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Apple becomes the first $1T company

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#281

Post by maym86 »

urda wrote: post #209
craftyguy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Large companies spend millions lobbying to keep it that way. It's not a accident that it's legal. They're not just innocently taking advantage of loopholes that just happen to be there. They help create them and keep then that way at the normal tax payers expense.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#282

Post by tensecondflash »

I like to think that between AAPL dividends and Apple hardware resale value (not even counting the value of the stock I’m holding on to) my spending on iPhones and MacBooks and Apple Watches has all been free.

Also, I sometimes I buy put options before a big product reveal in advance of the frequent stock price drop when all the analysts say “Is that what all the hype was about? That’ll never sell!”. Of course the stock prices pops back up again after Apple can’t keep up with demand.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#283

Post by __sr__ »

bepotts wrote: post #248
kodablah wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I love their approach as a consumer. Quite often anti-competitive actions are beneficial to customers at the expense of other companies.

I'm starting to see a lot of people charging Facebook/Apple/Google/Amazon with anti-competitive behavior, and yet most of the charges (including a lot of the ones the EU charges Google and Apple for) are just normal business behavior. Nobody cares about whether your smaller firm can compete against larger companies or not. As a consumer, I don't give a damn if Apple is "mean" to your business. Learn to compete better…

Exactly — this.

There is a major difference between what Microsoft was doing back in 90s and what Apple is doing today.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#284

Post by Isamu »

coryfklein wrote: post #258
Isamu wrote: post #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, des…

How much is my desk worth on the market? However much somebody is willing to pay for it. As the article states, Apple's "value" as a company comes from, in part, the fact that it's a good investment. Some may argue that "the fundamentals" of the balance sheets and whatnot doesn't justify a $1T valuation, but they would be missing the intangible parts of the business which cause it to be worth exactly that much.

I'm not saying Apple isn't worth a $1T market cap. I'm just saying you wouldn't use market cap to calculate if a company were a sound long-term investment. You'd look at the fundamentals, then make a determination of what you think the long-term value of the business is, then you could look at the current market cap and determine if it is under- or overvalued. Breathless reporting on the market cap of companies is sloppy, I think. The market cap kinda floats around, and worst case may be completely unrelated to the true long term value of a company.

Warren Buffet for some time said that he thought Apple was undervalued. I have no idea what he currently thinks, but it is probably still a reasonable value.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#285

Post by tehabe »

cakebrewery wrote: post #20
tehabe wrote: post #10

An honest question, why do people really care about the market capitalisation of a company?

Because investing has become integral in personal finance and market cap gives an estimate of a company's value, room to grow, etc.

But for investing the market cap is irrelevant, the stock price development is relevant, dividends are relevant, interests are relevant. There are a lot more indicators which are more relevant if you want to invest in a company or not than the market cap.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#287

Post by ryanmercer »

themihai wrote: post #199
ryanmercer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You can also credit Apple for the companies that will never see the light because Apple had the tax advantage(not to mention some of its abusive practices towards competition/little guy)

>You can also credit Apple for the companies that will never see the light because Apple had the tax advantage(not to mention some of its abusive practices towards competition/little guy)

You can also credit Apple for the countless iOS developers that have made anywhere from a living to a fortune, that have all paid taxes on their earnings, that have also created likely hundreds of thousands of jobs for everything from customer support to developers inside those iOS development companies, all of which have had income and thus paid taxes, directly as a result of Apple existing.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#288

Post by com2kid »

dalbasal wrote: post #275
com2kid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good lesson about market research. What they really learned is that people don't pay money for a phone. Asked if they would like to, they said "not really." Windows doubled down on the lower price range thing, which was disastrous for both the branding and the development of windows mobile. Everyone associated it with crap phones and they were stuck developing for last year's devices.

> Windows doubled down on the lower price range thing, which was disastrous for both the branding and the development of windows mobile.

This is very true. Internally the devices we had to use were very nice. The most responsive phones I've ever used were internal test devices.

That and my Motorola Q9H. Amazing device from a different era.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#290

Post by southerndrift »

npunt wrote: post #169
com2kid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While phones were routinely 'free' or $99, iPods were wildly popular in 2007 and routinely cost $300+, and one of the three legs the iPhone stood on was being an iPod. It should have been a red flag back then if market researchers and the people that hired them didn't see this as a convergence of music player + phone markets; it was the point of the keynote ! I remember people complaining then that they had to carry…

It seems like Bill Gates didn't want to believe. From an anecdote about Marc Porat and General Magic [1]:

>Eventually you won’t really need a PC, because all your work will be in a sort of cloud.”

>Suddenly there was an explosion from across the table. “MARC, THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!” It was Gates.

To go all in they would have had to kill the PC. In the same way, MS didn't embrace browsers and the Internet for a long time.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667776

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