/Block! Only a little better than Microsoft.

Warren Buffett probably influenced them to be a shareholder-friendly company.

The buybacks and the dividend yield is a big reason why Apple has a 3 Trillion Dollar market cap —- which none of the other tech companies have.

Apple's PE ratio is half of Netflix and Amazon's, despite them being in a clearly dominant position. I think tech is probably overvalued, but if the market's right about tech (and in the end that market is usually right), the only reason Apple isn't a $6T company is because investors simply don't have enough money to throw into them.

By dominant position I mean Walmart.com is 90% of what Amazon is, HBO Max is imho better than Netflix, Bing/DDG is as good as Google for most searches, etc etc. No company is within 1% of replacing Apple.

If you say Bing/DDG is as good as Google for most searches, you might as well say Samsung phones and laptops are as good as iPhones and MacBooks.

Funny you mention it.

I tried my best to understand iOS and stuff but in the end refunded the iPad Mini and went for a Samsung tablet. Overall a better experience for me. Wholly personal taste.

Google bought back 12.5 billion dollars worth of shares this past quarter [0] which puts them on a 50 billion a year track and it has only been going up. 50 billion on a 2 trillion market cap is about 2.5% which while not as high, they do keep increasing it.

[0]: https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/stock_buyback

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