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Apple's Long Road To $300
itwbennett writes "Apple shares inched over $300 for the first time Wednesday, nearly 30 years after Apple's initial public offering in December 1980. But it hasn't been a steady climb. In fact, says blogger Chris Nurney, 'Apple's stock history can be divided into two clear periods — the early years, from the IPO through Steve Jobs's long absence from the company after losing a power struggle in 1985, and the modern Jobs era, which began on September 16, 1997.' The bottom line: 'If you had purchased $10,000 of Apple stock the same month that Jobs again began leading the company, your shares would be worth $554,000 today. Not a bad return on the investment.'"
Is the "amazing windows mobile 7" shill some sort of meme? Are all the cool kids doing it?
I'm beginning to find it quite amusing. If ever there was a platform that was late to the market and consumers aren't interested in, it's windows mobile.
The ways of business are strange and inscrutable, but in the consumer market who is going to actually purposefully buy a windows phone?
It's all about the platform though, and the mobile phone market is only half the picture given that iOS also ships on iPods and iPads; both markets where Apple's competition is still playing catch-up.
iOS, with version 4, is finally at the stage where it's 'complete' (which is more than can be said for Windows Phone 7 at least until next year). What Apple need to do now is actually start to think, can we make this better? Otherwise, improvements in newer Android and Windows Phone 7 will eclipse iOS which will be stuck in a user interface rut that Apple are too reticent to fiddle with.
By the way, congratulations on your use of the word 'lose' instead of 'loose', even if it still wasn't the word you were looking for.
You almost had me going there until "amazing Windows Mobile 7". Too much...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Steve Jobs came back in 1997 and it had a small surge that was crushed in the dot com boom. Up to early 2004, you could acquire shares reasonably close to the 1997 price, it fluctated 1.5-2x, sometimes 3x, but after early 2004 it skyrocketed.
1997-2004 is when they had all those color iMacs and gaudy design (remember those awful clamshell notebooks?) befoe the industrial design. It returned to profitabilty, to be sure, and laid a lot of other groundwork, like 2001 was the release of OS X, to be sure.
And that same year (2001) iPod was released. Think about that. For almost 3 years after iPod's release, you could still have bought Apple at a bargain basement price. It took a long time for Wall Street to shed the malaise it had with Apple after the late 80s and early/mid-90s decline.
"but in the consumer market who is going to actually purposefully buy a windows phone?"
Me?
Initial reviews have been good and the development environment for Windows Phone 7 is one of the best I've worked in. Expect lots of great games and apps for this platform.
D2 is unusable so I'd say so. How about putting the (currently missing) threshold and display option controls back for users who aren't drooling js-enabled cock-monkeys?
Your long random rampling about how great your life is and how miserable people that own stocks and shares and money are makes me think that maybe you actually aren't that happy but are you just trying to tell that to yourself...
Money doesn't have to be the endin itself, it can be the means to an end. They may have just invested because they had fond memories of their Apple ][. Just by chance, they now might have the luxury of being able to geek away to their hearts content, without having to worry about the roof over their head, or where the next packet of cheetos is going to come from. Given the propensity for nerds to give their work away, this is quite a beneficial state for them to be in.
I'd love to see Minard-type illustrated map of product lines, sales of each product, board members and share price for the 1997-2010 period.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
'If you had purchased $10,000 of Apple stock the same month that Jobs again began leading the company, your shares would be worth $554,000 today. Not a bad return on the investment.'"
However, if you bought Apple stock, you probably bought about $600,000 in Apple products: iPhones, iPads, iTunes iThinkpads . . . etc.
So you are down 56,000 on the deal
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
+1. WM7 looks like the best thing happened to the mobile world in a long time.
...The ways of business are strange and inscrutable, but in the consumer market who is going to actually purposefully buy a windows phone?
With the blackmailesque death-grip that Microsoft holds over corporate America, do you really have to ask that question?
I didn't "buy" my last three Windows Mobile phones. They were issued to me.
As a long-time Apple investor, I am not terribly surprised that Apple has finally cracked the $300 dollar barrier. The reason I am bullish on Apple and have been for over ten years is that Apple has repeatedly shown it has the ability to find a technical product or market, analyze what is wrong with the current offerings and make a ground breaking product that basically redefines that market. That was the reason the original Apple 2 was successful. You didn't have to know how to wield a soldering iron to have an affordable home computer. The Macintosh again redefined the market by making a mouse-based graphical user interface widely available. Sure others went there first with the Altair proceeding the Apple 2, or the Xerox Alto proceeding the Macintosh, but both products had technical or cost flaws that crippled their chances in the market. This is the same basic formula that Steve Jobs applied to mp3 music players, online music and video sales, cell phones, and most recently tablets. He wasn't the first one to invent these things, but he was the one who was able to see where the short comings were and come up with a better product. Technical users can trash talk Apples products all they want and rant about how brand x's offering can do so much more and costs so much less, but the proof is in the sales. Apple only makes 30 or so products, so they can focus on each product with laser-beam intensity and make it the best in its market. I can't even count how many products Sony, Dell or HP make. Some are great, others are trash. People like Apple's products and keep buying them as fast as Apple can make them. So as long as Apple is able to continue with this business model, I will remain bullish on Apple.
It works for Android, none of the consumers know and purposefully buy Android, they just buy 'a' smartphone that's not a Blackberry and not an iPhone. Nobody knows RIM, iOS, Android with all the versions, etc. Only the technical people do, and we hardly make up or even affect the consumer market (or Linux would've made it a _long_ time ago)
Life is great! (as told by Lady Susan)
Maybe you should respect that other people have broader interests than you? I personally find it interesting that a vertically-integrated software and hardware company could become a serious part of the economy, after seeing the aftermath of Commodore two decades ago. If this offends you so, you can go stand with the dipshits who can't stand SF clogging up precious sports time in the TV schedule.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
In the immortal words of Snoop Dogg: "Drop it like it's hot". Into the porcelain trone, for example. After a few times they stop issueing, believe me.
There is nothing fundamentally sound about apple stock -- it is a company that sells overpriced inessential consumer items ... The stock price is riding on hype, not on merit. Once the hype goes away (and it will) there'll be a lot of people burned.
I made a good chunk of cash on Apple stock this year, but IMHO only idiots would seriously invest in it for the long term.
Awwell, not so important anyway, enjoy your flamewar.
There's nothing fundamentally sound about the pet rock either, yet it made the "inventor" a millionaire.
And your comment about once the hype "goes away" is laughable. Kids have been lining up at Apple stores like it was Black Friday, drooling for the latest and greatest tech for years now.
Jobs is crying himself to sleep that he makes half the money in the cellphone industry with only a twentieth of the marketshare. Weeping.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I was thinking that Windows Mobile 7 would be a big hit in the enterprise market. .docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
Windows Mobile 7 will be a big danger not to Apple, rather to Blackberry.
They can go for the best Office/Documents/Outlook integration possible - and who would not love it?
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Apple has a P/E ration of 22.6. That is about right for a company providing a large annual growth. It's not cheap, but it's not a bubble. Now, Amazon on the other hand has a P/E of 64. For comparison, the P/E of the S&P 500 is around 15 to 16 normally.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I don't know if it would be a revolution for the user, but I'm thinking Apple should start developing iOS in some sort of vector graphics system instead of bitmaps, now that they are pushing display close to or beyond what the human eye is capable of discerning. I know the fonts are like this already IIRC, but I mean the icons and everything. And then port it back to regular OS X.
That way they wouldn't be stuck rehashing everything to look right when simply releasing iOS to a new category of product (ie iPhone to iPad, and then next year iPad gets a retina display???) but also because it would leapfrog Windows in a department that would take Windows years to catch up.
Displays really haven't pushing the resolution as they should have been the last few years and it seems in part due that "HD" displays on computers now forces the user to correct the theme themselves or be faced with unbearably small text and the like.
I can hardly with for my 5760x3840 21" monitors.
They can go for the best Office/Documents/Outlook integration possible - and who would not love it? .docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex
Yeah, but if you've seen the direction Microsoft is taking with Windows Phone 7, that's not it. They are going for "social networking" and "iPhone/Android knock-off," not "Mobile Business Computing."
... and then they built the supercollider.
Can someone enlighten me as to whether the stock chart shows prices per unit stock taking into account of the splits or not?
i.e. after the 1st and 3rd split, the stock price hardly changes, when I would have expected the unit price to halve due to the split. After the second one, the value does approximately half.
Or is the graph simply showing how the value of a current unit of stock has changed, factoring in the splits?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Resolution independence has been 'coming soon' in OS X for years now. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be one of the features of Leopard, which was quietly dropped and still hasn't made it into Snow Leopard.
Apple are previewing the next version of OS X next week, and I won't be at all surprised if resolution independence is mentioned. I'll be very surprised, however, if it makes it into the final product.
Pretty much all consumer-goods are "inessential" - that by itself is no indication of anything. If it was, Coca Cola, Apple, Starbucks and basically anyone who sells any kind of luxury-goods, would be worth zip.
(I had put joke tags of holierthanthou in them pointy things around the first paragraphs, but they were ofcourse disappeared...)
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
never a better day to buy more worth less payper? maybe the ?aliens? will help. they sure have some nice shiny rides (complete with light show that would outshine ANY other pimpmobile).
still waiting to see something,... anything that really matters (compared to what is really happening; exploding babies, stock markup/banker FRAUD & LARCENY etc....), here.
