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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what their cash on hand is? If they aren't going to start paying dividends again, it seems they must be saving up for something major. Any speculation as to what it might be would be just that, but I can't see them leaving that cash laying around.

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They'll buy Hollywood before launching their "TV experience".

Unlikely, that would skirt way too close to trusts and they don't see themselves as being in the business of content creation.

I suspect there are much cheaper ways to bring hollywood into their orbit.

about $97B

Holy crap. That's enough to buy a controlling share of AT&T, almost all of Verizon, Sony 5 times over, Viacom 3 times over... It's hard to imagine how they could spend that on facilities or R&D, and AAPL's not the kind of company to take a loss on something in order to corner the market like AMZN. I can't imagine what they would spend it on.

Actually, speaking of Amazon, Apple could buy them easily, and still have enough money left over for Netflix.

Thisw is, of course, idle speculation, but it does serve to highlight just how much they could throw their weight around, if they wanted to.

The problem is that both Google and Microsoft have a lot of cash on hand as well. I always saw their reserves as more of a assured mutual destruction than actually being liquid.

Anything that one really wants, the others can jack up the price to stupid levels (Nortel's patent).

I think it hurts all three companies...like spending money on nuclear missiles that you'll never use rather than something els.e

Each company has shown that they're willing to spend money to keep some companies away from the others. --Look at Microsoft's purchase of Skype (I'm still not sure why they really did that).

The one thing that Microsoft does differently is they pay dividends, which is a very clear way of providing value to stockholders. Google has never done this, and Apple hasn't done this since 1995.

Microsoft bought Skype because they had an excess of European profits and, instead of taking the US tax hit by bringing that money local, they spent it in Europe, by buying Skype.

If you want to think about how Apple could throw their weight around, consider the subtler options. Their moves with strategic suppliers might give a clue.

To give that number some scale, consider that in 1985, the annual budget of General Dynamics Electric Boat topped out at $400B.[1]

Maybe they're saving up for an actual assault on Big Brother.

[1] - http://www.gdeb.com/about/history/centennial/eb-100yrs-7.htm...

To be clear, ~$400B was the US defense budget, not that of General Dynamics.

Wow, thanks for the correction. Skimming FTL.

(I formerly worked for GDIT, so this also looked wonky to me)

General Dynamics did a little under $32.5 billion in revenue last year, with $2.6 billion in profit. See: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/full_...

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