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Apple's Market Cap Exceeds Google's
Lawrence Person writes "Mac Daily News was one of many Apple-followers to note that Apple Inc.'s market capitalization exceeded Google today. That means that the combined value of all Apple's outstanding shares of stock exceeded the combined value of all Google's outstanding shares of stock. Apple's stock is worth $157 billion and change vs. Google's $156 billion. Other companies Apple has surpassed in market cap include Cisco, HP, and Intel. Also, Apple is now worth 3 times the value of Dell Computer, despite Dell's founder and CEO declaring over a decade ago that if he ran Apple, he'd 'shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.'"
Look at the price of iPod's, iPhone's, Mac Books, and their other products. They are selling them at an incredible profit. Not hard to see why apple is worth so much. As much as I hate apple I have to give them credit.
Not really a shock.
One company's based on ubiquity and mindshare. The other's the same though less so, but actually retails physical items.
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
... it's amazing that a company like Google, that has been on the stock market for only a few years, can have a market capitalization about equal to that of a technology powerhouse like Apple.
On the other hand, is there anyone in their right mind who thinks that Google will be as valuable after 30 years as Apple has proven to be?
I know this is redundant, but seriously... don't! The summary's got more digestible information than the article on macdailynews.com does!
Not only do they have an insane market cap, they also have tons of cash. The former means that it would be completely stupid to buy back shares with the latter.
So what are they going to do with that cash? Expanding the product line significantly would mean diluting the brand. Even buying / Starting a low end brand would have the same effect.
Well, when you factor in a rapidly growing computer market (for Apple) with lots of growth potential left, a rapidly growing music market with lots of growth potential, a rapidly growing smartphone market, a rapidly growing mobile applications market...
And so on.
The thing of it is, Apple can still miss in a few categories and still have tremendous room for growth. They have many legs of stability holding up their table of success (I daresay that's the most awful metaphor you'll encounter this week).
The market rewards innovation, mindshare, and success. Apple has all three...
If after that you are still mystified - buy mutual funds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, if you bought Apple stock when it was first available and sold it all in the early 80's you would have been incredibly rich. Then, if you would have bought it all back in the 90's and sold it again today you would have replenished what you would have spent in the mean time.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
And since Apples cost only twice as much as Dells, this means Apples are cheap!
More seriously: as an Apple shareholder I would like to have some dividend. Pretty pretty please?
Apple is also larger than oracle, sap, and cisco, and nearly as large as IBM. The only tech company larger than Apple by any significant margin is Microsoft; but even then, Apple is more than 60% as large as Microsoft and is growing considerably faster.
A little over ten years ago, liquidating Apple would have made sense, whatever else I might think about the company and the products, Jobs is a fucking miracle worker, and we need more business leaders with his ability (if maybe not ethics).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I remember the ups and the downs. Apple's stagnation during the Scully-Spindler-Amelio years. The failure of Copland and the dark age during which AAPL traded at $12/share and Sun take-over rumors ran rampant. Michael Dell's ass-hat punditry.
Then we saw the awesome Second Golden Age, a.k.a. the Return of Jobs - something we never thought could come to pass. We got the G3 (a terrific processor for its time) and the iMac. Of course it wasn't all rosy, we also had the The G4 MHz stall and the MHz Myth. But since Jobs' return there have been few misses and many outstanding hits. The greatness of OS X returned the Mac to its original place of software technological leadership. The iPod was a game changer, and even those of us who were among the hard-core Apple faithful never predicted what game changer it would prove to be in short order. And yes, the Intel defection proved to be (despite my anger toward it) a galvanizing force behind Mac platform growth. Now we have the iPhone (and iTouch) platform making history in its own right.
Apple has successfully captured so much market share in the last few years, people who will not likely return to the non-Apple world. Yes, the company is probably moderately overvalued right now, but with such growth and market saturation, a high valuation is sensible as long as the broader market can sustain recent rallies. Look at the iPhone sales estimates and then think about Apple's valuation. Google is a great company - unquestionably so - but it's an Internet property that can be replaced by a simple click of an address bar if a superior solution becomes available. (I'm not trivializing Google's place in the market but rather pointing to the fact that Internet leadership can change in quick order with disruptive technologies.) Not so with Apple, which isn't just a creative hardware vendor nor just a leading software producer, nor just a cultural business icon, but all that and more put together.
