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Apple Passes $300B Market Cap, 2nd In the World
An anonymous reader writes "In May, Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization to become the second largest company (by that measure) in the world. Today, with its shares riding high, Apple passed $300 billion in market cap, entering a club of two along with the still-gigantic ExxonMobile. And investors' targets could bring Apple beyond where Exxon is now (though Exxon continues to soar as well). Perhaps Wall Street is catching on that, despite the discontinuation of their underused Xserve, Apple is in fact becoming one of the key tech providers to enterprise, a position that even a year ago seemed laughable. If you consider the iPad to be a PC (which enterprise increasingly is), then suddenly you realize that Apple is expected to climb to 12% market share in 2011. Plus, of course, they have those little things called iPods, and iTunes..."
...something something
RGdot.com
The bigger they are, the harder they fall...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." --Steve Jobs
All Apple had to do was stop trying to climb the fence to play in Microsofts yard, and apply some ingenuity to marketing and manufacturing. They've done well in these regards. You don't need to be an iFanboi to tip your hat here.
Apple will never replace Microsoft in the workplace, because they don't want to, there's not nearly as much money in it as replacing Microsoft in the home.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Buying stock in a company that doesn't pay dividends is just gambling - you're buying in the hope that you can find a chump who'll pay more to buy it off you at some point in the future. You can only make money by selling the stock. Apple isn't unique in this regard: most major tech companies and oil drilling companies don't pay dividends. But to me it just looks like a house of cards. You're just gambling on investor confidence in a company.
As the iPhone and iPad continue to succeed, Apple neglects the original iPod more and more. Especially anything with a hard drive. I miss the days of dedicated music players.
Market capitalization is only one metric. There's also gross revenue (which Wal*mart wins) and net profit (which Exxon wins again). At current prices, AAPL still seems a bit overpriced compared to its peers.
it is a bleak landscape of conformity and despair.
High market capitalization doesn't mean anything other than people are interested in owning a piece of this company. It doesn't mean that the company is successful, or even profitable. It's a common fallacy (some would argue, THE common fallacy) that stock price has anything to do with the underlying company's intrinsic worth.
It's the same problem that sacked the mortgage market. The system is set up so that the bits of a company, called stock (or the mortgage) are entirely unconnected to the supposed underlying item of value, which is the company itself (building, property). With the stock market, people don't expect company dividends (anymore), and, even more bizarre, the supposed owners of the company aren't liable for any company crimes. Market capitalization is as meaningful as Twitter trends are.
That being said, it's interesting from a purely social point of view.
I don't respond to AC's.
Especially fanboys.
Why does someone have to be a "chump" to pay more for it? If the company's earnings have grown 10x then the company ought to be worth about 10x. Those earnings... do you realize they belong to the shareholders even if they just accumulate in the company's bank account? Dividends are a "feel good" disbursement for companies that aren't supposed to grow. If you want to invest in dividend paying companies go for it. Or you could buy apple and any time your holding is worth more than your basis, just sell some. You'd have done quite nicely even with that conservative approach, and yet still enjoy the feel of 0% capital appreciation that you crave.
Actually the list is skewed a bit, Berkshire Hathaway would be first as they trade in two categories, puts them combined over 400+ Billion, even more than exxon or apple. But in the end Exxon or Walmart have the real market power. Never rule out Buffett until hes not making Berk Hath's finance decisions!
"The moment came Wednesday when Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, shot past Microsoft, the computer software giant, to become the world’s most valuable technology company."
Now the politicians, regulators etc will be looking for their pound (or two) of flesh.
Being #2 isn't so bad really.
Like your post, for example.
At least in 2009 (I haven't looked up 2010)
The Blackberry phones outsold iPhones (revenue and units sold) and as usual, Nokia dwarfs them all (in market share).
Granted Apple has done quite well in the MP3 player market, and with its excellent profit margin it is certainly an extremely successful company. But let's compare Apple (market cap $296 billion) to Exxon Mobil (market cap $377 billion).