Yes, making one person a millionaire is totally the same thing as a single product line rolling on nothing hipster hype sucking up tens of billions.
There is a point where return on marketing and reality distortion will hit a wall, as it has happened with every overhyped product in history.
ATM, Apple's stock is up only because expectations are widely in excess of what it can deliver - and I don't mean analyst expectations, I mean distorted stock owner expectations. At some point, expectations will reconcile with reality, just as product will, and this time isn't very far off.
It is probably already quite ripe for shorting, and shorted it will get, and shorted hard. I'm waiting quietly, and I'm glad there's a whole lot of people who think like you.
Because I'll borrow and sell your stock gladly.
There is nothing fundamentally sound about apple stock -- it is a company that sells overpriced inessential consumer items ...
They sell those overpriced luxury items to a loyal, expanding base of consumers with large disposable incomes, following a consistent yearly schedule of product releases and upgrades. And that's been the state of their business for the best part of a decade. As an investor, it's practically everything you could ask for in a consumer goods company.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
We are talking about the "consumer market" here and Apple is proof enough that the average consumer does not care about openess and freedom.
I almost bought for nearly $1, 000, 000 of Apple actions just before job joined, knowing it would most likely be a very good and not so risky investment.
In the end, I didn't.
Oh the regrets.
If the only thing you see in an article about Apple's stock price is what it means for their investors' bank balances, I humbly suggest that you are the one who is obsessed with money.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
maps. it's wierd. looks like more than 50% of the country is being, or about to be flooded. maybe the maps/satellites are broken? better to buy more phony payper than to even wonder what really matters now.
Step 1: Say something inflammatory Step 2: End post with "enjoy your flamewar" (you know, the one you just started) Step 3: ??? Step 4: Somehow convince someone to mod your post "insightful"? I've complained about it before, but Slashdot's moderation system is really, really broken. Please mod this post off topic, because that's what it is.
Money doesn't have to be the endin itself, it can be the means to an end.
Thanks. You clearly read my post (unlike some of the other responders) & understood the point I made. I enjoy a happy life because I earn a reasonable salary that allows that and I don't think obsessing about getting any more money would make me any happier.
They may have just invested because they had fond memories of their Apple ][.
Even though I'm no Apple fan, this isn't a direct attack on them. It's an attack on people who claim to be "nerds" but obsess about money... nerds don't do that, they use money to indulge their obsessions - i.e a means to an end.
Just by chance, they now might have the luxury of being able to geek away to their hearts content, without having to worry about the roof over their head, or where the next packet of cheetos is going to come from.
I think I get what you're saying here but not quite sure. Putting Apple aside again, if you're saying that they earn enough money to the point where they no longer need to worry about it then, yes, I agree - that probably describes me in a nutshell.
But how does that explain those people who accumulate more wealth than they could ever possibly spend in their lifetimes? Does that not therefore illustrate that for some people, "money" and "everything else in the universe" are mutually exclusive? In which case, I'm in the "everything else in the universe" part but still very happy with my life - that's, again, the point I'm trying to get across.
Given the propensity for nerds to give their work away, this is quite a beneficial state for them to be in.
True. Nerds (of which I am proud to be one, despite being less nerdish now than I was in my younger days) have a true passion for the stuff they like, are willing to talk about that stuff a lot (yes, sometimes to the point of boring, been there, done that, got the T-shirt) and help others.
But do many who accumulate wealth help others accumulate it? Is the author of a "Get Rich Quick" book more concerned about helping others get rich or getting rich himself/herself with book sales?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I bought at $10 and finally sold at $180. The thing that scares me about holding Apple stock long-term is Jobs's pancreatic cancer. Apple management demonstrated clearly that they are not forthcoming about their CEO's health, and let's face it, we've seen what would happen to Apple if Jobs had to dial back his involvement. More than any other company Apple needs its CEO.
They do make great products though, and deserve all their success. I hope my fears are unfounded and that Steve lives a long and healthy life.
Okay, let's turn your question on it's head then...
Given that I, who is by his own admission a "nerd", have no interest in Apple's (or indeed any other) stock prices, precisely *WHAT* does that stock price mean to *ME*, in practical terms, then?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I dislike Apple as much as the next guy, but let's face the truth:
The iPod has been fairly priced since Ipod G2. I've asked people time and time again to tell me which portable audio player is better for the money. Their suggestions always turn out to be some ugly player that might work all right if you install third-party software. The iPod is the only Apple device that I've ever purchased.
Likewise with the iPhone. It's been pretty damn good compared to the competition the last couple of years. I'm not buying an iPhone out of principle, because Apple don't want to allow you to own your iPhone. I'm hoping Android will catch up and overtake in 2011.
The iMac is a bargain if you're into design and like the looks. Apple could easily sell it for five times the price to rich jerks. Likewise with the laptops.
I don't know what the heck "fundamentally sound" means in a market economy, though.
<quote><p> And to people using NT back then, Mac must have been a really bad joke.</p></quote>
No, Windows NT was not always better. I had 5 macs on OS 9 running one application combining: applescript, filemaker, photoshop, the predecessor of ImageJ, a scanner and a shared printer with permanently 30' in the buffer. With only one unstable Mac. By lack of Macs I had to add two NT PCs who implemented the first step of the process with only a scanner and photoshop, and there the trouble began as the PCs had a downtime of 20%.
it also looks (stupid satellites) like an inordinate area of 'god's' country is on fire.
Is forcing own ethics on others ethical? I for one judge technology on basis of merit, not ideology.
Maybe that makes me a good person, and it probably makes your philosophical conclusion less valid and your movement less worthy.
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex .docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
Maybe they can work on it after they decide on a standard for .docx, because I can't seem to get two copies (of the same version of word) to reliably display the same file in the same way on two different machines. I wish what I saw on the screen matched what people would see when they get it. I would personally use LaTex and .rtf formats for everything, but 'the world runs on windows' and when I send an .rtf to one of my bosses, they are so overwhelmed by the cascade of prompts and dialog boxes needed to tell Word that you want to use to open an .rtf, they usually just tell me that their 'computer can't read it' (seriously). User ineptness aside, I really don't understand how the world runs on windows. Most projects where I am forced to use Microsoft products because that is the only thing the recipient uses take 5 to 10 times as long as they need to. Despite it's excessive features, Word (and other MS Office products) seem utterly incapable of making small aesthetic changes to a document without throwing the rest of it in complete formatting chaos. As someone who witnesses and experiences this problem, I would estimate my academic department/ university would easily double if not triple it's productivity if we would start using more appropriate software for what we need to do with it. This would not outright exclude software like office, but it would certainly require us to use microsoft software as a tool rather than a standard. It's very amazing how many more problems a Windows user experiences on a daily basis.
I have stopped screaming at my computer since I started using a mac (with the exception of using office). Let me also say that I am no technological slouch, and my issues with Office are not a byproduct of my lack of understand like it can be with others. To put it another way, I actually run 4 operating systems on my computer (VMware versions of windows on a mac seem to work better than natively installed copies of windows on the same system, no joke, I was even able to register the machine to a Microsoft Active Directory to use an institutional copy of SPSS). When I got my current mac I installed windows on it in a dual boot with a mac partition (using a utility supplied by apple with the OS). I had purchased the Mac for the hardware (a MacBook Air) rather than the OS. I started out using windows for everything, but over several months I had naturally (not consciously) switched over entirely to the mac side. My point in all this, is that Windows is like an abusive boyfriend (I ripped this simile off of a post from a different thread, but it's more than perfect), you don't really understand how dysfunctional it is until to get out of the relationship and find a less destructive partner. It's hard to like Microsoft products, trust me, I tried. I really am not saying this as an Apple fanboi (because I am definitely not one). I am saying this as person who researches the efficacy of information technology in educational settings. In case you are curious about what I am figuring out (if you haven't already) is that technology tends to be selected for all the wrong reasons, and tends to fall so short of the mark, that no one ever uses it. I see classrooms with >$10k Smartboard installations that are completely unusable and collecting dust rapidly because there is a very poorly manufactured and barely functional Windows machine at the heart of it. When I was in 7th grade, my school system blew $15k a classroom into devices like laser disc players and Windows 3.11 boxes with token ring networks (which were obsolete before they were taken out of the box) by the time I graduated 5 years later, I had witnessed one actual use of anything but the television, and that was by a teacher who was responding to a student's challenge him on whether the laserdisc machines actually worked!
Use your imagination! We're talking about one company that controls its hardware, its software, and increasingly the services you can use on them, and it's doing very well. What happens when they're not a minority player any more? What happens if they get pulled up for anticompetitive practices? What happens if the reliability of their stock turns them into a cornerstone of investment banking? What happens to the economy if Jobs then dies and Apple, almost inevitably, does a backflip? What if they get bought out by the government because they're "too big to fail"? MacUS?
That's off the top of my head.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
How is it offtopic, GP is posting his opinion on the topic of discussion, which is, well, apple's stock price.
Your post, on the other hand, gets my offtopic modpoint, because it has squat to do with the topic on hand.
Enjoy.
Commodore made chip design, manufactured chips, did board design, manufactured the boards, made the cases, made the OS, and sold the computers to the retail channel. They even made some applications.
