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Apple becomes the first $1T company

washingtonpost.com

201–210 of 352 posts

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#201

Market cap is number of shares times share price. Is this equivalent to total amount of money that went into AAPL? Did investors put in 1 trillion dollars?

I don't think so. All of the money put into to AAPL (via the public stock market) is all the stocks issued via public offerings * the price of the offering, no? After that they have just been traded without Apple seeing any of that money. Stocks given as compensation also contribute in some way, if we expand on "money" as to include forgone income by the employees.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#202

I went to grad school with a guy who, the day Apple stock hit $14 a share, decided to spend $500 of his grad student stipend to buy some. He figured Apple's cash on hand was worth more than $14 a share. I thought he was nuts. I was an idiot.

In the early 2000s I spent $1800 on a set of 18in chrome rims for an early 90s Accord, the wheels were almost half the value of the car. I use to do the calculations for if I had spent that money on AAPL instead of something so incredibly wasteful. It's easy to beat yourself up looking back in retrospect at dumb decisions.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#203
I dislike market cap as a measure of a company, as clearly a company can be wildly overvalued or undervalued. It is a not as if the "wisdom of crowds" has calculated the true value of a company.

During some of the pre-crash days early in the century, publications would trot out companies ranked by market cap, as if that really meant something. All I remember is various of these companies going under in the crash, despite their pre-crash valuation.

Revenue is a big deal. And profit too, although Amazon has shown you can keep that close to zero by reinvesting in growth, and that can work too.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was the first to lead with this egregious fee. They should be forced to unbundle the fee into optional components, e.g. five components of 6% each, minimum 2 components must be chosen (12%). That would subject each service fee component to competitive quality/demand forces within Apple, e.g. app search, trials/CRM workflow, app distribution. Developers and users can both exert choice on the subset of fees appli…

Apple was the first to lead with this egregious fee Before that carriers had much higher fees when you sold J2ME apps on feature phones through thier store.

What type of customers or market sectors bought those apps?

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#206
post #111
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... and it won't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard"

Come on, he had to say something in public. Behind the closed doors he gave hell to the Windows Mobile team just as soon as he got his hands on that iPhone.

True. But it was funny to see how the Apple haters ate this up.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#208
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 overnigh…

It was obvious to me right during Jobs’s demo that iPhone would completely destroy everything that came before and take all the profits. And price is much easier to lower than it is to raise, and Apple did lower it about 2 months after releasing.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their money. If they have a $1 trillion cash sitting on the sidelines doing nothing that is their right to do so. Apple doesn't make money to support governments.

> Apple doesn't make money to support governments. Sure, but governments do support Apple and its employees.

And Apple pays all of the taxes that they are legally required to, and so Apple is supporting the governments it interacts with.

Implying otherwise is dishonest and ridiculous.

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