Exxon Mobil's 2010 profits of $19 Billion on $285 Billion in revenue completely dwarf Apple's 2010 profit of $6 billion on $36 billion in revenue. Granted Apple has a higher profit margin than Exxon Mobil, but in 2009 Exxon Mobil's profits were greater than Apple's revenue.
Both companies are certainly successful, but I suspect Apple's stock price has more to do with its image than its value.
You have to wonder if Apple is going to allow Lion Server to be virtualized on non-Apple servers. This would go a long way to help Apple dig out of the hole they made for themselves in the enterprise world when they canceled the XServe without offering a *REAL* replacement(no Mac Pros and/or Mac Minis are not replacements!). Allowing Lion to be virtualized on non-Apple hardware would give Apple more of a presence in the datacenter without having to maintain a "bulletproof" server hardware engineering team and a large number of parts distribution center. However Steve hates the whole "mac clone" market so much that he seems to be willing to screw his customers over rather than let them run *JUST* the server OS on non-Apple hardware. I still don't know why he didn't opt to allow OS X server to run on "certified" oracle servers, it would have been a win-win for both companies. Apple would have been able to free up the resources previously devoted to the XServe without screwing over some of their most ardent supporters and Oracle would have gotten both sales AND a ton of free advertising for their server division since Apple is currently the media darling and everyone would be reporting on said relationship.....
Monstar L
Note that MS owns a big slice of the Apple pie.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Who would want an oversized iPhone that has limited software support? Why would I want one if I can't use Entourage, Excel, Word, etc...
What I've come to find, is that my own company (subsidiary of Cox Enterprises) has created iPad apps for our general managers to track track and keep up with sales stats, trends, etc... and that most interestingly... one of our clients, Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp. has an iPad application for their field reps that allows them to do away with paper entirely while they walk/inspect the cars they intend to sell.
We are entering a world where web apps and custom "iSoftware" (has this been TM'd yet?) are now taking the place of generic software.
Anybody have a link to one of those "free iPad!!!!" websites? All of a sudden I have the urge to stretch my iPhone screen by 300%....
Every 2-3 years Apple has been releasing a product into a brand new space now. People are currently focused on the iPad. But the question every investor wants answered is what comes next and how successful could it be? Apple is already over the iPad while other companies are still trying to copy it.
Apple has been sitting at (or around?) 4-5 billion in revenue for the better part of this last decade. They have great products, and a modest growth in sales each year, but as many have pointed out, most of the ipod/iphone sales are replacements, or selling to new (young) people just entering the market. Don't get me wrong, Apple sells fantasic products (I keep eyeing the iPad as a replacement to my dead-tree edition to the NYT), but IMO their sales will plateau soon unless the global market for Apple products expands dramatically during this global recession. Let the short term buyers drive up the price; the long game almost guarantees that after an initial run, the price will plummet back to 2009 prices. Apple is squarely in the consumer market, and I don't see them expanding in to the enterprise market in the near future (unless they release an enterprise-focused brand in the near future?). HP, Dell and the like aren't going anywhere. If you're looking for a quick buck, keep browsing biotech and Big Pharma. Technology is a mature market that's been mined out. The smart CEOs in the tech sector are going to learn from the Googles and Facebooks that one time IPOs and private investment are the right way to go. IPOs followed by split after split after split will disappear as a corporate strategy for viable companies.
moox. for a new generation.
If there's one thing Apple is not, it's enterprise. iPods, iPads, iPhones and even mac OS are all consumer-grade products designed with the aim to fuse gucci-like sex appeal with simple usability. Where does security, stability, and manageability fit into this? Selling style, luxury, and limited functionality (for the sake of ease of use) has always been Apple's niche and it's worlds away from enterprise-grade software and hardware.