The only real question is, going forward, how long will Steve Jobs continue to lead the company. For he has always been the driving visionary force behind Apple's success, and without him Apple's value would take a substantial hit. I wouldn't want to be an AAPL share holder on the day he announces his retirement. Until then though, one can make a lot of money by buying Apple toward the bottom of market lows and holding on for almost inevitable new highs.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
market cap isn't a "real" measure. it's merely the share price x outstanding shares, it's not real money, just speculation. apple's value is probably more robust than googles though.... 156 billion for a web business? did we learn nothing from the dot com bubble????!!!!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's ridiculous to report what Dell said OVER A DECADE AGO about Apple. Leave your bias in a reply instead.
Which what the parent was getting at...
You cannot directly compare a set of per-year values with one absolute, total value.
Well, when you factor in a rapidly growing computer market (for Apple) with lots of growth potential left, a rapidly growing music market with lots of growth potential, a rapidly growing smartphone market, a rapidly growing mobile applications market...
And so on.
The thing of it is, Apple can still miss in a few categories and still have tremendous room for growth. They have many legs of stability holding up their table of success (I daresay that's the most awful metaphor you'll encounter this week).
The market rewards innovation, mindshare, and success. Apple has all three...
If after that you are still mystified - buy mutual funds.
Everything the parent said is true. The amount of growth, on the other hand, is anyone one's guess and if they miss a "target" their stock price may get tanked. And I'd like to add, innovation isn't necessarily rewarded. SONY was one of the most innovative companies that has existed. But whenever they came out with a product, a competitor(s) came out with a cheaper one eroding Sony's margins to the point where they couldn't recoup much of their R&D for their products. Now they've pretty much become an also ran themselves. Apple seams to be doing well with their hit hard and fast strategy (create a new product, charge up the ass for it, and then when competitors come out with their own, lower the price but still keep the Apple premium for the brand loyalists.)
Basically, Apple is no longer a personal computer company: they're an electronic entertainment and fashion accessory company - much more profitable this way and shows the marketing genius of Jobs & Co.
Well, they could buy Sony I suppose and mop up the consumer electronics market...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Is that a new feature? I hope it's not in beta...
The problem is there's a few things at work there:
1. Apple seems to have accumulated a cult-like following of people who self-identify with the corporation. It's weird.
2. Apple only competes in high-margin markets, where they often are price-competitive.
3. Apple doesn't disclose internal costs like R&D.
The stock market is a mechanism by which monetary inflation is captured and transferred to the wealthy.
HTH
Deleted
I guess I sold my shares too soon.
(I bought some when they introduced the first iPod nano. Good investment.)
How about this....
What business is Harley Davidson in? Not Motorcycles. They're in the image and fantasy business. Middle aged professionals buy them and pretend to be careless free spirit rebels on the weekends and then on Monday, they're back to being the Sam the accountant or lawyer or engineer. I saw quite a few "bikers" with their Harley Davidson logo'd leather attire (huge business for Harley!) and Rolex watches. Real motorcycle enthusiasts, from what I'm told, prefer BMW or something Japanese: Harleys are junk.
What business is McDonald's in? Business process. When someone buys a franchise from McDs, they're buying a way to do business and a name for the burger joint that they open.
Estee Lauder was famous for saying that she was in the business of hope not cosmetics. She sold women the hope that they can look young and beautiful like her models.
My point is that if Apple were a computer company, they'd be making the crappy margins that Dell and the other PC makers are making.
The stock market is a mechanism by which monetary inflation is captured and transferred to the wealthy.
It's a shame I've already posted in this discussion, or I'd mod you Insightful.
Hah! You Suck!! The imaginary value that _our_ stockholders, working with incomplete information, has placed on _our_ company is higher than the imaginary value that _your_ stockholders, working with incomplete information, has placed on _your_ company! Losers!!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Market cap is the current share price multiplied by the number of shares in circulation. Now imagine that simultaneously everybody actually decides to sell their shares. What will happen to the price? It will collapse because everybody will assume the shares are junk.
In other words, market cap is only a valuation of a company provided you don't try to realise it by selling a significant number of shares. It is a typical smoke and mirrors number used by crooked gamblers - I'm sorry, I mean investment companies - to try and get suckers - I mean investors - to buy overpriced shares.
The same applies to land. At one time the apparent market valuation of Greater Tokyo was more than the entire United States - because supply was totally inelastic, and yet people thought they must have a presence in Tokyo. As a result, land changed hands for insane prices. The moment the recession hit, prices collapsed.