Apple designs cases, designs the overall system, makes the OS. But they do no chip design. And they do not have their own manufacturing facilities for anything. It is all outsourced to someone in China or Korea.
In the long term Apple will get dethroned when the people which are doing all the manufacturing work start selling on their own for cheaper. Samsung was already in the game and their products have been getting more compelling.
Oh and Apple hardware seldom is the best. What Apple is good at is system integration. It is the sum of the parts, rather than the parts themselves.
The whole point of my comment was that stock prices is not "News For Nerds" as Slashdot claims to be.
I have news for you -- Nerds are not one big homogeneous mass, and you're not the sole arbiter of nerd taste.
But regardless, how can anybody be so blind as to not see the significance when a computer company that was nearly dead a dozen years ago now has a bigger market cap than Microsoft or Walmart, and is closing in on Exxon? No matter what your personal feelings are about their products, they've clearly tapped into something that's getting large numbers of people to fork over their hard-earned money. Whether you're interested in the money aspects or not, a company's success in the stock market is a measure of what is selling in the marketplace. Success breeds imitators, so it's a harbinger of what we can probably expect to see from other companies in terms of products, processes, and market strategies.
"Nerds & geeks, whatever their faults, are people who have passions for stuff *OTHER* than just money."
Yup, that's why I like to make sure I have a comfortable retirement fund so I can do the things I'm passionate about when I retire. If you're not and don't own a single stock... good luck!
Therefore they don't have "investors", they only have speculators.
The only way you can make money from Apple shares is by selling Apple shares. If you don't get the significance of that, let me put it another way: you always need new suckers to buy in to the scheme at higher prices.
If that sounds like a good long term "investment", then would you be interested in buying in to an exciting ground floor opportunity to market quality steak knives to other steak knife marketers?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I have to wonder what triggered Apple's interest in RI. If/when we have a display technology that can reliably produce large, very high resolution (ten times the current dot pitch) displays, it'll be useful and nigh-essential, but on LCD that's not going to happen because of cost, and the current wave of upcoming technologies are more about picture quality than resolution.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This is true, they're not integrated to nearly the same extent. It's something they seem to be aiming to increase, though. I have to wonder if they'll buy out some of their more important component manufacturers in the coming decade.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
You know, spending all your time obsessing and replying to every response to your comment only reinforces to everyone what the AC grand parent said...
While I agree with you that nerds, scientists and engineers are more valuable to society (I'm asking for a flame, I know) than economists and the latest Wall street Gugu, it does not mean that we must block all information about the financial issues of the world.
It takes you only 5 seconds to scan a summary on /. and /. obviously expects its readers to make the conscious decision to stop reading if they consider it a waste of time. There are plenty of other topics to read...
almost all of the (dozen or so) flood warnings are gone now. aliens? gone as well. the fires....? looks like maybe another 'miracle' might be needed. no problem. when you're crusading for 'god', the only losers, aren't
So apples engineers who designed the altvec coprocessor,apples design specific hardware that allowed for true plug in play. And currently apples purchase of pa semi conductor which designs the A4 processor (a slightly modified arm).
Apple has a long history of custom designing hardware. Then those designers work with the software people to get more computing power out of a given spec.
That sounds like they are vertically integrated to me. They may not design every aspect but why reinvent the monitor?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Who the hell has $10,000 lying around to invest? I guess this is just one of those "the rich get richer" type of things.
I bought one share of Apple stock back in September 2001, when it was trading at about $20. The stock has split since then, so I now have two shares.
Hearing this news, I really wish I'd bought more.
That is the true tragedy of the commons.
Invaders must die
And had one purchased $1000 (not $10,000) in Tandy (Radio Shack) in 1972, by 1980 that $1000 was worth $1.2 million (not $554000).
Tandy was the 800 lbs gorilla of PC manufacturing. For 7 years they built and sold more PCs than all other manufacturers combined (IBM, Compaq, AST, et.al. ad infinitum).
No, I didn't buy any.
I am not certain that the summary takes into account the multipliers caused by stock splits. After I finish waking up, I will compute the value of a $10,000 investment = current price times how many shares were first purchased times first split factor times second split factor times ...
Oh wait, capital gains taxes!
That's as maybe...
But the only Apple product I have ever owned is an iPod Touch the missus gave to me when she bought her iPhone. Don't get me wrong, it's a neat gadget for a freebie but Apple's failures or successes have little or no impact on me.
You seem to have problems visualising that someone can be a "nerd" without being an Apple freak...
So, once again, please explain how Apple's stock price contributes in any way to my personal well-being or happiness?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Yes, let's subtract "technical people" from people who buy stuff so that we can pretend "consumers" don't purposefully buy Android phones. Let's also define "technical people" as "people who know what OS their phone runs" so that we aren't talking utter bullshit.
does Apple pay dividends or are stockholders just a bunch of people agreeing that a piece of paper is worth $n because fertility rate of penguins skyrocketed? After all penguins and performance of Apple have exactly the same influence over the price of stocks, which is 0. People think it matters but they are wrong. Dividends are what allows to evaluate realistic value of stocks. Without that you just trade a piece of paper and your investment is all about finding a greater sucker once you want to get your money back.
How is that different from housing market which crashed not that long ago? 'It can only go up' bullshit and people lined up to buy only to flip the house to somebody else. House doesn't pay for itself (unless you are into rentals) so it's not much of an investment, your only hope is to find a greater sucker. Stock market full of dividend-less stocks is just a game of hot potato, last one will get burned and wiped out.
Hey Ballmer! how is the new batch of squirting zunes going?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Why do people like you just read what they want to read in anyone else's commemts?
Just because I own no shares does not automatically mean I have not made previsions for my retirement. If anything, just doing so in stocks & shares strikes me as both foolhardy & risky.
Please try to visualise colours between black & white.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
No. It serves to add strength to my original statement that I am a (Slashdot) nerd with little interest in stock prices.
I'd love to sit in a room & argue with you because you sound like the sort of person who storms out in a huff rather than graciously admitting defeat.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Excuse me? Nobody's asking you to be personally interested in this article. You're the one calling for it to be stricken from Slashdot because you can't see the relevance of it, and I've shown why it's "news for nerds", which was all that was necessary to rebut you. The discussion is over.
I'm certainly not going to answer your hilarious, and no doubt logic-free, accusation in the third paragraph. I have in my entire life possessed exactly one Apple product. I've experienced significantly more brand loyalty to hot beverages.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
a serious part of the economy.
Yup. Apple makes up about 15% of the NASDAQ index.
This is not a good situation, if previous Apple price movements are anything to go by.
If Steve Jobs' liver explodes, it will take a sizeable chunk of the NASDAQ with it.
And that's been the state of their business for the best part of a decade. As an investor, it's practically everything you could ask for in a consumer goods company.
Ah, but you see Apple's meteoric rise is not due to them behaving like a consumer goods company, instead they've become a fashion house. So things shall get real interesting for the brand once Steve shuffles off this mortal coil. So like all investments based on fashion, there is some risk of the fickle mob changing their tastes.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Dude, Apple has taken over half of all the money made in the smartphone market, they basically created the entire market for consumer tablets, their Mac business has been growing faster than the entire PC industry year-over-year, for the last 10 years, they have launched the most successful online music store, they've owned a very significant part of the PMP market since 2001, they have been raking in profits around $2 billion a quarter the last few years, their sales have been largely unaffected by the global downturn, their stock price has increased 50-fold in less than 10 years, their competitors are scrambling to imitate about everything they have created over the last decade, and still you keep insisting that it's just hype, it's inflated, that everyone is living in a reality distortion field, they are overrated and they are rolling on hipster hype?
Really, if you honestly believe all this yourself, you are the one living in a reality distortion field, and I sincerely think you should get your head checked. Not liking Apple stuff is perfectly fine, but you'd have to be a first-class idiot to be so myopic and unable to look beyond your own little world to think like this. I really feel sorry for you if you're so jaded you can't get over the fact not everyone is like you when it comes to computer and gadgetry preferences.
I was in the Verizon store yesterday. They had a little section for Android phones, a little section for Blackberries, even a little section for Samsung Android phones. They also had a little section for Windows platform phones. There were three phones in that section, and only 1 was even powered on. I had to wait to see the Droid 2, but nobody in the store even bothered to look at the windows phone while I was there. They were right in front of the front door too!
...and Google has a PE of 23.5, with less growth and more difficulty finding new sources of revenue. Come next week, Apple's PE will drop down to 20 or so again with their new earnings report.
I wish I had mod points right now. Apple stock is worthless. Your only hope of getting your money back is to find another sucker to pay you as much or more than you paid. Ideally, a stock should pay a dividend that will pay me back what I paid for the stock over a period of time (what that period of time is depends on various factors--age of the investor, inflation rate, etc). The price that other people are willing to pay for the stock is just a bonus.
If a stock does not pay a dividend, you may as well "invest" your money at the casinos.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It is very much a key man company. I don't want to be holding stock the year Steve Jobs dies - no one else has the, no, I won't say "vision" for a company that repackages old tech and patents something as innovative as a text filter - call it the marketing skills, Steve has. The minute he dies Apple becomes an overpriced PALM.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They are a public company, publicly audited. They have the earnings and cash to support that stock price. I'm a big shareholder and have no desire to have dividends paid out, since they are taxable at the highest rate of about 35%, going to 39% next year.