Consider HP SANs or the Solaris operating system: these are highly-manageable, dependable, secure enterprise products. They make up infrastructure that must be relied-upon. The companies who make them provide expert support to ensure proper setup and continuous service. They are complex and well-engineered. These are not qualities of Apple products.
Of utmost importance for enterprise users is security. It seems that Apple often botches this. Consider just the security problems with iPhones that have been discovered in the last year. We learned that iPhone email security is farcical and that their on-disk encryption doesn't really work (c.f. http://marienfeldt.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/iphone-business-security-framework/). We also saw remote execution flaws (http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2010/Sep/1024413.html), and Apple's mishandling of iPhone PKI (http://cryptopath.wordpress.com/2010/01/).
And security isn't the only feature of enterprise hardware and software that is divested by Apple. Apple's software often lacks any remote management software, let alone robust tools for this. Dependability, too, is often not a feature of their products.
To claim that Apple's products can serve the enterprise customer seems ludicrous. I would hope that, over time, the features of well-engineered enterprise products find their way into consumer-level products; deploying Apple products in the enterprise seems to transplant the flaws, shortcomings, and hassle of consumer products into the enterprise. Who desires this?
P/E for Apple is actually not all that high. What you are overlooking is that Apple's valuation is so high because they are doing great in :
a) media sales
b) portable music player sales
c) smartphone sales
d) laptop sales
e) tablet sales
The thing is that Apple has a lot of products in very new and rapidly growing markets. If you think about pretty much any one of those categories and think about room for growth, you'll realize the apple share price is still pretty conservative.
Oh, and don't forget about the massiv Apple cash reserve which they've not even deployed to any great extent.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A little late to the game but it still applies. Funny how quickly people have to downplay the accomplishment. Anyone that downplays this is by definition a Microsoft fan boy. I'm not a fan of either they both have their strengths and weaknesses. It's amazing that Apple which was never seen as a strong competitor can in a matter of a few years blow past Microsoft. Microsoft has gotten sedentary and lacks any real innovation so it was just a matter of time before Apple passed them. Microsoft may be on more computers but if they aren't careful even that can change. This should be a wake up call for Microsoft. I'm sorry but Windows 7 is still a pain in the ass compared to Snow Leopard. If all my software ran on Snow Leopard I'd drop Windows 7 like a hot potato and that's a fact. They need to go back to their roots with with Windows 8 and stop trying to be a pale knock off of the Mac OS. I still prefer XP over any of the current OS's which is a sad thing all these years later.
Whoa!... So, Michael Dell, eat your heart out.
Where does security, stability, and manageability fit into this?
The thing is, those were never really that distinct from consumer needs. We have all seen what happened when the "enterprise grade" Windows was used by the world. It's pretty obvious the enterprise for all the bluster doesn't ACTUALLY require the level of security you call for, as much as they might wish for it.
Of utmost importance for enterprise users is security. It seems that Apple often botches this. Consider just the security problems with iPhones that have been discovered in the last year. We learned that iPhone email security is farcical and that their on-disk encryption doesn't really work
If you read to the bottom of your own link, FDE works in iSO4.x. The device is properly encrypted, and can be remote wiped as needed.
It's as good as any other device out there; better than most and I would argue better by far than Blackberry since company data doesn't have to go through a RIM server.
Dependability, too, is often not a feature of their products
Oh right, that's why the Apple consumer product ratings are so high. Because they are so "unreliable". Well sir then please explain how so many companies stick with POS Dell boxes that fail if you sneeze and sometimes if you don't. I know, I had to deal with them for years on end.
Your whole post is just so much trolling a view of Apple from way back in 2005 or so. It ignores the very real use of iPads across the enterprise, the substantial management features and Microsoft integration in place today. In short, it totally ignores the reality of modern IT departments and the needs of business units in real companies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you mull it over, you'll realize that consumers actually require a HIGHER level of security than do enterprises. Enterprises can afford to be a little lax because they have full-time people dealing with security issues that arise, and maintain boxes.
