Apple becomes the first $1T company • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#101

Post by ryanmercer » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:47 PM UTC

delinka wrote: post #60

ryanmercer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, you know, all the sales tax collected in their retail channels. And employment taxes on their 80,000 domestic employees. And property taxes. And real-estate fees. And government testing. And the obscene amounts of duties they pay importing every single thing they make. That's just for the U.S., in every other country they do business those apply as well (with exception of perhaps the import duties for busines…

That's tax they might generate , but most of that is not tax paid by Apple. Consumers pay sales tax and duties go right into the price of the products, employees pay income tax...

>That's tax they might generate,

It's tax that would not have been paid if Apple did not exist.

>and duties go right into the price of the products,

And if the government said "Apple must now pay 50% on every dollar they make" guess what would go right into the price of the products...

>employees pay income tax.

Business owners must pay the federal government 6.2% of every dollar their worker makes until that annual salary reaches $113,700.

Then 1.45% of all pay regardless of how high it goes for medicare.

And unemployment insurance in whatever state.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#102

Post by privacypoller » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

foobaw wrote: post #66

ben174 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I tell everyone when they kick themselves for not buying BTC when it was $0.25. You would have sold them the second they hit $1.00. The only people I know who got rich off BTC are those who found an old wallet on an old drive in their garage.

Definitely - getting rich off these things means you have to go against convention. People have to call you "crazy" or "wild."

Don't get your causation mixed up though. Most of those people are actually crazy, wild and broke.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#103

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #86

tschellenbach wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand. I think Google creates way more value for the world, they are just not as good as Apple at capturing that value. Android, Maps, Docs, Gmail, Navigation, Analytics are all (mostly) free.

They're not free. They just don't cost money . Arguably they're very expensive.

They're not free. They just don't cost money. Arguably they're very expensive.

This is a distinction most people don't grasp. I didn't, myself, until recently when a briefing from the legal department resulted in scouring the word "free" from eight web sites and replacing the word with "at no cost."

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#104

Post by dev_dull » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

I think about such a large number this is and I really am not surprised. Apple has created a product that I use all throughout the day. I won’t leave home without it and I’ll drive back if I forget it. It’s so addictive that I have to take active steps against using it too often around my wife or kids.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#105

Post by jarsin » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

jlv2 wrote: post #72

paulpauper wrote: post #43

Everyone talks about Apple as the best possible investment, but an investment in XEM or XRP (Nem or Ripple or Stellar Lumens) in early 2017 surpassed all of Apple in its 30 year history. My money is on Google, Facebook or Amazon eventually surpassing Apple though

> but an investment in XEM or XRP (Nem or Ripple or Stellar Lumens) None of those is an investment in something with inherent worth. Hence, I'd not call them an investment, but pure speculation.

And most of the trades are fake buy and sell records in some scam artist database. The whole thing is such a sham.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#106

Post by com2kid » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

mikekij wrote: post #25

"A $600 phone?! Who's going to buy a $600 phone?!" -Steve Balmer

I worked in Windows Mobile at the time.

He was just quoting what the best market researchers had told him. We were given a LOT of market research papers with in-depth customer surveys where lots of people said, repeatedly, that they would "never pay money for a phone". If you think back to then, phones were "free" with a 2 year contract.

The idea of getting someone who was used to free to switch over to $600 overnight was, by any reasonable accounts, not going to happen. The market researchers did the safe thing and said that the status quo would continue.

Of course they were horribly wrong, but again, in the moment, trusting literally every expert in the field is not the worst position to take.

After all that I learned to be wary of market researchers.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#107

Post by dijit » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #78

rayiner wrote: post #54

Good for it. Becoming a trillion dollar company selling quality products people love. Not data mining everything about your life and using it for advertising (Google), ruthlessly destroying competition (Microsoft), or destroying the environment (Exxon). How old fashioned.

We can still complain about their walled-garden approach to software distribution, particularly the extortionist 30% fee and handicapping of non-native apps. Or their kowtowing to the Chinese censors.

The 30% fee is not baseless.

Steam charges 30% to be on its store. Same with PlayStation and Microsoft Store.

Seems like it’s the standard distribution fee.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#108

Post by jakarta » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

pseudonym2 wrote: post #83

This will be very controversial, especially in HN, but market cap doesn't mean shit. Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.

Equity is not a measure of actual worth, it's a product of accounting conventions (which are increasingly incorrect)

A company's value is the free cash flow available to owners from now to kingdom come discounted back to the present.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#109

Post by tomp » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:50 PM UTC

pseudonym2 wrote: post #83

This will be very controversial, especially in HN, but market cap doesn't mean shit. Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.

> Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor.

I wish this was true, but I think you’re severely overestimating Apple’s competitors... In the last 5 years, noone has even approached them, neither in hardware nor in software, even though the formula is painfully obvious (high quality hardware that keeps working/updating, and non-annoying easy-to-use software that’s friendly to powerusers).

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#110

Post by notimetorelax » Thu, Aug 02, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #90

pliny wrote: post #56

>“Apple’s $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018,” said David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland. “That puts this company in perspective.” The comparison would be Apple net income (~$50B) vs. GDP, not market cap (which has units of USD) vs. GDP (which has units of USD per year).

Yeah, that was a real howler. I really hope he was somehow misquoted, because the comparison literally does the opposite of put something in perspective.

Well, I think it accomplishes that. You need USA to put aside 5% of what it can make in a year to buy Apple. That’s a ton of money!