Expect fewer and fewer companies to pay dividends in the future. I don't particularly like this trend, as it does require management to discipline itself, but that's what our ridiculous taxes will do.
Atlas Shrugged was supposed to be a warning, NOT a newspaper!
I am not personally interested in this article, agreed.
It is not "News for Nerds", that is the point I am currently arguing, you have not countered that so far with any valid response.
Fine, discussion is over, but since you haven't argued my core point, I win. Thanks.
no doubt logic-free
Careful with the English there, also - that's a fallacious statement. A conclusion for which there is no doubt cannot have been arrived at without a certain degree of logic being used to get there.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Apple's customer base is anything but fickle, it's famously loyal.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If you think Apple, the company, has no influence over AAPL, the stock, you're a complete idiot. In absolute seriousness you'd need a combination of total ignorance of the facts and a complete disinterest in discovering them for you to draw that conclusion.
You have m shares, and Apple's projected value in tangable assets like cash (from selling gizmos), facilities, and personnel in the near future is X. X = m * $n.
The housing market imploded because the estimates of X were a mixture of delusion, fiction, and outright lies. By comparision Apple's financials are available in easy-to-digest quarterly reports.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
D&D is nice and all, but it won't keep my boiler running when I retire. I became interested in investing a few years back. When I was growing up I was too busy hacking and playing games to pay any attention to the basic skills of providing for yourself. I just existed from day to day, never worrying about where my next meal was coming from, kind of getting by, but I ended up in a whole mountain of debt and a very bad situation.
Maybe you are luckier than I am and know how to do this stuff properly, but to me it was a mystery.
Eventually I figured out I needed to get out of debt. No food does that to you. So I looked around for info about how to do it, the website I happened across was The Motley Fool, i'm sure there are others, that was around 15 years ago.
It was a long, hard struggle to get where I am to day. I have no debt except a mortgage, and I have actually started to save money. For the first time in my life my net-worth is positive. On this journey I continued to read, and discovered how interesting investment can be its far more than greedily watching the stock price. Quite the contrary it makes you absolutely aware of what is going on in the world, global economics is far more complex, wide reaching and interesting subject than I could have imagined.
What worked for me was seeing finances as a game. Some kind of huge mmrlrpg. I love stat building games and so once this clicked all of a sudden it became fun to plane for the future and try and accumulate wealth. Its the best game I have every played, and the results seem to have so much more meaning than all the others. You should try it.
Begging your pardon, but if Slashdot removed every article where one person had "little interest" in the topic, then there'd be no fucking articles.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Yeah, what a crazy guy, wherever did he get the idea that you made the assertion that the price of stocks and shares doesn't matter to nerds....
Invaders must die
But they do no chip design.
You are mistaken. Apple's got a world-class VLSI design team, including among others, the lead designer of the DEC Alpha. (He was running PA Semi when Apple acquired them.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But regardless, how can anybody be so blind as to not see the significance when a computer company that was nearly dead a dozen years ago now has a bigger market cap than Microsoft or Walmart, and is closing in on Exxon?
Complete irrelevance, sorry.
I don't buy Apple products, they've never made anything for a price I'd want to pay. Lots of people do buy their stuff and love it. Let's agree to differ, put that one to bed and put aside any notion this argument is "Apple hater vs fanboi". Okay?
Despite having no interest in Apple products, I am interested in reading what they make because what they do will have some impact on other companies as well and, in turn, affect what they make. This I would describe as "nerdy" behaviour for someone interested in gadgets.
I am not blind to the significance of Apple's growth, I just don't consider it relevant to me.
No matter what your personal feelings are about their products, they've clearly tapped into something that's getting large numbers of people to fork over their hard-earned money.
That's a topic for another debate - you could argue they've done it purely on the strength of their products, I'd argue about blind brand loyalties, status symbols & an anti-Microsoft backlash. Let's not start that one here.
Whether you're interested in the money aspects or not, a company's success in the stock market is a measure of what is selling in the marketplace.
It's a measure of how much profit it makes for the shareholders, not how good what it actually sell is.
As a nerd, I can admire the technical qualities of something with no interest in how big the company is. It's an irrelevance.
Success breeds imitators, so it's a harbinger of what we can probably expect to see from other companies in terms of products, processes, and market strategies.
Nobody will imitate you if you make something that's technically good but that nobody will buy - it's the VHS & Betamax scenario over again.
They may try to imitate you because they too can make money from what you do, maybe selling at a cheaper price - but that does not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of what you are selling.
Why can you not visualise that someone can admire something for it's design & quality while not giving a toss about the share prices?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
A house is not.
where the next packet of cheetos is going to come from
Classic.
+1 funny for that excerpt, but it might not have been clear form just a modding, so there ya go.
In all seriousness, if I was rich, I would still enjoy commoner activities like eating packaged snack foods.
Yeah, large quantities of money as the freedom to do what you want - also called "'Fuck you' money". Thing is, you have to make sure to not get entangled in the process of *getting* that money, and I don't think wise/lucky stock market investing doesn't come with too many special strings attached. (the latter is as opposed to, say, the obligations and pressure that may come with a high-paying job)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Are you kidding me? You can't even parse a sentence? It means "I have no doubt, that your accusation was not founded on logic", not "your accusation has neither logic nor doubt". Sweet non-existent Christ, you're a tedious troll.
I rebutted your statement thoroughly by existing, as a nerd who has an interest in this topic. I outlined the reasons for my interest, for completeness, in the above comments. There are several other nerds discussing the subject avidly at this moment in this comments section.
If you're going to play the "no true scotsman" fallacy and claim that none of us are nerds, you're on your own.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
While I agree with you that nerds, scientists and engineers are more valuable to society (I'm asking for a flame, I know) than economists and the latest Wall street Gugu, it does not mean that we must block all information about the financial issues of the world.
This is the problem with Slashdot. Too many people with too much pent-up emotion hitting the "Reply To This" button too quickly.
I definitely did NOT say nerds & scientists are more valuable to society, it's plainly obvious a lot of the good stuff that gets developed would never get out to the public at large without people with financial sense behind them. So PLEASE DO NOT put words into my mouth.
I DID say that stock prices aren't "News For Nerds" and that means ANY stock prices, not just Apple's.
t takes you only 5 seconds to scan a summary on /. and /. obviously expects its readers to make the conscious decision to stop reading if they consider it a waste of time. There are plenty of other topics to read...
And it takes about 1 second to read the words "Post Comment" meaning that you are invited to discuss the summary if you so wish.
Maybe I've overlooked something but I cannot find a "Post Comment Only If You Are Prepared To Say Something Good About Apple" button... mind you, these days on Slashdot, that's kind of the accepted norm...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Wish I had bought AAPL and GOOG in real life rather than in a stock market simulator game.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Are you kidding me? You can't even parse a sentence? It means "I have no doubt, that your accusation was not founded on logic", not "your accusation has neither logic nor doubt". Sweet non-existent Christ, you're a tedious troll.
A commonly used tactic. Cannot win main argument discussion, therefore moves to discussion of semantics.
Oh, and the second sign of losing an argument is resorting to direct abuse - so thanks for asserting my victory.
I rebutted your statement thoroughly by existing, as a nerd who has an interest in this topic. I outlined the reasons for my interest, for completeness, in the above comments.
No you did not. You merely demonstrated that you drink far too much of the Apple Kool-Aid & have sacrificed reason in favour of brand loyalty. You have yet to explain why a gadget nerd like me, with no brand loyalty to Apple, should care about their stock prices. That is what I have been waiting for.
There are several other nerds discussing the subject avidly at this moment in this comments section.
Yes, but I am having the discussion with you.
If you're going to play the "no true scotsman" fallacy and claim that none of us are nerds, you're on your own.
How simply do I need to put this.
I claim:
1. A nerd is someone who appreciates something for it's design, content, technical expertise, customisability, not the profits of the company making that item. e.g. A fan of Marvel "Iron Man" comics cares far more about the quality of writing and artwork in the comic than Marvel's share prices.
2. Nerd != Apple User
3. Shareholders do not care what is produced by a company as long as their share prices & dividend payments exceed their expectations. Therefore, the stock price or size of a company has little or no impact on the quality of what they produce. Since a nerd IS interested in quality, the logical conclusion is that stock prices are of no interest to nerds (like me).
4. Therefore, news about ANY stock prices (not just your beloved Apple) is not "News For Nerds".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"but in the consumer market who is going to actually purposefully buy a windows phone?" Me?.
You don't exist in Macboy's world.
In the beginning, there was null.
I did not request removal of the article - as a Slashdotter I exercised my right to discuss the relevance and/or content of the article.
Big difference. Please try to keep up.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
And your point is what, precisely?
I am a nerd, I am interested in the design and technical capabilities of stuff.
Size and profitability of a company is not directly proportional to the quality of what they produce. (e.g. VHS vs Betamax)
Therefore share prices don't interest a true nerd.
Please discuss... it's a quiet afternoon for me & I've karma to burn. So go for it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Upon seeing the RSS title, I was hoping this piece was about Steve finally going down-market. Yes, Apple's brand identity is about bourgeois status, but doesn't Steve ever consider doing something about the digital divide anyway?
Apple has repeatedly shown that it can create whole new markets. How about celebrating this nice round number stock price by working on something for the not-so-well-off?