Consumers have noen of that; they have only themselves. Would not the blood of any corporate IT manage run cold at the thought of a system that had to be maintained by a user, for years on end? But that is exactly what happens with hundreds of millions of consumers. Computing devices aimed at them must be FAR more solid and robust than any product targeting an enterprise, if they are to work well for any length of time.
Furthermore employees are a lot easier on equipment than a home user, a home user moves stuff around and takes it with them. Office equipment generally vegetates in one location, and is handled with more care.
And that is why the enterprise is starting to adopt Apple gear, because Apple has had to build software and hardware secure and robust enough for real world use, not coddled managed enterprise land. In the end business people want solutions to work and it simply cannot be overlooked anymore that Apple gear is providing real solutions that work for everyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not the ORIGINAL PDA, the ORIGINAL physicist - but both have something to do with apple. To paraphrase Newton "What goes up, must come down"
FYI, Android has already surpassed the iphones market share
Right but...
Either way iPhone is currently on the decline
Actually not at all, the iPhone is seeing huge sales growth.
That's because while the market share of smartphone sales might be in decline (I don't think that's quite yet the case but let's pretend it is) the market segment as a whole ie growing very rapidly, so Apple itself is still growing at a large clip. Smartphone sales growth of something like 18% a quarter is not a "decline".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It doesn't mean that the company is successful, or even profitable
It doesn't it doesn't it doesn't!
*sucks thumb*
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A friend asked me to help get their new Christmas MacBook Pro to print photos with a 8-yr-old Canon printer. First, I go to the Canon website looking for drivers. Canon doesn't have them for download for that model anymore, though, not even for Windows. Googling finds the 'download-driver' websites offering drivers...but they are for older OS versions and won't download without the obligatory 'signing up' etc. Frustrated, I plug the printer usb cable into the macbook and expect to see a pop-up screen about finding new hardware and where should it look for a new driver but...nothing. Click through to 'printers' and...it says the printer is not only recognized but ready to print. Yeah, sure. Click on the iPhoto app and select 4x6 borderless print and...in a few seconds out pops a beautiful print. I'd been so conditioned by the Windows way of doing things that I expected it not to work with OS X 10.5. What does this have to do with the TFA? Only that Apple has got it going on right now. Someone else might beat them but it won't be because Apple wasn't offering good products...the someone else will have to be offering much better products and that is going to be very, very difficult to do.
if microsoft hadn't been paying out dividends for the past decade their market cap would be roughly $300b
if appl hadn't been paying out dividends for the past decade their maret cap would be roughly $300b
Hate to gloat, but ...
Hey Ballmer, How you like THEM Apples?
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Does anyone else remember when AOL had a market cap of $222 billion, because the Internet was the new big thing and AOL, with its acquisition of Netscape and Time Warner, was sure to dominate that space forever?
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/fortune/1002/gallery.biggest_losers.fortune/8.html
Yeah.
If Steve Jobs so much as sneezes Apple loses 20 percent of its market cap. Not because he's so essential, but because investors want to get out ahead of the gigantic Hype bubble deflating. We've seen this before. When will people learn?
Indeed. As the GP said: investor confidence/some chump buying it at a higher price. Without a dividend, there is no inherent return on investment. It's only going to go up so long as someone is willing to pay you more than you paid for it.
Since the GP used oil investments as an example, I'll point out my own experience from researching them: there's barely any good oil companies that aren't paying a healthy dividend. As some southerners are fond of saying, you could swing a dead cat into a room filled with oil investment ideas and no matter where it lands, you'll likely find a company that pays at least a 3% dividend (and 6-12% dividends are very common).
Oil investments are actually one of the very best investments for the elderly and poor because they are so reliable about paying dividends in bad times. The oil companies my grandmother owned may have lost half of their value in 2008, but there was not even a hiccup in her getting her dividend checks from them.
