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Apple becomes the first $1T company

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#331

Post by harias »

chickenbane wrote: post #149
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.

I'm an Apple fan - congratulations to Apple - but on the other hand Apple being the biggest company in the world is pretty uninspiring. After seeing Tesla build a mass market electric car factory, or SpaceX launching a Roadster into space, a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank making phones and headphones feels like a wasted opportunity.

It is really hard for large companies to innovate. Especially with so little competition (I like to think that android and apple users are different demographics). It is the same case with Intel. Sometimes I'm mad at them as they are wasting valuable human time because of slower processors.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#332

Post by zeusk »

omikun wrote: post #132
zeusk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exploiting 3rd world labor and selling overpriced crap to the rich of the world. How old fashioned.

As opposed to employing 1st world labor and let 3rd world labor starve?

You think, that is the only other thing they could be doing?

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#333

Post by newscracker »

_pferreir_ wrote: post #246

Is this supposed to be good news? I see lots of excitement in this thread, but isn't having a single company worth so much money a sign that we are, as a society, failing to create an economy that is truly competitive and fair? We've already got banks that are too big to fail, soon we might have private companies that are humongous to the point of having the same status.

This is just some sort of milestone that's being published and discussed widely.

On the point of a single company being worth so much money, here's a different perspective. One of the many measures of how valuable a company's stock is, is the P/E ratio (price divided by earnings). It just says what multiple of the earnings a buyer of the stock is willing to pay. For Apple, this is now around 20. Take a look at another stock, say Amazon. As of now, it trades at a P/E multiple of 145 and has a market cap just shy of $1 trillion (where Apple is), at $895 billion. If Apple were treated the same as Amazon by the stock market, it would have a market cap of over $7.2 trillion today. If Amazon were treated the same as Apple, its market cap would have to be about $124 billion. Yet, this is where we are.

From the "too big to fail" angle, a simplistic analysis based on the above numbers alone would say that Amazon is a lot more leveraged and riskier than Apple is (the latter also has a huge cash pile of more than a couple of hundred billion dollars).

So the issue here is not that Apple has reached $1 trillion in valuation, because that's well deserved for a company that makes so much money. The issues exist everywhere in what companies do as larger contributions to society and how they're rewarded by the stock market.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#334

Post by hndamien »

dev_dull wrote: post #104

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.

Besides my family there are 5 possessions I get mildly depressed if I don't have. My iPhone, my Bragi dash, my Tesla, my house, my Bitcoin. Maybe 2/3 of these I can see being usurped by something better - I'll leave it to the reader to guess.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#335

Post by kamaal »

candiodari wrote: post #322
southerndrift wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Int…

Nobody gets to upper management in an established company, ESPECIALLY not in sales, by using their own judgement to override everyone else's. No matter how right they may be. If you want that sort of position, burying your own ideas deep and hide them in shame (use them to impress interns if you must) is the only way to go.

That's where Steve Jobs was really so better than everybody else. One should never be afraid to put what's behind, and start again on something new. This thing is often repeated in case of failures, but I've realized this is even more so true in terms of success. Success is harder to put behind and start over.

The big part of this is 'continuity'. If something works well, you are tempted to take the next obvious steps in the process. And you should. But after while its not hard to see that you are max'ing out the net utility you could extract out of it. At that point, one must stop, relook and not be afraid to start on something all over again.

Also this is so very true at an individual level as well. Never stop having a life. So many sports people retire between 35 - 40, then their whole life falls apart. This is also true with people have some early career success, I have seen endless examples of people reaching career peak by 30 - 35 and then everything falls apart, may be because they lucked out, but largely because they just can't start again. You have to start with a new purpose when you come to an end of an existing path.

Or time is expensive, and it shows your loss sooner or later.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#336

Post by kamaal »

komali2 wrote: post #273
southphillyman wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I never ate my favorite food during highschool (sushi) I'd probably have an extra 2k in the bank I could have spent on Apple. If I hadn't ever played WoW, I could have had 540 to spend on Amazon. I probably also wouldn't have been as fat growing up. If I had not paid for that dumbfuck YOLO trip to Singapore near the end of college, I'd have 2k to throw at Netflix. Or, actually, BP, this was right during the spill.…

Off-late HN has been getting a lot of posts of the types:

"X% Americans live paycheck to paycheck"

"Y% American have nothing saved up for retirement"

"Z% Americans don't have $SMALL_AMOUNT for an emergency"

etc etc.

Your post perfectly explains why.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#337

Post by kamaal »

scarface74 wrote: post #153
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.

I like Apple’s simple transaction model - I give them money and they give me stuff. My desires and thier incentives are mostly aligned. Everything Google does is about advertising and collecting data. Those two things don’t align with my desires.

>>Those two things don’t align with my desires.

They align with the needs and wants of billions of people.

Now Apple might be ahead. But its not hard for them to lose all of that. Apple as of now is not useful to the masses in most countries. Google is.

There is a reason why companies like Dell and Microsoft ruled so much in the 90s to the 2005. Once you exhaust Steve Jobs's established product lines, you are just selling expensive cosmetic shining gadgets offering little in extra value compared to Samsung or Dell. At that time is when Google like companies will outshine Apple.

Scary thing for Apple is the new Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems. Steve Jobs is no more, and its already showing.

In fact one big revolutionary product from Google could change everything for Apple. The raw utility of Google search still far exceeds that of iPhone. And that's just one product. Maps, YouTube, Android etc have very large utility to common masses compared to iPhone.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#338

Post by thirdsun »

com2kid wrote: post #106
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 overnigh…

When it comes to pricing I'd never rely on what people are saying. They may not like the price, but the only thing that counts is the actual, potentially reluctant vote with their wallet.

Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company

#339

Post by thirdsun »

jandrese wrote: post #141
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…

The original iPhone pricing was really baffling. Had it not been a really revolutionary device it would have flopped IMHO. You paid $600 for the phone, and then AT&T added the phone subsidy to your bill anyway (and never took it off), so it was just stupendously expensive. Apple lowered the price pretty soon after launch. It was worth it to have a browser on a phone that wasn't total dogshit.

I still remember the early iPhone days when german providers heavily subsidized the device. With a simple 30-50 EUR/month plan you paid about 50 € for the device upfront and that's it. Sure, you might argue that the price might be hidden in the monthly fees, but it would have been the same 30-50 plan regardless of if you opt for the iPhone or your run of the mill Motorola, Nokia or Samsung device. Basically the iPhones were sibsidized by all customers and you'd be a fool to select a cheap phone. Also note that these iPhones were unlocked and ready to be sold on eBay once it was time to upgrade.

These days you pay full price stretched over 24 months.

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