APPL $3T valuation isn’t far off – but no thanks to Vision Pro, argues Bloomberg
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
You see, as a student I had a bit of Apple stock bought sometime around 2001. The next year I sold those shares for a tidy 50% profit (so I thought!) and spent all the money on a brand new iPod. Only 500 euros for thousands of songs in your pocket and blazing FireWire upload speeds, amazing!
At roughly 600x appreciation accounting for stock splits, looks like those shares would be worth over $300k today.
And what would you value the music listening happiness of that timespan at?
Maybe it was a good investment! Music is pretty nice, and the iPod was great.
Same for everybody else. Don't worry about it.
Shit happens.
I'm using Ubuntu on an old HP laptop right now which is working fine for me, but maybe, far off into the future, I will buy one of those Macbooks. I just don't like Apple's software, but as an overall package they're good and I don't see any better options right now, I wish there were better options, like something with Apple's hardware, but with better software.
1 - The inevitable conclusion of Apple's walled garden is that once they fail to demonstrate organic revenue growth, they will begin converting their platform control into revenue, at the expense of users. In ways that make the App Store look quaint.
2 - I'm allergic to tech elitism, and I like messing with people who distilled their social litmus test down to the icon colors for non-standard SMS reimplementations.
3 - MacOS and power users are obviously so far off Apple's priority list at this point that relying on it as a work platform is a poor risk decision.
I've ordered a Sony phone. The appeal is 3.5mm jack and a bezel instead of a cutout - I've never used the front camera on my phone so it's obtuseness irritates me. The OnePlus had a pop-up, great solution.
However, if this one doesn't work out or the next time I need a new one the options are poor I think I'll be compelled to switch.
macOS is based on Unix; Linux is Unix-like [1]. Neither macOS nor OS X are based on Linux.
> It is a Unix-based operating system
> macOS makes use of the BSD codebase and the XNU kernel,[14] and its core set of components is based upon Apple's open source Darwin operating system.
MacOS and before it Mac OS X do not have “Linux” roots. The operating systems are based on Darwin which has roots in FreeBSD (which is emphatically not Linux).
You could say it has Unix roots or BSD roots, although they have diverged significantly. MacOS for example runs on a Mach micro kernel rather than the monolithic kernel you’d find in a Linux or BSD distribution.
As far as the user land goes MacOS does ship a full BSD shell environment and not a GNU/Linux one.
They have a Nike/Coke kind of grip on the market. But that kind of stuff can flip on a dime if Apple begins to be 'not cool'. They have survived releasing bad products(butterfly keyboards and bad antennas). They survived from being the cool thing young adults use and migrated over to the phone your mom uses.
I really can't see any obstacles for their domination of the Veblen good tech market. And that market is incredibly profitable, where Asus has significantly tighter margins.
I'll probably end up buying some total market ETF since even 100k in a good performing Apple is only ~7-15% per year, 7k-15k... but the risk is insane. Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
* Do you think the stock is currently undervalued? If yes, at what price would you consider it to be fairly valued? Overvalued?
* Can you afford to lose the money?
* Is there another investment opportunity that offers a better risk/reward ratio?
It doesn't matter if you are correct in your assessment of Apple's continued dominance of their market if most investors agree with you, because then that assessment is already baked into the price of the stock. The only way to beat market is to take a contrarian position and be right.
If your goal is not to beat the market, then you should probably not be picking individual stocks.
More like that lots of these insiders, shareholders, etc are preparing to sell their stock once it hits magic numbers such as "$3TN market cap" or "$200 a share" as it is constantly being reported on the news again.
The market is testing your psychology to jump in at those extreme prices with the retail folks just falling for it and losing money again.
> Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
Great move and not bad and one of the good opportunities to jump in after ignoring the mania. [0].
But then there was Meta that did 200% in 6 months when it was $88. Now the stock has recovered as others have noted. I and some others in [1] also ignored Meta's stock panic, bought in as low as $89 when nearly everyone was screaming about Meta going down to $0 and now people want to buy Meta stock at $290 today.
Oh dear.
Too much risk of them becoming "uncool", no longer the default choice, increasingly less frenetic phone upgrade cycles, etc. They have very strong competition on the hardware side as well IMO, especially with the rise of folding phones and the like offering something that you simply can't get with apple. Of course, they can always produce one, but..