Silly, I know.
You are repeatedly defining nerd in terms of you. Until you get past that, there is nothing to debate.
Invaders must die
A commonly used tactic. Cannot win main argument discussion, therefore moves to discussion of semantics.
You should have considered that before you made an inept attempt at attacking my semantics, and were found wanting.
Points 1 and 2 in your argument are examples of the true Scotsman fallacy, and are at any rate unsubstantiated. It's great to see my ability to predict internet debating styles holds up.
Once again, the objective is not to convince you to be interested. The objective is to demonstrate that this is/is not news for nerds. You've not done so.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It's about perception when it comes to the stock market. Many analysts and investors believe that Apple is growing and are optimistic about the potential. Given the track record over the last decade, they are right to be optimistic. With the exception of a few products like the Apple TV, Apple is successful and has made tons of money every time they venture into a new market. At the same time, they are experiencing growth in their traditional market of computers. Could Apple stumble badly? Yes any company can but they haven't yet.
But as a comparison you could look at MS. MS stock price has stayed pretty much the same. While MS is highly profitable, analysts haven't seen that they've made money on anything that isn't Office or Windows. It's about the potential not always the profits.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes but Windows Phone 7 also represents a step backward when it comes to business features. MS is heavily focused on consumers now with WP7. Office and Exchange integration is just a stop gap. MS has promised more features like remote wipe, etc. in the future. Right now, it appears that Blackberry is the only game for business phone users.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In addition, in point 1 you state:
A fan of Marvel "Iron Man" comics cares far more about the quality of writing and artwork in the comic than Marvel's share prices.
Even assuming point 1 was true (it's fallacious, as established), you implicitly allow that a nerd, in this case a fan of Marvel's Iron Man comics, could care about Marvel's share prices, provided that they cared about the comic itself more. So if point 1 was true as written, then my assertion - that this is news for nerds - would be implicitly true.
Thanks.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Ah, apologies, I should say that you were asserting that the article should never have been posted in the first place and was of no relevance to Slashdot's audience, because it was of no personal relevance to you.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
D&D is nice and all, but it won't keep my boiler running when I retire.
I've not played it myself in about 15 years or so - I was using it as a demonstration as to why I perceive myself to have got less nerdy with age.
I just existed from day to day, never worrying about where my next meal was coming from, kind of getting by, but I ended up in a whole mountain of debt and a very bad situation.
I was no different, believe me.
Maybe you are luckier than I am and know how to do this stuff properly, but to me it was a mystery.
Yes, I was lucky. I found a missus with far more financial sense than me who helped get me on the straight and narrow. We're still happily together some 18 years later.
Eventually I figured out I needed to get out of debt. No food does that to you. So I looked around for info about how to do it, the website I happened across was The Motley Fool, i'm sure there are others, that was around 15 years ago.
Whatever works - and it still always needs some strength of character to do it.
It was a long, hard struggle to get where I am to day. I have no debt except a mortgage, and I have actually started to save money. For the first time in my life my net-worth is positive. On this journey I continued to read, and discovered how interesting investment can be its far more than greedily watching the stock price. Quite the contrary it makes you absolutely aware of what is going on in the world, global economics is far more complex, wide reaching and interesting subject than I could have imagined.
I agree entirely. I keep an eye on economics, even as a total computer an OS nerd, I find a lot of that stuff incredibly interesting. But then if you have that level of interest, you also fully understand that the technical beauty of what a company makes is NOT necessarily related to their stock price or size.
It annoys me that the same people here who used to say "Windows is crap even though Microsoft's share price is high" are now saying "Apple's higher share price is an indicator of how good their products are" - total hypocrisy & rubbish.
What worked for me was seeing finances as a game. Some kind of huge mmrlrpg. I love stat building games and so once this clicked all of a sudden it became fun to plane for the future and try and accumulate wealth. Its the best game I have every played, and the results seem to have so much more meaning than all the others. You should try it.
Again, whatever works, and if you got out of debt & happier as a result then good for you, I mean it.
But, my point is that please don't expect a resounding "Whoopie Do" from me just because Apple's share prices have smashed some all-time high. As a gadget nerd, it's of no interest.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"True nerd"! Ding ding ding! We have the No True Scotsman fallacy!
Congratulations!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Let's read the banner together, shall we? Would you like me to put a nice tinkly little tune on so it makes it easier for you?
Ready?
"Slashdot. News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters"
Are you still with me? Or do you need a break and a glass of warm milk before we continue.
I repeat - nerds don't care about share prices. Therefore stock prices is not news for nerds. Therefore I am arguing (note that BIG word there and don't read it again as "frothing at the mouth & demanding the takedown of the article") the relevance of posting this article.
Just because the article mentions Apple (I will pause there for a few seconds so you can make a quick reverent bow towards Cupertino) does not automatically mean it is news for nerds.
There. Got it now? Go for it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm a nerd, I care, plenty of other nerds in this thread care. The fact that I'm willing to debate the point on the internet honestly only emphasises my point.
FYI, the "I'm going to say you're a fanboy so that I can feel I've got the moral high ground" schtick only works as far as you can make a convincing case for fanboyism. It doesn't play very well as a rhetorical approach outside videogame forums, so you may want to restrict it to your arguments on those.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
does Apple pay dividends or are stockholders just a bunch of people agreeing that a piece of paper is worth $n because fertility rate of penguins skyrocketed? After all penguins and performance of Apple have exactly the same influence over the price of stocks, which is 0. People think it matters but they are wrong. Dividends are what allows to evaluate realistic value of stocks. Without that you just trade a piece of paper and your investment is all about finding a greater sucker once you want to get your money back.
Many companies do not provide dividends: Dell, Amazon, Apple. It's all about how people perceive the value of the company anyways in any stock market.
How is that different from housing market which crashed not that long ago? 'It can only go up' bullshit and people lined up to buy only to flip the house to somebody else. House doesn't pay for itself (unless you are into rentals) so it's not much of an investment, your only hope is to find a greater sucker. Stock market full of dividend-less stocks is just a game of hot potato, last one will get burned and wiped out.
Pretty much that describes any stock market, commodity market, futures market, etc. That is the risk/reward aspect of most investments. If you want a guaranteed and safe investment, buy US Savings Bonds because if the US government defaults, everyone is screwed anyways. But at a measly 1.4%, you are not going to get rich.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
when you put your money in the bank, you expect to get n% every year. That helps you to estimate viability of your investment. Same thing with stocks with dividends. You see company's profits, you estimate how much they pay the shareholders, you calculate how many years is required for the investment in that stock to pay for itself and any money coming in later is pure profit for you. You have some hard data to work with.
Now apple stock - company may be worth n, may have net profits m/year but that doesn't mean anything, there is no physical bond between price and performance. People create it in their minds (company grows, so stocks must be good thus it rises) but it doesn't mean it's there. Stocks rise only because people think they will rise, not because they expect to be paid reliably for owning the stock from company's profits. Owning the stock alone does you absolutely no good, you have to find a sucker to see your money, period - just like you had to find one to sell a house.
You mentioned delusion and fiction - very accurate. Stock market downturns are so severe lately simply because it's now ruled by faith of the participating players and lots of hot air, not by simple math. Sharks use the math and they screw everybody else over and over.
Are there too many companies that have had a steady climb? And the article says it's split adjusted, meaning the shares aren't worth $300, but if you reverse every split so you're back to the same amount of shares that were out there in the beginning, THEN they'd be worth $300. Big whoop. If you "split adjusted" IBM's shares, or heck even Microsoft's shares, I'm pretty sure they'd be worth a hell of a lot more than $300 in that sense.
Hello. You know I agree with pretty much everything you say and get where you're coming from. The only thing I take issue with is the Nerd Elitism (for want of a better word). I've always disliked the social movement that lumps disparate interests such as IT and comic books together. I see it as some mishapen product of the American school system (I'm European) and an unwelcome cultural export that says: you like database analysis and design, therefore you get lumped in with the Star Trek fans, etc. Rolling in a lack of avarice to the ever-expanding remit of the movement, well it's admirable in its way but it's in no way a preserve of "the nerd". I'm not even sure it's a prevalent trait (have you seen the graphics card industry?).
I'm happy that you take some pride in your nerdiness, but (and this is probably a good thing), most of those positive attributes you hold up aren't banners of your tribe, they're just qualities of you as an individual.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Yes, it is unfortunate that Apple hasn't standardized on some vector graphics format. In my iPhone development I often find it easier to generate an image programmatically than have an image for the different resolutions.
with the fed printing dollars like there is no tomorrow? no thanks, i'll pass. The US will try to inflate the debt away, screwing the bond holders in the process. Why there are suckers buying US bonds (or any bonds in general) is a mystery to me.
Big part of modern markets are virtual goods and i simply don't like it. They tend to be extremely profitable so everybody loves them, but they are also very risky and you lose big time in times of downturns. I guess people love spectacular gambling, not slow, steady, boring, economically sound investment.
When you buy a stock with no dividends, the perception of value is all there is. This is an iherently risky trade and you can get wiped out completely because if nobody is willing to buy the value drops to 0 and there is nothing you can do to get any money back.