Warren Buffet has become one of the richest men in the world through not paying attention to mumbo jumbo like market cap, but focussing on the actual core value of companies and their likely income.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
... Which one would you miss the most? Apple hardware would still work for a long time without someone to support it, but I (and I guess a tens of millions of others) would REALLY MISS Google search, mail, blogs, translate, maps, etc, etc, etc (sure it can be replaced - but TODAY I would miss Google and give a hoot about Apple. Service > Hardware. Apple's value is overrated.
Lars F.
Economists can't be nerds? Nothing nerdier than a maths geek. (*ducks*).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
yeah, the beta version has a known bug... it bytes.
*ducks*
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft is currently the biggest IT company there is & most people believe that they got their unfairly for the following reasons:
1. They lock in the customer to proprietary applications and file formats.
2. They are a big supporter of DRM.
3. They do not fix bugs in their software quickly enough.
4. Their products are overpriced.
But Apple is doing all of the above also. So why are they any different?
And, to be honest, why should I care how big a company is when I've never for one moment given even the slightest consideration to buying one of their products?
Credit where credit is due - I use Google stuff daily & Microsoft were big and bad enough to force me into a situation where I have to use some of their products...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1600894&start=375&tstart=50
We're all trying to get the word out where ever we can. Apple has been silent and unhelpful with reguard to this issue. Many iphones have been locking up since the 2.0 software update. When the iPhone locks up, it must be unlocked by docking it with your pc that contains itunes. This means no 911, no phone calls until you get back home to fix it. You lose all of your data in the proess.
This has happened continuously. Well over 16 times for myself and many others. It is now becoming a daily practice to take an hour to restore the iphone from its "bricked" state.
Please help get this word out. Apple is getting away with murder.
I hate Apple because:
Every product I have owned, or belonged someone close to me, have failed within two years.
Apple does not respect or honour Norwegian consumer laws. You are required to provide 2 or 5 years of warranty at no additional cost beyong the initial investment in the product, but Apple insists on 90 days.
Apple is all about silos and locking in the user. Look at the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone for the best examples. It's a good business strategy for the mass market, but I prefer other vendors.
Hypes. Accompanied with fanboys.
When did you last time Apple something? Or iPoded/iTuned as song? Or iPhoned someone?
Yet.. we Google all the time.
I don't recall anyone Yahooing something even when that marketing campaign was at full speed.
Google has outgrown the "household name" and has become a verb a few years back.
Considering that the company didn't exist 10 years ago - THAT is something.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Buy a Nokia.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Has someone mentioned that yet?
If the value of the stock exceeds the value of the company by too much, it can cause problems for the company, stockholders and the rest of the market. i'm not claiming to know what Apple is worth. Just don't want to see people take a bath if Apple tanks.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I have pretty much spent my professional career using Window$ and when I needed to do development, I used Linux. I pretty much just disregarded Mac as cultish until I took over as the IT Director of a sports publishing company that was all MAC. I drank the Kool-Aid and shaved my head because MAC was doing what the Linux people were hoping that Linux would do: provide an alternative to Windows that actually worked.
For as much as I love the idea of Linux on the desktop, it won't work because even today it's just too difficult to make it work out of the box and that's what needed. Mac actually does it. It IS a superior experience.
That being said......
Apple is a publicly traded company and as such here's what's important to them.....
Making money for their stockholders.
That means sweatshops for iPods and doing things like heading down the dangerous path of closing off the Darwin source for development so that OSS geeks can't find a way to make OS X work on commodity boxes.
Apple is going to do what is best in their corporate interest. Surprised? Don't be. It's business
The real question in all of this is how is Apple going to be after Steve Jobs leaves (whether voluntarily... hahahahahahaha or via cancer). No CEO is more tied to his company than Jobs, except maybe Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett.
Am I the only to note that this happened in Jan 2006? The Wikipedia article linked in the summary says so. No one else has commented on it. What gives? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dell - The last line in this article says this happened in 2006. Ashraya
I hate discussions about share value that ignore the fact that the share value is set by people somewhat arbitrarily. It has no direct link to the value of the company or its products/services.
I understand the interest in the numbers. It does surprise me that Apple is worth so much, but given the loopy attitude people have towards Apple products that seems independent of their actual product, it makes some sense.