I agree completely. Apple's 21.5-ish P/E is quite good. I know a lot of people would argue with me but for a tech stock it's very reasonable, especially one with the image of Apple. After all, stock prices are based on image almost as much as performance.
The fact Apple has a highly evangelical user base says something about their products - they're meeting needs that customers didn't even know they had.
I'm a classic case where I saw the first iPod commercials and thought, "wow, that looks stupid! If I'm going to listen to music, I'm going to listen at home on my hi fi system."
Fast forward several years and I'm absolutely inseparable from my iPod.
As Henry Ford said, if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Apple have a 21.8 12 month normalized P/E which would be considered high (MSFT is 12.1, normal is between 10 & 16). Sure there is a debate to be had about if it is simply overvalued or if there is a good reason to believe revenues will rise sufficiently to justify this price but it is definitely high.
Also cash on hand doesn’t have much of an effect on P/E. It isn’t recorded as part of revenue and has both a negative (hanging on to large amounts of cash without either investing or issuing a dividend) and positive (investor confidence in medium term sustainability) impact on price which cancel each other out. Also consider that MSFT ($44.17B) has nearly double cash on hand as compared to APPL ($25.62B).
They should dump 50 Mio $ for Wine on Mac Development. It is a minor investment but would make a huge difference. With a market capitalisation of 300 Billion you can do these kind of things with ease.
If I call a horse's tail a leg, how many legs does that horse have?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
This is the new year. Investors usually stampede over the new year. It only makes sense that a rising property such as Apple would get a large boost off this. By March things will probably have flattened out, unless there are some major Apple announcements or releases in that time.
and their market cap is down to a little under $500,000.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOXQ.PK
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Gee, and I still have my issues of Macworld where every editor was writing Apple's epitaph, Apple's stock was about $12 a share, and Spindler had turned the company into the "Computer of the week" with dull-as-dirt case designs (they looked like the old "Leading Edge" machines).
Infoworld by that point wasn't even acknowledging Apple's existence, and everything Apple-related was folding up. Then came the rumors that Apple was going to buy BeOS, but nobody believed it would be enough to save them. Then came the annoucement that they had bought NeXT, and Steve Jobs was returning.
Everyone gasped, and then continued to say it wouldn't be enough to save them. Then Jobs introduced the "Fisher-Price Mac", a candy-colored all-in-one atrocity with no floppy drive... The iMac. It did OK, but not well enough.
Then Jobs decided to enter the MP3 player market, an interesting twist, as that market seemed too small to make money. And that's where the genius began. Apple decided to create NEW MARKETS, rather than try and push into already crowded markets that were oversaturated with cheap PCs. Of course, we got Cmdr. Taco's famous "lame" review, but Apple's "Think different" continued to push us with marketing and Apple tied into the "cool factor" of having an iPod.
And Apple's been riding high ever since. Not bad. Not bad at all for a company that everyone, every so-called "expert" considered to be done, kaput, washed-up, finito.
And yet, these experts continue to scream in their columns and blogs, and on CNBC about how right they are about everything, and I have to wonder how those people sleep at night being so wrong all the time, and yet, get paid to give their opinion.
Go figure. All I know is that I have a friend who bought Apple stock when they were at their low point because he believed in that company. He's doing very well right now, I assume. More power to him, and screw those "experts".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
How could using the Zune for duplicating the entire Apple business model fail?
The strategy worked before...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Well, Apple has actual products. There is no imaginary bubble that is being inflated on what COULD happen. Apple is already making it happen, and those products will expand, we all know this. Even if those products didn't expand, their market for continual updates will keep the company healthy on its own.
You are out of your tree if you think their share price is "still pretty conservative" when their share price has them as the second most highly valued company in the world. It's already been pointed out that Exxon's _profit_ is higher than Apple's _revenue_.