I bought a single share of AAPL in 1/2008. Then another share in 10/2008. I slowly expanded my investment as it split. It's the second-highest performing stock or fund I've owned over that 15yr period ($TSLA is the highest).
$AAPL pays a dividend. Reinvest the dividends and go long.
“Old ones” being?
I used to own a 2015 15” MBP and currently have both a 2017 15” MBP and 16” M1 Max MBP and they feel equally quality to me, with the main difference being that the M1 model has more empty space in its case due to its increased thickness, which is a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make because it allows for cooling that doesn’t struggle.
In developing countries, it's a prerequisite to have iPhones if you want to be viewed as high class. Period. But iPhone penetration is very low in these countries. This means there's only one way to go for Apple in these countries; up.
Apple's brand is incredible around the world.
Their product lineup is so simple compared to competition, that it's often the easiest to recommend their products to tech illiterate population.
Almost all android and laptop manufacturers release so many products that the many choices making buying a product frustrating as if they are designed for the sale and not use.
iPhones are also really affordable when you factor in that you can sell them later for a decent value.
What is the point of buying at the all time high with stocks like this, when last year almost everyone was scared to buy in 2022 during the layoffs spree?
By the time it hits either $3TN market cap or $200 a share, Tim Cook probably would have sold some by then.
At this point, I don't even know how I'd switch back to Android even if I wanted to (and I don't). Once they've got their claws in, they've got you—and you're happy about it.
No wonder their growth and expansion continues.
I'm about to buy Macbook Airs as gifts for my family.
Heck, I might even buy a Vision Pro when it comes out.
Apple is so good at its ecosystem thing. Luckily, I own AAPL.
That doesn't make these ideas good, but mobile apps are frequently a bad idea and everyone still makes one.
In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone.
It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor.
I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
That being said, DirectX doesn't feel like the titan of the industry it once was. If you're shipping a multiplat title and intend to hit PC, PS5 and Xbox in one fell swoop, targeting Vulkan makes it a cinch. It wouldn't be as "native" as a DirectX-first title, but it does offer SPIR-V cross-compilation and a huge degree of control over how you present your program. It is not neccesarily easier to use, but I feel like I'm seeing it more now that game engines are supporting it. If Nintendo continues to develop their Vulkan drivers from what they were on the Switch, it's very likely that we will see a write-once-port-anywhere GPU API.
Oh, and there's Metal too. Sorry pal, nothing nice to say about you. Go home, tell dad to let Vulkan play with you in the GPU sandbox.
Another part of it is passive investing in indices and etfs cause money to flow disproportionality into the biggest stocks by market capitalization. This is a positive feedback cycle for the largest companies in the index.
These stocks may well go higher. But they are also at levels right now where you are unlikely to get a good return on them if you invest long term from here.
I would neither invest in them nor go short against them.
If you wish, it’s trivial to filter out the effect of buybacks. Look at market cap over time instead of price over time. Look at market cap divided by revenue over time, instead of market cap divided by share price over time.
Buybacks are not always the best use of capital, but with BRK as a key shareholder, you feel that it must make sense in their circumstance. The same money Apple invested in buybacks, its competitors have invested in dubious hiring sprees and unchecked R&D.
I wouldn’t add to my apple position, but I wouldn’t consider selling any time soon. The folks at BRK know better than me!
This then is amplified by passive investment. I think that’s what makes buybacks so effective.
I’m not saying anything about it making it harder to determine the intrinsic value of a stock, which I think is what you’re talking about.
Tim Cook became CEO when Apple had a $364.4 billion market cap. Soon that market cap will be 10x!
Greatest CEO of our generation.
Note that "Services" revenue includes App Store and AppleCare, among other various items (I think also Google's search deal with Safari).
It's very easy to score if you start running halfway between 3rd base and home plate.
The other thing is that "wearables" wouldn't be nearly as successful without the preexisting Apple ecosystem of iPhone and Mac. There's a reason Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhone, and it wasn't "courage", it was "cash". ;-)
I think Apple has suffered with its innovation since Steve died because there is no one left that great to say "no" to a product, or feature. Tim Cook might be a good businessman but he is not a product innovator, and that's Apple's biggest problem right now.
Cook didn't really find any major product-market fits, except for Airbuds, and even those I imagine were a longer term vision.