Personally, I see stocks like baseball cards, minus the pictures and the sometimes interesting statistics.
Of course baseball cards are much more difficult to move, but in essense they are the same thing. They sell at market value. The market value is simply set by what someone is willing to pay for it, ot what it is worth to someone in terms of concrete savings or value. Building a business case on the purchase of baseball cards or stock is completely speculative. It is not like you can say, you will make money for sure.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
My question is this - besides a measure of how much their shares are worth, what does that mean? Not trying to be a smartass. Quite the contrary, in fact - I'm a dumbass when it comes to economics and the like so I literally don't know what this sort of thing means, in practical terms.
Also, Apple is now worth 3 times the value of Dell Computer, despite Dell's founder and CEO declaring over a decade ago that if he ran Apple, he'd 'shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Clearly Mr.Dell is not the best man at predicting the fortune of tech companies. Best example of this - Dell itself.
If I ran Dell, I would shut it down right now and give the money back to the shareholders, so that they can buy more Apple shares with it.
That is, if there is any money to give back...
If you don't succeed at first, try again. If you still don't succeed, try harder. If nothing works, try reality shows.
I put on my robe and my market cap.
sic
... Apple stock price bears no relationship what-so-ever to the present or future value of the company.
News at eleven.
He's never going to live that one down.
Such as people who claim that Apple has raised any sort of bar in technology. When has Apple ever innovated anything, or raised any bar? Apple is good at two things: dressing up other people's technology so it looks like Apple made it, and selling other people's technology once it looks like Apple made it.
As for raising the bar, which bar did they raise? Aside from prices, nothing was really raised at all. Their hardware is equivalent to what I am using, and their software can only compete on looks -- for those of us trying to get real work done, Mac OS X is just another expensive proprietary Unix. Yes, proprietary, take a look at the license agreement before you take a look at whatever source code Apple has released. What real value is there in OS X that isn't in...RHEL? *BSD? Minix? I can think of something that RHEL has which OS X does not: an EAL 4 certification (to be fair, OS X 10.3.6 did receive an EAL 3 certification, but there are legitimate and meaningful differences).
Palm trees and 8
Every dollar Apple makes, whether its revenue or profit, is a dollar that doesn't go to Microsoft.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Are you a racist who thinks only Americans live on this planet? I ask since you seem to understand my post very good in fact, automagically defending Apple against one Anti Apple foreigner (!) who paid $160 for family license I bet you have never thought of paying.
Now the reply to your post:
"If you had bothered to search Google, you would have easily found a Safari extension named Inquisitor X, which adds more functionality to Safari's search ability and lets you change the engine. No binary hacks required."
It is a code injection hack, if OS X had a real antivirus instead of snake oil sellers, it would jump up and down. Wonder why it is injected or input manager needed? Because there is NO mechanism to actually change that "ein" search engine "für alles".
"No, it makes perfect sense. Apple is all about presenting users with the single, best option rather than giving them multiple choices, and Google is the best option for 99% of users."
If we think that way, Windows is the best option for 92% of American market and 98% of real World market. So perhaps Apple should give up shipping OS X and become a Windows reseller.
""It is also unsafe since some black hat guy may popup and say "I coded search engine chooser", you know the result when users got used to hack system binaries.""
"What does this sentence even mean?"
It has only 1 "green underlining" so it is grammatically correct but somehow, sort of weird sentence which is designed to make the point but not to give ideas to some script kiddie idiots. As far as I can tell, it worked. ;)
I guess I wasn't the only one that couldn't wait for android to come out.
What is really shocking about this is many stock analysts view Apple's stock as significantly undervalued.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/88230-replacing-p-e-in-valuing-apple-stock
Of course if Steve Jobs were run over by a truck tomorrow it would dive hard.
This whole Mac VS PC thing is stupid and childish. I don't buy Apple products because I am cheap, and I would rather spend my time making things work the way I want them to than letting some 'Genius' make them work for me.
Peroid. End of story.
They have contributed much to the open source community.
Apple is using a lot of open source code, and they have released some open source code themselves. But what have they actually contributed to the open source community? I can't think of any significant piece of Apple software that runs on any Linux distribution.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
With what? Quartz, HFS+, Cocoa, Darwin, and XCode do not "raise the bar" on anything. Apple fans like to point to USB, OS X, Bonjour, Quicktime, and similar technologies, but Apple's contributions there were either to adopt an existing standard that was coming anyway, or to take an existing technology, tinker a little with it, and release it under their own name.