The sheer insanity of Apple's share price is a perfect indicator of _everything_ that's wrong with Wall Street and the stock market. You'll tell me that I'm wrong of course, but you'll cry just the same in a year or two when Job's gets the sniffles again and their shares devalue 20% or more in a week.
The P/E is basically a measure of where the market expects the stock to go. When the company plays out its tech innovation, 10 to 16 is about right. When it is still a growth company, 20 just says it will settle on a price that will make it about 10 to 16.
Apple has shown no slow down in innovation, so this is probably a good bet.
Well, there were people buying Goldman at $280 and Google at $690, too a few years ago. Let them think what they want. Post hoc market analysis is always great to justify the trade you just made - until you start losing money that is.
Personally I wouldn't touch the market with a 10 foot pole right now, and I've been out for the past 6 months. It doesn't feel right. I'll let other people try to make a few percent in this sideways trading. There are other, safer ways of making money. But by all means the GP and his buddies should by all the AAPL they can. Just look out for worms...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
P/E is a projection of how the market thinks a company will grow.
A huge pile of cash has a substantial impact on the forecast, because it means that as the economy strengthens again Apple has a lot of choices to buy into growth - acquiring other companies that can give Apple a large boost.
It also means to some extent that if a smaller competitor comes along Apple will be able to "buy them out" (hopefully not in the Simpsons sense).
Lastly it means Apple has a lot of flexibility to launch new products and not make hasty choices out of a need for cash flow. So it's also indicative of a company that is prudent.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the Internet marketplace, the decline [of .NET Framework] should continue quite handily, while the intranet marketplace will be dependent on their continuing decline in the workplace and eventually home marketplaces. Things like Silverlight are their only chances of slowing the defection in this area as well.
I don't see much of a decline of .NET in the home market. Microsoft's TV gaming platform uses the XNA API on the .NET framework. Apple has no TV gaming platform unless it introduces apps for Apple TV.
EVERY SINGLE OPERATING SYSTEM, SERVER OR CLIENT, can run on lower end, cheaper hardware than Windows client or server. EVERY ONE OF THEM.
It is copyright infringement to promote hardware as capable of running Mac OS X if you are not Apple Inc. Apple v. Psystar.
While this is true, gaining ground in those industries would give them more funding to work with in whatever they wish to work in... So they can use the extra money from iPhone sales to work on their OS... And marketing their computers. And that thought is a bit scary when you consider what they can do.
you'll cry just the same in a year or two when Job's gets the sniffles again and their shares devalue 20% or more in a week.
Why? I expect the share price to drop 50% if Jobs were to go.
That doesn't matter because (a) I'd still be ahead as a shareholder, and (b) at this point Apple has a ton of forward momentum and a corporate culture that is more responsible for what Apple is doing than just Jobs. There's no way Jobs is the sole reason they've had the product success they have had, that comes down to the company having a culture that has learned to do things "the jobs way". Something like that takes a decade or more to unravel, at least.
So after that 50% drop I would buy like hell because it would quickly rebound back to where it was once people realized Jobs didn't matter as much as they thought he did.
And don't forget we've already had a preview of this, when Jobs took his leave of absence earlier - the stock recovered just fine long before Jobs returned.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Amen. By sales, Apple ranks way up there at... 197th! (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_list/) Any company whose stock value is this wildly inflated vs. its actual sales indicates fanboy frenzy, which is just about the definition of Apple. Lots of companies have had inflated stock values over the years. They always come down to earth eventually.
I work for a FORTUNE 500, and here there is a line for people to get Macs and iPads. iPhone is now the standard for company-paid cellphones. The company cannot keep up with the demand from people asking for Macs. Though the share of Macs is still small, but it is consistently growing and since people and the IT department are happy about their Macs because of lower need for maintenance, I believe this trend will continue.
I'm quite sure your Apple fanboy ipod music player is FAR LESS solid and robust than an enterprise LOB system.
The more I thought about this the more upset I got about how simply ignorant and breathtakingly backwards this comment is.
