True enough. IBM and Microsoft currently trades at a P/E (price-to-earnings ratio) around 15, Google at 23, and Apple was at 11 when the market closed.

So at least according to the "a company is worth X years of future earnings" model, Apple is priced as a company that will grow even less than IBM and Microsoft over the next X years. Or perhaps it's priced to grow a bit more in the immediate future, but to start declining after that.

There are certainly other factors at play as well, but I don't know them well enough to enumerate them.

My main point was simply that when you think of "present company value" as the integral (the area under the graph) of the earnings graph far into the future, and add growth rates and fluctuating uncertainty, several non-intuitive aspects of company pricing start to make more sense. Even if it doesn't explain everything.