They give developers a great platform for either open source development or Mac development without charging for developer tools.
Any code you develop using Apple's native APIs for OS X will only be useful for OS X. That makes it a nice platform for Apple to tie developers to their proprietary platform, but it doesn't make it a nice platform for open source.
They have created an exceptional market for independent developers to make REAL money writing for the iPhone.
You're right: independent developers can charge ridiculous prices for their apps on iPhone. Whether that's going to be a long term viable market remains to be seen.
I guess Apple is bad because they make money.
No, Apple is bad because they keep doing things that are bad for consumers and they keep lying.
For example, with the iPhone, they have created a platform that is far more restrictive than any carrier phone ever was; kudos to their PR department, who managed to misrepresent the iPhone as some kind of rescue from carrier restrictions.
They pulled a similar stunt with DRM: just as DRM was dying naturally, Apple and iTunes firmly established it in the market place.
Apple is outsourcing like crazy overseas; if all US computer companies were run like Apple, there wouldn't be any jobs to speak of.
Apple has a long history of doing sleazy and deplorable things; that's why anybody with half a brain should "hate" them.
Of course, what Apple calls "research and development" is largely development; the company does no research to speak of, instead preferring to cull the best ideas from the market place.
Yes, Apple copied the Rio but dropped the 32 MB of memory and put in a hard disk, omitted the clunky buttons, left out the slow transfer speeds, increased the display side by probably 10x... hell put a Rio and an iPod side by side and I bet you can't tell the difference.
Trolling is a art,
If you had bought it in the early 80s when things were looking good and sold it all in the 90s when all seemed hopeless, you'd be too broke to buy any now.
do you have any idea of how many companies had tried to put out 'rio' style portable music players? literally hundreds, so why has apple sold 150 million or more ipods? because they got it right, and they combined a sleek sexy music player with a cheap source of music, through the itunes store. I've explained to countless people they can make mp3's from most audio cds, and in general instead of learning a new program they ask ME to do the leg work of encoding their music. it takes money to use itunes, but it's easy to use.
and now, the ipod brand is more famous than the walkman brand was in the 80's.
the iphone is a huge printing press for money as well, they get money from the sale of it, and even more from the contract with at&t. jobs coming back to apple, and as the CEO really worked out great, so far. although i think even apple will start to feel the pain that so many tech companies are feeling from the global economic downturn that seems to be happening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
SELL!!!
Rio devices with 32 MB of memory must have been roughly 4 years old by the time the iPod came out. Apple may have had the best product the day that the iPod first hit the shelves, but other companies had similar products already in the development pipeline and have quickly caught up and in my opinion, quickly surpassed the iPod in terms of overall quality and value.
Where the iPod won it from the competition was ease of use.
Something like an iRier might have more features, and better specs, but have you ever tried to use one? I have.
I got my first Mac a year ago, but the first time I used one was in 1997 and after that I knew I would end up on a Mac eventually.
It was the time of win3.11 and win95, winNT4, (and I think Mac system7). I was at university and helped a lot of people with their computers. I was used to first having to "figure out" someone's computer before I could help them.
I also did some DTP work. At one point my computer couldn't handle what I was doing, and I ended up finishing my project at a professional DTP firm, who happened to also have QuarkXpress but on a big powerful dual head Mac. I was productive from the get go, and if I needed something, it would just be where I'd expect it to be and work intuitively, even outside the software I had experience with on Windows. At that point I understood that Apple is just miles ahead of the competition in UI design.
They are just very good in removing all things from an UI that you don't really need. Some rarely used options and a reduction in choice comes with that, but I'll do without an optic output for my digital music player if it means I have an interface that is easy to use.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
anyone?
how dare a company make record profits!!
If I had Apple stock, I would sell. They have executed amazingly well over the last decade, but they also got lucky. With portable music players, Apple was at the right place at the right time and got out ahead of everyone. Will there be another chance like that? The iPhone is doing well, but it faces heavy competition from companies that are much more prepared this time around. With the Air and Apple TV, they're trying to stay ahead, but not gaining much traction.
Apple's use of slick looking devices and clean, optimized UI gives them an advantage and allows them to mark up prices. However, other companies are going to learn to do these things nearly as well, and then Apple will have to compete more on price. They aren't going anywhere, because they have cash reserves, faithful customers, and they do make fine products. But I think they've peaked.