When you buy copper you get a tangible item (thus it will never have 0 value) plus there are people willing to buy it from you because they want to make things of it. Profitability of their products acts as an anchor of the price of the raw material. Yes, it's also a perception of value but it doesn't exist in a vacuum as opposed to dividendless stocks which don't have any anchor to provide the check on their price.
You're correct to a degree, inasmuch as stock prices can be inflated artificially (esp. when there's an anomalous growth spurt that's assumed to be sustainable). Absolutely you can get stocks where the price is completely decoupled from whatever the underlying company is worth. The market is not an effective tool for estimating a company's value. However that does not mean that the whole exercise is a game of bullshit.
You're only offloading on a sucker if the stock you're offloading actually is overvalued. If you offloaded your Apple shares back around 2000, the recipient would be in a position to offload those shares for a much better profit today, so you'd be the sucker in that instance. In that case, owning the stock has done them much more good than you.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Vector assets are already supported on OS X. Vector assets aren't supported on iOS for performance reasons, but the APIs are the same.
When you buy a stock with no dividends, the perception of value is all there is. This is an iherently risky trade and you can get wiped out completely because if nobody is willing to buy the value drops to 0 and there is nothing you can do to get any money back. When you buy copper you get a tangible item (thus it will never have 0 value) plus there are people willing to buy it from you because they want to make things of it. Profitability of their products acts as an anchor of the price of the raw material. Yes, it's also a perception of value but it doesn't exist in a vacuum as opposed to dividendless stocks which don't have any anchor to provide the check on their price.
Stocks with dividends are less risky but they're still risky. The price is still dictated by perception. That's why MSFT stock hasn't really grown; investors don't perceive it to be growing so they are not investing. If you bought MSFT when it peaked near $40 in mid 2007, you'd would have lost nearly half your money right now.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Tragedy? Perhaps the things that you believe are so crucial are just not important in the larger scheme of things. Did you ever stop to think that perhaps you are the fringe element and mainstream simply doesn't care that they can't install some random app from some random developer? A quarter of a million apps does a lot to allay fears of a 'restrictive' platform. Linux is totally free and open, yet it too struggles with mainstream acceptance. Did you ever stop to wonder if perhaps being open and free wasn't all that's needed for success? If it's obviously not working there, why would you expect it to a shoe-in for some other platform?
A Tragedy? Hardly. A tragedy was 9/11. This is just inconvenient to geeks and business as usual for businesses. For iJoe, it's all irrelevant.
The overall productive uselessness of our economy will be her demise.
Based on the headline, I was hoping that Apple was inching toward a $300 price tag for some offering in their Macintosh line. Man am I bummed.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Well, Windows Mobile is "7" and Apple is only "4" so that makes Windows mobile almost twice as good.
Your math doesn't include the splits. If you had bought $10,000 worth of AAPL on Sept 16, 1997, you would've bought 1,823 shares. They've split twice since then so you'd now have 7,292 shares which would be worth $2.18M.
After all penguins and performance of Apple have exactly the same influence over the price of stocks, which is 0. People think it matters but they are wrong. Dividends are what allows to evaluate realistic value of stocks. Without that you just trade a piece of paper and your investment is all about finding a greater sucker once you want to get your money back.
That's not true. You really do own a piece of a company when you buy its shares, and trading them to another investor is selling that small piece of control. When the trading occurs in small amounts between individual investors, it feels useless, as you don't own enough of the company for any real control. The person purchasing those shares is in the same boat - those shares are relatively worthless.
However, when a company gets acquired (a very common thing in the tech industry), the acquiring company must purchase all of the shares at a price which nearly everyone will be inclined to sell at (typically the latest closing price plus some profit margin). It's at that point you realize the shares you own really do mean something; you DO own a piece of the company, and the acquiring company must purchase those shares from you.
Actually, you're absolutely wrong.
Stock price is the market valuation of the Net Present Value of the company. Dividends only extract value from shares, and hands it to current owners of those shares, in the form of cash, it takes resources that can be used by a company and hands it over to others.
Some Market stocks are valued way beyond their realistic value (see Amazon), based on growth and income. Apple is NOT one of those companies. The PE ratio of low to mid 20s is on the slightly "high" side, but compared to speculation on IPOs is quite reasonable. Average PE Ratio is in the mid to high teens, for stable established companies. Companies experiencing rapid growth in earnings tend to be right where APPL is today.
So, while a "bunch of people agreeing" on valuations, that is true regardless of whether or not a company pays dividends. And your post just shows your ignorance in how stock market works. Additionally, what is that green piece of paper in your wallet worth? It is fiat currency and is only worth what people think it is worth. It actually has less value than the piece of paper representing stock of the same worth.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As others have pointed out countless times, dividends are paid out by companies which are no longer in a growth stage in an attempt to make their stock appear more attractive to investors. It is foolish to buy stocks that pay dividends at in a down market and wise to buy into growth stock. Paying a dividend shows that the company does not have any plans to grow through acquisitions or taking risks on new market segments.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
If you think stocks are risky you are simply a moron. Stocks have been the best investment over any 20 year period during the last 300 years. You should have been 100% in stocks (or close to it) until you were within 20 years of retirement, and at that point incrementally increase your position in bonds until you were at 100% bonds at the time you retired.
I really don't think it's that hard, but I guess maybe it is for some people. Personally I think you just regret never buying stocks when you were young and realizing your mistake now you try to justify your poor decision.
I'm not personally interested in your existence, so please fuck off and kill yourself. Really. We don't have any interest in you, so why are you alive? It just doesn't make any sense. So what if a few people care about you? The vast majority don't, and we shouldn't have to put up with you.
The grandparent is too harsh but I think Apple still is hyped. They keep wearing a suit ten times the man inside, sure the company has grown but so equally has their hype. I know many people that are buying Apple products they'd never ever consider buying if it wasn't made by Apple, and I don't mean because their products are that revolutionary different. And in that sense, the stock market is not wrong. Are the consumers wrong? Well, I think this old chestnut fits: "The market can be wrong longer than you can be right."
Right now Apple can pick any market they want and have a burst start of loyal fans, press coverage and 3rd party developers. No chicken or egg problems that there's no users because there's no apps and there's no app developers because there's no users. Other companies spend years doing it, even running with losses to get into the market and still only get to be a player. Apple comes in with its new iShiny and gets to command an instant premium and actually casts a shadow of doom over the other players that their market is about to disappear.
Call it what you want, but that asset is real. Most companies out there would kill to have anything like it. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to keep earning Apple lots of money in the future too. In a way Apple has become the master of self-fulfilling prophecies, they come in convincing everybody this is how it will be and then that is exactly what happens. But the core of that power is hype, not fraudulent marketing kind of hype but the kind of hype that's apparently taken root in quite many people's heads.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I bought my first shares of Apple in 1995 and continued to buy through 2000 and later. I remember my cheapest pickup was at $12 a share (pre-split its $6/share today). Been selling steadily as the price has gone up over the last few years. Ofcourse I wish I had had more money to invest in Apple at the time and I had held on to it all until now but I'm not complaining. I still have half of the shares I originally bought and at current worth can pay for both of my kids college educations (my oldest is 4 so you never know how much college will cost in 14 years!). I'll continue to sell as it goes up but I'll probably always own some Apple stock.
I'm hoping they announce a split soon.
The grandparent is too harsh but I think Apple still is hyped. They keep wearing a suit ten times the man inside, sure the company has grown but so equally has their hype. I know many people that are buying Apple products they'd never ever consider buying if it wasn't made by Apple, and I don't mean because their products are that revolutionary different. And in that sense, the stock market is not wrong. Are the consumers wrong? Well, I think this old chestnut fits: "The market can be wrong longer than you can be right."
Right now Apple can pick any market they want and have a burst start of loyal fans, press coverage and 3rd party developers. No chicken or egg problems that there's no users because there's no apps and there's no app developers because there's no users. Other companies spend years doing it, even running with losses to get into the market and still only get to be a player. Apple comes in with its new iShiny and gets to command an instant premium and actually casts a shadow of doom over the other players that their market is about to disappear.
Call it what you want, but that asset is real. Most companies out there would kill to have anything like it. And I'm pretty sure that it's going to keep earning Apple lots of money in the future too. In a way Apple has become the master of self-fulfilling prophecies, they come in convincing everybody this is how it will be and then that is exactly what happens. But the core of that power is hype, not fraudulent marketing kind of hype but the kind of hype that's apparently taken root in quite many people's heads.
Well, over the years I've become a real Apple fan, and I've never regretted any Apple product I've ever bought. But I have to admit that some of their stuff isn't so great or special, or overpriced. For example the AppleTV just doesn't interest me at all (well, maybe just to hack it, the hardware and price are interesting). Or the Mac Mini, which is a great machine, but simply too expensive for what it offers beyond similar hardware (just the form factor). So like any company in existence, they don't do *everything* right.
That said, compared to all the other computer hardware and software I've bought and/or used, the Apple gear really stands out and in some ways is miles ahead of anything the acres, dells and lenovo's have to offer. I'm not a specs fetishist like some people, so I don't care if I have a 2.8 Ghz i7 instead of a 3 Ghz one. I don't play games, so I don't need an HD 5870. But I do value seamless hardware/software integration, troublesome and easy operation, the combination of a great GUI and a UNIX shell, nice looking, quality built hardware that lasts 5 years without falling apart, silent operation. Or a smartphone that's both extremely easy to use and still very powerful (the walled garden argument doesn't fly with me, in practice it's really a red herring), with great software support, a large and active software and development ecosystem based on design principles that are modern, pragmatic and efficient. From my professional point of vew (as a software engineer) there's a lot to like about the way Apple designed and implemented OS X and iOS, and I think you won't find many software guys who dispute that.