I was involved for almost a decade in working on backend systems for business, and I know how they are built. The software is built in fits and starts, in the middle transferred to an offshoring company that has to be carefully controlled just to produce software that kind of works, or else carefully mauled by process consultants during development. The hardware has been sourced by carefully technical evaluation of many options, then buying the worst possible option but that ended up with your boss getting a free membership to a golf course (I know, this exact thing happened to me [only I don't know what it was the boss got out of making the poor choice he did]).
I would say there are few things on this earth less robust than any line of business system, because most of them are made to work by sheer force of will of dozens of people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All right, Scotty !! You can have her when she's done doing me !!
And Mister Spock. This Apple thing. How long before it implodes ??
Unknown, Captain. The gravitational swings are off the scale !!
Do when have time to get in on the aciton, Spock ??
If you are a gambling man, sir, then yes !!
And if I'm not, Mister Spock ??
Then, sir, I recommend we split MOST-RICKITY-TICK !! She'll take out half the sector when she blows, Captain !!
It's already been pointed out that Exxon's _profit_ is higher than Apple's _revenue_.
Indeed that has been pointed out. Now lets talk about Exxon's and Apple's growth prospects this fiscal year.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
It is ExxonMobil... if I am not painfully mistaken...
USB media is always (or nearly-always) formatted FAT32
Windows Explorer can't format FAT32 bigger than 32 GB. (The joke is that that's why it's called FAT32.) USB hard drives have been far bigger than that for years, and USB flash drives and SDXC cards will soon reach 64 GB.
pointing out clearly that not only does the buyer have to purchase a copy of OS X, *they* will have to ignore parts of Apple's EULA (which may or may not be valid)
In that case, if the second largest company in the world can convince a judge that the EULA is valid, then anyone selling a PC for the express purpose that an end user can install modified Mac OS X induces copyright infringement. For inducement as contributory infringement, see MGM v. Grokster.
That would be the Mobile, Alabama based devision of Exxon Mobil, I presume?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I used to juggle an iPod Nano(and before that, some sort of Sansa player), a cell phone and a DS.
I currently pay $60 plus sales tax per year to Virgin Mobile USA, a Sprint company, for cell phone service. An iPhone would cost me more than that a month for the $30/mo data plan plus the mandatory minimum $40/mo voice plan. How do people afford iPhone service?
And then you get to input devices. Nintendo Tetris on my DS handles a lot better than EA Tetris on my aunt's iPhone.
Some people quote market share, others quote stock prices, others count page clicks by OS type, others show market profit share and others complain about the price. But it all boils down to economic wants and needs, popularity and desire.
People can get old tech with free software for practically nothing. Or, they can pay a premium for new tech and great design. It's a big spectrum. For clothes I could get something out of a free hand-me-down box or buy the latest designer fashion. With clothing sometimes you need to simply stay dry and warm, and sometimes it pays to dress for success.
Good design can be worth it. I can be more productive if I'm not spending all my time maintaining a clunker that sucks my time and gets in my way. Good design can let my tools become transparent to my consciousness and enable me to do things I never could do before. People want that, but sometimes it is priced accordingly.
And, then there is marketing. Desire can be orchestrated. It can be managed.
Apple products are designed to create demand and fit desire. They are the peak of affordable design, and priced accordingly. When it comes to market share, Apple recognizes that the markets are not measured in product units, downloads or clicks. The measurement is money. Apple finds broken markets to create unrealized product needs. They then design great products to fill those needs, integrate world class manufacturing and market them via the worlds best 'reality distortion field.' They then sell through a great combination of online sales and storefronts that are a joy to enter. And, finally back it all up with Genius support.
They maximize desire and price accordingly. At the big poker table, you don't need to win the most hands to take most of the money. And, the same goes for that other poker game, the financial markets.
Apple is the huge winner in taking cash out of the product market place and creating valuation in the financial markets. The are the most popular in every category they decide to play, with the only popularity measure that matters: money, the universal medium of exchange.