Then again, perhaps I'll look back at this post in 10 years and laugh, as Apple's valuation approaches $1 trillion and they buy out an ailing Microsoft...
iMac? can't even update flash, or anything else.
Everything you say in your post has no merit, based on this one line. Yeah, so tell me, a professional Flash developer, how I'm not able to update Flash on a Mac? Speaking of not being able to update "everything else", maybe it's time you updated your rhetoric?
Apple is doing well because it is no longer a boutique computer company.
It now uses Intel CPUs and Linux operating systems, and it sells cell phones.
Apple has grown by becoming a different company.
Essentially, Steve Jobs shut Apple down, gave the money back to the shareholders, then asked them to invest in a new company with the same name and address.
I think you mistake brand-loyalty with faboyism. Brand-loyalty is earned, whereas fanboyism is an irrational/out-of-proportion affinity for something. If I've had great success with a particular company for a period of two decades, I feel safe in sticking with that company, even for twice the price and half the supposed "value" (value being a completely subjective, hence worthless, argument). BMW comes immediately to mind for me. It doesn't have to be just BMW or Apple Macintoshes, for example. It can be Fords, McDonalds, Dells, Microsofts, whatever. The difference being, some companies force a brand image upon us via marketing, and others deserve a brand-image through years of excellence.
...and hilariouser. XD
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I am the only one who noticed this story isn't even accurate anymore???? Maybe the editors could just cut and replace the company names in the headline.
I put the word bricked in quotes. This is a grey area situation. Because by all definitions the iphone is bricked until you go home to fix it (Which is a 4 hour process)
It is essentailly bricked until you get home, meaning you cant do a single thing with the iphone. You cant call, you cant call 911, you cant receive calls. The entire phone is broken. The OS is currupt, the apps are currupt, it is a brick.
Yes you can restore it, but you really need to see the situation for what it is... the iphone for many of us, is spending more time in the usb dock being restored than it is in service as a phone.
I said "brick" using quotes, to show that it is useless as a... until you restore it. The problem is so bad though that we are all hitting this bug multiple times... 20's 30's... we're all up there in restores, sometimes multiple times a day!
So for the most part, i think the term brick applies... in that it is "useless as a brick"
I can't imagine what someone is thinking when they moderate this tripe as insightful. No one can "make" wealth? Wealth is value.
What is more valuable to you: food, or a pile of carbon/nitrogen/etc atoms? When we grow food, we're just using tools and knowledge to "move reality around", so we're not really "making" anything, right?
Wrong, obviously. This is the very nature of "value added". Wealth is not a zero sum game. They "moved stuff around" to make computers 40 years ago. And it was more stuff. Were those rooms filled with hot, vacuum-tube using computers better because they had more "stuff"?
And to top it off, the Second Law of Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems, which the planet is not, and no one has shown the universe to be either.
3.5B ending in the trailing 12 months ending september 29, 07.
But in the 3 quarters since (ending 12/29/07, 3/29/08, 6/28/08), Apple has already made 3.7B, and they still have a quarter to go.
That type of profitability with that type of growth comes at a premium, especially when people see upside. That's why XOM (Exxon-Mobile) has a 400B market cap despite over 40B in profits in the last year - because people see Apple's star rising and see the possibility that Apple will supplant Microsoft-based PCs as the de facto computing choice, and the possibility that Apple could devour huge amounts of market share from Nokia and RIM with their phone, and continue to grow their media empire as the place of choice to sell digital content.
On the other hand, people look at XOM and see a bloated giant, dependent in many ways on leases it holds in a myriad of foreign countries, selling a product which has clearly jumped the shark. It's not a question of if the world moves away from oil, just when and how fast. It's the same reason VCs aren't funding oil services companies but are pouring money into green tech - because we know how this ends. If there is to be anything left of civilization, it won't have XOM in it. (At least, not as an oil company of any size)
iPhoned?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Good for you and your opinion. It just seems that many millions more tend to disagree with you.
I'm a Mac user. I'm on a Mac right now (Mac Pro tower dual quad core, and I love this machine). I have a Lenovo T61 with Ubuntu 8.04 and XP next to me, and I dual boot on my Mac to play games in Windows. I also work all day on Windows.
Today at work, I was testing a CalDAV syncing software to sync Outlook with Apple's iCal server. The $45 application was written in VB by someone who thought that having things like 14 tabs in the interface and switching views form one tab to another by selecting a checkbox would be good ideas.