So, clearly, Apple is doing a lot of things right. It's not magical, it's most of the time not revolutionary (though you could argue the 1st iPhone and the app store were), but it's almost always better than the competition. The focus, determination and execution of Apple's efforts in the mobile market are really astounding from a business point of view, and I think a lot of people simply don't recognize how well planned apples strategy with iOS has been up to now, most likely they have been working on this for over a decade, which now allows them to churn out devices ranging from pmps to phones to tablets at yearly intervals, with no real competition able to keep up.
So as much as I dislike fanboyism, evangelism or superlatives like 'magical' or 'revolutionary', I think it
why do you think i am ignorant? I simply don't care about superficial stuff like P/E thresholds and whatnot. I prefer to pay attention to rather oldschool values which say that buying piece of paper to sell it higher is not an investment, doesn't help to create viable businesses and doesn't produce actual wealth. It's a speculation, however you slice it.
Dividend means that business has to be stable, viable, economically sound and profitable in long-term perspective and that means nobody is interested in manipulating company's value to pump-n-dump or whatever. Dividend yield provides some 'objective' part of value other than 'it's all in the eyes of the beholder', it's the non-zero bottom of the stock price range.
What you say works only because people play the same game, they generally agree that P/E = 10 means something and P/E = 20 means something else. As long as you keep your money in the stock you get no money, you only hope that when you need it you will find a buyer. If you can't, you can wipe your ass with it.
Why don't you put the money in the bank and let them give you nothing for it, after all it's better for you when the bank gets bigger and they should make use of your cash. No, it's only better for you when you are paid to keep your money in their account. Same thing with bonds. I don't see why it should be different in stock market, after all that's how it worked initially.
of course there is no 100% safe investment and i can bet that fundamentals couldn't justify 2007 price of MSFT
either way, in such scenario the perception is not all there is to the price. As long as dividend is at least at the level of inflation you don't lose anything and if it's higher then it actually adds to your account which is not apparent when you look at the graph alone. Such stocks are not spectacular but they are safer and i'd rather keep my money in them than in the all-or-nothing type of stocks.
inflation - 5%
stock with no dividend - at least 5% to break even
stock with dividend - for example 3% price + 2% dividend to break even
such stocks they may look worse on charts when compared to growth champions but as we can see that doesn't mean shit in reality. From the owners perspective it's pretty much the same if not better, he gets money all the time and can make use of it, not only at the end.
i get what you say but given that we are still in the lost decade on Dow
http://stooq.pl/q/?s=djia&c=30y&t=l&a=lg&b=1 (30 years)
http://stooq.pl/q/?s=djia&c=10y&t=l&a=lg&b=1 (10 years)
i very much prefer to be paid for holding the stock too, thank you very much. All-paper stocks provide no cushion for the unlucky. Promise to make buck 10 years later is not enough. Downturn drastically changes perception of value and there is nothing to prevent the bottom falling out.
With a economic conditions that are best described as a depression being held at bay by devaluation of the currency, Apple still sets records. I wonder when they'll be worth more than Exxon.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Abuse - the last bastion of those with nothing intelligent to add to a discussion.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
In which case, please download all of your nerd-related memories & mental definitions into my mind & I will try really hard to define nerd by your terms.
How *ELSE* am I supposed to define anything?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Rubbish. Balderdash. Crap. Bollocks.
I think it's safe to assume that if we lined up 100 regular readers of "Iron Man" and asked them the question:
"Are your regular buying habits of the comic more influenced by the quality of artwork and writing in the comic, or by Marvel's share prices?"
it's safe to assume most of them would say it was the former.
The other stuff you've written is designed to deliberately obfuscate so, without further explanation of its actual meaning, I am forced to ignore it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
You should have considered that before you made an inept attempt at attacking my semantics, and were found wanting.
My attack on your semantics was done AFTER I'd confirmed victory in the core argument - it was therefore irrelevant to the actual outcome of my victory.
Points 1 and 2 in your argument are examples of the true Scotsman fallacy, and are at any rate unsubstantiated. It's great to see my ability to predict internet debating styles holds up.
Being entirely unaware of said "true Scotsman" fallacy at this moment in time, if my statements serve as proof of said fallacy then that is entirely coincidental. But I will go off and find a definition of that fallacy now so I am aware of it for next time.
Incidentally, if I have no knowledge of what Internet debating style you are predicting, I can neither confirm or deny that said prediction is correct.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
As you are, a self professed nerd, you likely have a reasonable grip on logic. Consider this hypothetical example:
Joe sixpack is a guy. A guy who likes to drink beer, but he does not like to drink wine.
Joe sixpack asserts that because he does not like wine and that he is a guy, that guys do not like to drink wine.
This is hasty generalisation, that is drawing a conclusion about an entire group based on insufficient evidence.
In your original post you stated you weren't interested in share prices, and you also said that you were a nerd. Subsequently you went on to say that the whole point of your first post was that "stock prices is not news for nerds".
You concluded that stock prices is not news for nerds, based on the fact that you are a nerd that is not interested in stock prices. You therefore appear to have fallen foul of the logical fallacy outlined above. QED
Invaders must die
You misunderstand, tragedy of the commons is a figure of speech which relates specifically to the outcomes of behavioural patterns of the individuals vs the group. It is not a literal tragedy, at least not in the singular definition you have ascribed to the word. (context is important when looking to understand the specific meaning of a word that carries several)
Specifically, Tragedy of the Commons, relates to the way in which individuals may prefer behaviours that may directly benefit themselves, but that ultimately may have net negative effective on society as a whole. Forgive me if you knew this, your post suggested otherwise.
I don't think it is fair to say that their is no benefit to be had through endeavouring collectively to enhance our understanding, and further development of, technology as a whole. The point you make about the success and popularity of proprietary software platforms are equally valid, but they merely server to illustrate the point that people are going to choose the short term benefit over the long game. It's all the rage these days, never more so than in the financial sector. Where it has had a long history... "buy now pay later" springs to mind. By these standards success is easily achieved, fire out a new shiny iDevice and don't look any further than the next quarter. We'll all be dead soon anyway.
Crucially though in your reply, I think you have rather put the cart before the horse. Somewhat ironically, I am one of the individuals who right now is putting their personal benefit ahead of the group. I sit and a write this post on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro, my iPhone next to me... or is it the wife's... oh no her is plugged into the iMac in the other room. So it seems redundant to lecture me about iJoe's needs, for I am Joe.
What is intriguing about humans is that we are complex beings, capable of holding in our minds many conflicting thoughts. Balancing our morality, philosophical ideals with our emotional reactive selves. I know with every swipe to unlock and click to install I am just lining the pocket of Jobs et al, and doing nothing directly to contribute to the open source movement, but that is a very short term outlook. These tools are a means to an end, the revolution isn't going to happen overnight and I doubt I will play much of a part in it, but it doesn't mean I can't understand it, want it to succeed. Neither does it mean that I cannot use proprietary tools to contribute in some small way to that movement. My long term goals are very much aligned with open source.
And all the while, I'm hanging on to those apple shares I bought I couple of years back when Steve stepped out of the picture for a while, and Wall street collectively bricked itself. So yeah, I'm over the moon with the way things are going!
To say I haven't thought about my position in the world is a gross underestimation, I know exactly who I am and where I fit - I understand my internal conflict, I understand when not to let idealism get in the way of pragmatism, and I understand that these decisions do not mean I cannot still hold true certain beliefs.
To me, Open Source is not about installing an app from a random developer, it is a movement based around a philosophy of sharing for the benefit of the human race as a whole. It is greater than the sum of its parts. One reason it is not accepted by the mainstream is that it is largely incompatible with capitalism.
As a species we have evolved to a point where we understand the principle of collaborative effort often being superior to individuals, but the extent to which that is evident is still hugely variable. I think we are heading in the right direction though.
Invaders must die
Your assumption of a tragedy in this context assumes that the closed platform of the iPhone is poor for the larger whole, when in fact, the very ability of Android to develop and thrive in such an environment directly contradicts such an assumption.
Yeah, me too. Before reading TFS, I thought it had something to do with getting a $300 netbook out the door.
Actually, you're still wrong.
Why would you funnel money out of a company that can re-invest that capital for you, and you don't get gains or pay taxes on it while you hold it?
If you bought a company that paid Dividends (say IBM) you'd be paying taxes (25-40%) on that income (which has already been taxed once) and then having to deal with it (say re-invest). Why would you do that? It isn't efficient use of capital at all. THAT is why corporations don't pay dividends.
Of course all of that is because we have ridiculous laws on taxing income (WTF?), when we shouldn't be. But that is part of the Fairness Nazi's grip on socialism and income redistribution(which doesn't work). Why would you tax something that you want to encourage (income, savings, investing etc?)
No wonder we have a debt problem, we give credit for debts, and tax income ...
Lastly, if you want "solid" investment, I suggest Gold. That is REAL as you're gonna get. Or bonds, which are about one of the least speculative investment there is. Stocks, all stocks, even the ones that pay dividends, have speculation built into the price.