The markets prove that Apple creates the most popular computers, music players, tablets and cell phones.
You do realize that there's.... Linux. MacOSX doesn't even need to be in the equation.
arivanov's post discusses Apple consumer devices that "are aimed at where Microsoft wanted to be, tried to be and failed to be." It gives examples of how iPod beat Pocket PC and Zune, iPhone beat Windows Mobile 6 phones, and Apple TV beat Windows Media Center Extenders and various crashy Windows CE set-top boxes. Besides, you said "EVERY SINGLE OPERATING SYSTEM", including Mac OS X.
You do realize that hardware for hardware, MacOSX is more expensive... but serving/performance capabilities, Windows is more expensive. [five paragraphs about servers]
You said "SERVER OR CLIENT", and I was taking you up on it by replying about the client. Is a Mac running Mac OS X less expensive for a given level of performance than a Dell, etc. running Windows Home Premium?
In stocks today a P/E of almost 22 is high. It should be ok, but for most equities investors won't touch it.
The big one to me is $0.00 in dividends. Go to hell and keep your damned stock. No way I would invest in any equity whose company is profitable and paying no dividends. Now I might work for them, but wouldn't invest in them. :)
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Yes, lets. With gas prices going through $3 a gallon and higher in coming years, Exxon's profit margin should be quite safe.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
You bring up giving Windows 98 to consumers s an example of how enterprises don't really want security
No, I'm talking about any variant of Windows; It was built to be secured by someone who knew how to manage Windows, which 90% of home users do not.
Even UNIX systems require some degree of understanding to secure well; A solaris box for example would require some tailoring to get secure. OS X comes with defaults out of the box (all services disabled, no root user, etc) set up by default to be basically the most secure initial configuration possible for a UNIX system.
Now back to the "example of how enterprises don't want security", I am noting that most companies in fact put Windows desktops everywhere with all of the potential for viruses and malware and so on, when a properly configured UNIX desktop would in fact be a much more secure configuration. The fact is that for many people the Windows desktops over more utility and therefore a tradeoff is made; lower security for higher utility. So again I say, companies are not necessarily interested in the utmost in security, but a degree of security that is convenient. Look at any company and you'll notice a host of potential security issues that exist because the company needs them to function.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After the first tests done, please bear in mind that I need further investigations followed to provide a more reliable conclusion. So far it turns out that the time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTTOU) bug (race condition) [12] seems to be patched in iOS4. The flaw is no longer reproducible for me in the way described above.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
lets. With gas prices going through $3 a gallon and higher in coming years, Exxon's profit margin should be quite safe.
Great, they maintain profit margins. In a market with fewer purchases.
So where is the growth from? Because the loss in sales is not made up by some slight gain in profits. There is no more money in oil for Exxon when the price rises; The price rising means it's harder to find and extract what oil there is so Exxon has to spend more to get it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Look above. You are mistakenly assuming I was responding to someone else.
Now I understand that you didn't reply directly to the post about Apple's dominance. But all parent comments in the tree still color my perception of comments below them to an extent, where a comment is simultaneously a reply to all its ancestors. So I assumed that Apple's dominance was still part of the discussion.
For client, Windows is MORE expensive than virtually any other OS when it comes to hardware costs - EXCEPT MacOSX.
In other words, on the client or for trivial server workloads, from most to least expensive: 1. Mac; 2. Windows; 3. everything else. I can get behind this. But does your analysis include the cost of replacing hardware that has a Windows driver and a Mac driver but lacks a Linux driver with hardware that has a good Linux driver, especially for things like graphics, WLAN, laptop webcams, flatbed scanners, and the like? And does it include a subscription to CrossOver so that more of your existing games and other non-free apps will keep running (vs. plain Wine) while you phase out their use?
Who would've thought that ripping off customers by selling old wine in new, shiny, expensive bottles could be so profitable?