It is an example of many Windows shareware apps that simply don't follow any worthwhile guidelines. I have yet to see a Mac shareware as bad as this.
It's amusing that Apple now has just about enough cash on hand to be able to cut a check for a controlling interest in Dell.
... they combined a sleek sexy music player with a cheap source of music, through the itunes store. I've explained to countless people they can make mp3's from most audio cds, and in general instead of learning a new program they ask ME to do the leg work of encoding their music. it takes money to use itunes, but it's easy to use.
While having the store to buy from is important to the iPod's success, realistically most of the music on iPods does not come from the iTunes store. According to industry research only about 15% of iPod owners have ever bought anything from the iTunes store and it accounts for less than 2% of the music on the average iPod.
A big factor in the iPod success story is Apple's iTunes software making it easy for the average person to rip their CD collection. I know smart people who downloaded the program solely for that purpose because they could not figure out how to do it with WMP or whatever shipped with the player they bought. Remember, when the iPod came out, WMP ripped to DRM'd WMA by default, adding DRM to music from CDs that did not have any to start with and resulting in a lot of people who ripped their collection and then could not get it to work on their portable player.
It took simple hardware, easy to use software, and an easy store with DRM that did not significantly get in the user's way to make it happen. That's where Apple really excels, in putting together solutions that address all of a customer's workflow and needs. It's working for the smartphone market too.
Steve Jobs is Apples King Midas, almost everything he touches turns to gold: iMac, iPod, iPhone MacIntel, Final Cut, iTunes Store and in fact most everything, he rarely sets his foot wrong and when he does, as with Cube, he learns from it. iPhone 1.0 wasn't a runaway success, but v. 2.0 is a resounding success. The Apps store selling software to iPhones, yet another perfect hit. Bottom line is, without Steve Jobs, Apple would at worst be bankrupt today and at best be as little worth as Dell! Bottomline is, that Steve Jobs makes all the difference, of cause aided by very talented people like designer wiz Jonathan Ives, but Jobs is a visionary genius, who excels in so many areas and under his leadership Apple has moved out of the little Mac niche and into niches such as MP3 players, smartphones, digital music and film downloads, it all contributes to Apple's bottomline and the continued health of Apple.
I am not arguing or disagreeing, because I don't know what the case is. But is this verifiable from a survey or something? The only reason I ask is that I grew up during 50s/60s/70s and the Walkman was like Kleenex. I mean, I know the chemo is messing up my memory/recall to a degree, but I seem to remember the walkman as being synonymous with portable music devices back in the day. Sony was criticized heavily for having so many versions of it. I think their showroom in Tokyo had hundreds of Walkmans, that were all in production. Back in teeny-bopper Japan days (when people used these things called pens and pencils to make marks called 'drawings' and 'writing'), you could hit the Big Time, and become a has been, in about 8 days.
Sony did their level best to stay abreast of the styles etc coming up from the street. Apple, more accurately reflecting modern American marketing, imposes upon, rather than draws from, in order to keep costs down. That's how it appears to me. iTunes 7x had a fatal I/O operation with an external drive several days ago here at home, while my ten gig first gen iPod was plugged in, and totally destroyed the booting/reading/recognizing of my old iPod, for good.
iTunes, the app, is what... a file manager on the file side, a database on the lib side. And the stupid HFS+ incompatible with Unix-like systems file system looks its worst running with iTunes. If I was the guy who decided to keep the Finder 8 years ago, I would fucking kill myself, as a favor to the whole world. I've been an Apple client since '79, and I absolutely despise these people.
They turned it into a toy store, and destroyed NeXTSTEP, for no extra charge. At least they had the decency to drop "Computer" from the company's official name.
My clients buy me a new apple laptop every couple years. I stopped buying their shit when the Powerbook 150 was 'new'. Fuck those guys. I only use it because of Adobe. (and, yeah, fuck them, too)
*fixes aim acordingly*
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
Why all the fuss? It's Microeconomics 101. People buy products they like and value according to their tastes and preferences, subject to the money they've allocated to those scarce resources (re: the money they have to spend). With all the Apple haters and "profit-monger haters" below, take a lesson in simple economics. It may sound like a syllogism, but if Apple weren't meeting the needs of consumers, they wouldn't continue to post record earnings. Score one for the free market.