And dividends are no guarantee of stability of a company. Just ask the shareholders of SCO Group. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Isn't Apple required to purchase the stocks back from you if you want to sell them?
Umm... RTF *is* an MS format. Does nothing to invalidate your argument, just saying.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Moderation +1
20% Insightful
20% Flamebait
20% Troll
I heart slashdot math
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If crapple is that good anyone could run it. Ignore the man behind the curtain.
Yeah, sorry. What I meant was, "Please mod my post offtopic, because that's what it is." I realized after I posted it that "this" was ambiguous.
a company's success in the stock market is a measure of what is selling in the marketplace.
this is not a universal truth, it may not even be true 50% of the time.
Umm... RTF *is* an MS format. Does nothing to invalidate your argument, just saying.
You may be right, but it only makes that situation more ridiculous. The thing that blows my mind is the fact that it cannot faithfully reproduce documents between two systems with the exact same version of MS Office installed, the fact that office needs additional plugins just to understand older versions of it's own highly proprietary format is an absurd technical problem. Whatever the cause for this may be, it's simply unacceptable for a product that costs so much and is regarded as standard. In the past standards came into existence because they worked, MS uses a business model that penetrates markets, but not through the merit of their software as much as the quality of their contract lawyers. Apple is certainly a very annoying company on many levels, but at least their success is driven (however, not entirely based) on the quality of what they produce. I really cannot stress how headache free my computer is, and (without having to reinstall my OS every 6 months and operate it with impeccable vigilance) my computer works exactly as well as the day I purchased it. There is a lot to be said for the POSIX style of organizing an OS, it's really quite elegant.
A good example of this is when I watched a professor I work with try to find a day old document on her W7 (installed within the last few weeks) computer. The search in the file manager was so amazingly slow we had to give up and find another way to locate it. Compare this experience to what I have to do on my own computer to find a file. The search includes the actual content of the file (which you can turn off very easily if it is getting in the way of finding your results) as well as any file names. This, in itself, is not anything to write home about, except that the whole process from hitting enter to getting the last result seems to happen instantaneously, as in, it has taken less than 1 second at most since I have gotten the machine. This is because my computer does all the indexing ahead of time when I am not using it, so that I don't have to wait on it when I need it. I am really not exaggerating when I say that most work takes me about a half to quarter as long on my mac than it would on any other system I have used thus far in my life.
I personally couldn't care less which computer people choose to use. But if the world 'runs' on Microsoft, the world is a sucker of the lowest order. It's really absurd how short MS products fall of the bar set by the rest of the industry.
"I am not blind to the significance of Apple's growth, I just don't consider it relevant to me."
So go back to the gym where you belong and get off of this uninteresting to you nerd site. There is nothing here for you.
"Why can you not visualise that someone can admire something for it's design & quality while not giving a toss about the share prices?"
For the same reason you refuse to believe there is more than one nerd on the planet and that it isn't just you?
"Proprietary is anti-freedom, anti-freedom is wrong, so supporting proprietary solutions is unethical."
I'm not sure if I'm reading slashdot or the communist manifesto ... wake up please, communism has failed and most of the readers here live in capitalist countries, earning their living with proprietary work.
How is this not true of the USD?
It's just worthless paper, it only has value if you can find some sucker who will give you goods or services in exchange for it.
Yes, let's subtract "technical people" from people who buy stuff so that we can pretend "consumers" don't purposefully buy Android phones. Let's also define "technical people" as "people who know what OS their phone runs" so that we aren't talking utter bullshit.
I think parent would define "technical people" as "people who care what OS their phone runs." Lots of people know what OS their phone runs—they just care about whether they can run that cool app their brother/wife/husband/sister/pet/whatever just showed them.
I'm not a Microsoftie by a long shot - being a Linux admin and dba - but I do have to shoot down your example: MS has had a document indexing service for quite a while; and they can't really help it if the college administrators (I presume, you're talking about a professor) turn that off on their installs.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I'm not a Microsoftie by a long shot - being a Linux admin and dba - but I do have to shoot down your example: MS has had a document indexing service for quite a while; and they can't really help it if the college administrators (I presume, you're talking about a professor) turn that off on their installs.
No one turned anything off, these professors had nothing to do with installing the OS they were using, and they are not really the types of people who are going to dig around in system settings. Also, my point was not that Microsoft hasn't attempted to have indexed searching, I am saying it doesn't work very well. Actually, it works so poorly, my professor gave up before it could finish. This is a sharp contrast to the search feature on OS X 10.6 that finishes (literally) before you can utter the phrase "this is taking too long". If my search took longer than 2 or 3 seconds, I would assume something was severely wrong* with my computer.
*Like a W7 partition lurking somewhere on it.
I just think that people seem to spend more time learning how to work around MS software's limitations than actually making use of the computers its installed on. I am not using this to make a point about brand loyalty, I genuinely mean it when I say that I don't understand how anyone gets anything done on a Windows box. It just seems like the computer is constantly about to crash, and it often does. Simply not having to deal with a 100 ms delay on everything you do on your computer makes a big difference, and I see latent user interfaces on windows boxes constantly. People get so accustomed to that pause between a click and the intended action on Windows computers that they don't notice how much of a problem it is. It basically adds up to a significant portion of your time being spent waiting for a machine that can read millions of characters off of magnetic media in one second to finish doing the necessary calculations to display the word you just typed on the screen. It just seems like Microsoft could have tackled word-processing by now, given the hardware we have these days.
MS also seems to downgrade it's software from that of it's peers somehow. Macs allow you to scroll a window which isn't at the fore-front (something very useful windows definitely does not have as far as I can tell). So if you two finger scroll a window that is being partially obscured by another window, the scrolling occurs without the target window having to be brought to the forefront. Every piece of software I have ever used on my mac (including free beta software downloaded from some random project) can use this feature, with the exception of Microsoft Office. Seriously, I didn't believe it when I noticed it, but it is entirely the case. I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories, but it seems so ridiculous that it is almost surely intentional. In all my criticism of MS, I don't think they are that incompetent.
My computing experience is so pleasant (I have literally stopped screaming at my computer) since I switched over. It's really a completely different and worthwhile way to get things done. Our society spends entirely too much time on computers not to be more demanding of quality in their software. I think the reason most people think it is so difficult to learn how to use a computer is because it is difficult use them once you do learn. But it doesn't have to be, because I am currently typing this on an example of a computer that doesn't have these problems.
Apple could easily change it's slogan to "They actually work." or "Our computers don't have that problem." and not be the least bit intellectually dishonest in doing so.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that *he* turned it off; rather, that the uni's install monkeys did so on their install image - possibly because Joe D. Rector whined that his disk was spinning all the time.
If you're quite sure that the service was running, though, that point is moot.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
She was using it, and it yielded no results within a reasonable time frame. Once she did get results they were entirely confined to the local folder she was in, when we tried to search the entire system, it basically locked down the whole system until she cancelled or closed the window it was in. My friend puts it really well, he says that he trusts the 'working' spinning wheel on a mac. Sometimes something you are doing can take a minute to process for any variety of reasons (such as something being processor/resource intensive), but the spinning wheel always means it's working, but it's not done. But the hourglass on the windows machine can often be a precursor to a crash, and it often doesn't indicate that something is going to be completed as much as indicated what you may already know, which is that your computer is freezing up.
Absolutely. Holding onto a stock and guessing if it's about to flatten out or decline is no way to play the markets in this day and age.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I for one judge technology on basis of merit, not ideology.
Unqualified aphorisms like that one are ripe for the picking.
Are you saying you that you judge a gadget purely on its specs? Isn't someone's morality dependent on their ideological position?
Would you purchase the best piece of technology from Nazi Germany in 1940? 1943? You don't care if child labor was involved in making it? Slave labor? I suspect your more honest answer is that you simply disagree with the ideological perspective of the Free Software Foundation and friends.
Before it was repackaged as the Timex-Sinclair ZX81 and sold as a completed item, the Sinclair ZX81 was sold as either a kit, or fully assembled. If you wanted to save some money, you had to populate the motherboard and solder it together.
http://www.zx81kit.com/allcomponents.jpg
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that *he* turned it off; rather, that the uni's install monkeys did so on their install image - possibly because Joe D. Rector whined that his disk was spinning all the time. If you're quite sure that the service was running, though, that point is moot.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happened, but it did at some point return results. Do you think that if indexing is off it would still have a search box? I am not asking rhetorically, I am just curious, hehe, I have tuned windows 7 out for the most part so I am not very familiar with it beyond just using it on a day to day level.
I once actually turned the indexing off on my SSD MB-Air to 'save' read/write cycles on it because I thought the constant defragmentation would wear it out too fast (It turns out that this doesn't improve its life all that much, and I am not sure why) and the search got pretty worthless, as well as being the only time my computer has given me Apple's gray screen of death. This may be because I did it with a command line, when I should have just used the checkbox in the info screen for the drive, hehe. Once I turned it back on, all the problems were solved. Whether it is in Apple or MS, Viva le Indexing!
I'm not a windows type, either, but I do occasionally come into contact with it :-)
It wouldn't surprise me if the search box still works even with indexing turned off, really - regardless of how bad they sometimes implement things, the general ideas are often good; and it seems to me that they would remove a searchbox that isn't going to work anyway.
What a depressingly stupid machine.