Posted on 04/26/2015 1:50:56 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple can’t grow like this forever. No company can.
In a few short years, Apple has become the biggest company on the planet by market value — so big that it dwarfs every other one on the stock market. It dominates the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index as no other company has in 30 years.
Apple’s market capitalization — the value of all of the shares of its stock — is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones, laptops and other gadgets and services keep generating favorable publicity — and if its quarterly earnings report on Monday is as strong as the market expects it to be — there’s a reasonable chance that Apple’s value will keep swelling. Not far down the road, it might even reach the $1 trillion level that some hedge funds predict.
But even if Apple still has some room to run, there are some early warning signs. After all, the company has already crossed a significant threshold. In February, it grew to twice the size of the next biggest company in the S.&P. 500, a rare feat of financial dominance, and one that hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan was president.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You be sure to let us know how that Apple Watch is being used, when you get it.
This is a new way of interacting with the technology we have today. And Apple always breaks new ground on these things ... so it’s going to be a while before we fully understand the range of interactions we have with this new piece of technology. We’re going to be learning how to use it, while at the same time, the device itself will be evolving in subsequent generations of upgrades!
Congratulations on being in the beginning phase of a new way of doing things!
Yeah, the Rainbow - the proprietary PC for everyone. The model above that was geared for administrative stuff and the top model, the Pro, was actually advertised on TV. The ad as I remember showed a doctor and the flavor was something like “if you are as smart and wealthy as this doctor, you should have a DEC Pro PC.” Yup, the whole line deserved to bomb. The Pro model was such a bad seller that they were given to all the finance admins just to use Lotus 1-2-3.
My first PC was a DEC desktop model with Windows 3.1. It was a real PC and lasted until I got a Win98 machine. That was after DEC had completely crumbled.
Apple won’t last forever at the stratospheric highs on the stock market, but they can go a very long time being successful in the consumer market, apart from the stock market.
As long as Apple keeps with its “Think Different” company mentality in developing products and then also evolving existing products ... Apple will keep right on doing very well with the consumers. I will be long gone from this earth before Apple has any turnaround with the consumers out there ... :-) ...
What do you think of ETF’s like “QQQ” as opposed to individual stocks like AAPL that will, as you say, have their day and then fade away?
“Cultish” was somewhat true 20 years ago (I really didn’t believe it then). Now? Hardly — they just make great products that ordinary people use. There’s no way a $750B market cap is a cult. It sells,mainstream products and services.
You only get the impression of cultish if you read the occasional article written by a kook. Or are swayed by the insane rants and accusations that are tossed out by lunatics who insist on showing up on Apple threads.
“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that's not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don't know what they want until you show it to them.” - Steve Jobs
The Apple Watch is a first for technology and a blueprint for the future of technology. It will be the advent of human wearable computing which has the ability to always be with you, which will eventually lead to embedded technology in humans that opens the door to unlimited possibilities.
This will enable other technologies to progress, such as Nano Bots, direct nerve interfaces, artificial limbs, etc.
This gives Apple the ground floor for development of these technologies.
Apple has been a trail blazer for new applications for our technology of today. Apple is very good at it!
We, at Control Data Corp (CDC) in the late 1960s-mid70s, cockily called IBM the "Itty Bitty Machine Company". When the Computer Peripherals CPI) joint venture with NCR was formed in the early 1970s, we CDCers also mocked NCR as the retarded stepbrother. Little did we realize that the mainframe computer was the dinosaur in the market and the desktop was the wave of the future. Bye bye CDC and CPI in the mid 1980s while IBM and NCR are still chuggin' along. Craig Computer is still clinging the supercomputer niche, as far as I know.
Quite true!
The New York Times: They know “past one’s prime.”
Bill Gates kept Apple alive when it should have died in the 80s/90s. Why did Bill Gates to that? Because Apple was the only tech company that would be called a "competitor" and without the Apple "competitor" Windows would be broken up. So all you Apple lovers need to thank Bill Gates and Windows for keeping you on life support in late 80's early 90's.
Heh, good one.
Meanwhile, Apple can sell its base iPhone 6 at $249 and make money, and has 89 percent of mobile phone profits, leaving 11 percent for everyone else to split.
LOL
Of course a company’s fortunes will wane and wax if you are talking in terms of decades or longer. Hell if you look back at Apple shortly before the turn of the century, prospects looked pretty darn bleak. However, in the short term, I just don’t see Apple as being a stock to short. If they can keep their focus on design and integration, I don’t see why they can’t keep things rolling along for a while. Given their cash reserves, they can ride through a lot of stuff that would kill smaller companies.
This whole thing is in a way kind of like ‘climate change’. Anyone with a brain knows the climate changes. 60k years ago there were glaciers covering Canada and major parts of the U.S.. The real question is: what is causing it?
In the case of this article, I think it’s mostly just click bait.
As for Googles “don’t be evil” motto, define evil. I think the actions of Goggle’s founders have been more aligned with what most of us would call evil from the beginning.
I think you should reconsider that consideration. There are over 1.2 BILLION iOS devices sold, almost 100,000,000 OS X Macs. . . and close to selling seven million more each quarter. That's a pretty damn big "cult."
Thanks for the appreciation Gefn. I plan on continuing this challenge through the end of this Freepathon, so if the Freepathon is still going by then, have at it, but you are always welcome to donate at any time to FR.
No, he didn't. This canard is false. Apple was past the crises when Microsoft settled a lawsuit that Apple had brought against it for infringing Apple patents and copyrights of QuickTime. The judge in the case had told Microsoft they were going to lose big time. Microsoft was under heavy scrutiny from the Department of Justice for restraint of trade and monopolistic practices and did not want a public trial with the very anti-competitive practices.
Steve Jobs approached Microsoft with a proposal to end the issues because he wanted to clear the table for Apple as well as he took control. He proposed a settlement.
Microsoft PAID Apple to settle the lawsuit that could have run into the multiple BILLIONS of dollars had it gone to trial. Instead, Microsoft, to save face would buy $150 million for non-voting Apple five year restricted Preferred stock, re-issue and continue developing Microsoft Office for Mac for those five years, License from Apple the in-suit patents and copyrights for a further undisclosed royalties for five years only, and license to Apple for the life the life of the patents and copyrights at no cost many of Microsoft's intellectual properties of copyrights and patents.
In exchange for all that, Apple would issue a $5 piece of fancy paper (the stock certificate), grant the in-suit licenses, agree to package Microsoft Internet Explorer with every new Mac for five years along with Netscape Navigator, and drop the lawsuit with prejudice and in addition drop all other possible causes of action against Microsoft that Apple might have. Do you see the imbalance? That's because there is none. Microsoft got more than quid quo pro in the dropping of the lawsuit.
These agreements were outlined in three interlocking contracts that were filed with the court. . . and were unsealed around seven years later. All of them were contingent on the sale of the non-voting stock. A company that is bailing out another does not buy non-voting stock. . . they get voting stock and one or two seats on the Board of Directors. They especially do not get RESTRICTED stock which they cannot sell for a specified time. Forensic accountants have looked at both companies' books and have concluded that those "future royalties" came to as much as $2 billion over the five years of the agreement. . . and funded much of Apple's R&D for the iPod and future iPad and iPhone.
As I stated, at the time of the so-called "bailout", Apple had over $2 .4 Billon in cash and liquid assets, had gone though two profitable quarters, each greater than the previous, and including buying NeXT from Steve Jobs for a combination of cash and stock.
Ergo, Jpsb, there simply was no bailout, no "saving of Apple", no Bill Gates as a white knight. And Apple pulled itself out of its problems.
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