Slashdot Mirror
Apple Becomes the First $1 Trillion US Company in History (reuters.com)
Apple became the first $1 trillion publicly listed U.S. company on Thursday, crowning a decade-long rise fueled by its ubiquitous iPhone that transformed it from a niche player in personal computers into a global powerhouse spanning entertainment and communications. Reuters: The tech company's stock jumped 2.8 percent, bringing its gain to about 9 percent since Tuesday when it reported June-quarter results above expectations and said it bought back $20 billion of its own shares. "Apple's $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018," David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland, told The Washington Post. "That puts this company in perspective." The company's fortunes were turbocharged by the launch of personal gadgets such as the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. Since then 18 different iPhones have been launched and more than 1.2 billion of the devices have been sold.
Brad Stone, writing for Bloomberg: As critics enjoy pointing out, the company under Cook has failed to come up with another iPhone-type hit. But that's like saying da Vinci never came up with another Mona Lisa-type painting. The release of the iPhone is up there with the founding of Standard Oil as one of the greatest business moves of all time. And while the iPhone has altered daily life so much that no one remembers life before it, Apple has also persuaded customers to embrace other inventions they never knew they wanted, such as connected watches that buzz and beep (to cure the distraction of the phone, Apple says) and wireless dongles that hang ridiculously from their ears.
Apple isn't alone on this mountaintop. Amazon.com, Alphabet, and Microsoft are likely at some point to pinwheel across the $1 trillion finish line, too, and they're almost as good as Apple at manufacturing customer desire. No one told Amazon they needed a speaker they could talk to, or Google a self-driving car, or Microsoft a ... OK, it's been a while since Microsoft has driven civilians wild with desire.
Brad Stone, writing for Bloomberg: As critics enjoy pointing out, the company under Cook has failed to come up with another iPhone-type hit. But that's like saying da Vinci never came up with another Mona Lisa-type painting. The release of the iPhone is up there with the founding of Standard Oil as one of the greatest business moves of all time. And while the iPhone has altered daily life so much that no one remembers life before it, Apple has also persuaded customers to embrace other inventions they never knew they wanted, such as connected watches that buzz and beep (to cure the distraction of the phone, Apple says) and wireless dongles that hang ridiculously from their ears.
Apple isn't alone on this mountaintop. Amazon.com, Alphabet, and Microsoft are likely at some point to pinwheel across the $1 trillion finish line, too, and they're almost as good as Apple at manufacturing customer desire. No one told Amazon they needed a speaker they could talk to, or Google a self-driving car, or Microsoft a ... OK, it's been a while since Microsoft has driven civilians wild with desire.
does NetCraft confirm it??
...Everyone knows Apple is going out of business (71 predictions of Apple's demise)
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Pretty amazing accomplishment!
Maybe this will quiet the anti-Cook faction.
Oh, nevermind; who am I kidding?
From the MacRumors article (emphasis mine):
Apple has officially become the world's only trillion dollar publicly traded company, in terms of market capitalization, which is simply the company's number of outstanding shares multiplied by its stock price. [...] As with most milestones of this nature, however, Apple reaching exactly a trillion dollar market cap doesn't have too much significance, beyond the vanity of it.
Pretty much sums it up.
That predominantly services the upper class is the most valuable company in history. There's something not right there. It's just not sustainable...
Perhaps what it "not right" is your initial premise.
It's amazing what years of tax evasion can do for a company.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The company revealed an adjusted outstanding share count of 4,829,926,000Wednesday alongside the company’s third-quarter results. That factors in hefty stock buybacks and nudged the trillion-dollar per share price to $207.05.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, Michael Dell famously trashed the company with a killer quote. When asked what he'd do with Apple if he were in Jobs' shoes, Dell said:
"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."
One could imagine
It is amazing how good your margins are when you employ overseas slave labor to assemble your products. But yeah: kudos to the management team.
And they can't make new Mac Pro.
While impressive, there have been far more valuable companies in history - the Dutch east india company (VOC, the first publicly traded company in the world) had an inflation-adjusted market cap of over 7 trillion at its height.
But that's like saying da Vinci never came up with another Mona Lisa-type painting. The release of the iPhone is up there with the founding of Standard Oil as one of the greatest business moves of all time.
Give. Me. A Fucking. Break. You. Hack.
And while the iPhone has altered daily life so much that no one remembers life before it
Just because you were still in diapers when the first iPhone launched, doesn't mean the rest of us don't remember a time before it.
[...] And that's very sad, that such a money-making personal computer happens to be so horrifically crippled and locked in.
Um, HOW is the Mac (you said "personal computer"; so I assume you mean Macs, not iPhones) either "horrifically crippled" or "locked in"?
"Locked in"? To WHAT?!? You can literally legally run more OSes (and even conveniently switch between them using the Mac's built-in Bootloader) on Macs than ANY other computer. You can purchase Applications from anywhere on the planet, and even write your own with Apple's FREE IDE (a Developer License only costs money if you want to submit Apps to the Apple App Store). So, where EXACTLY is the "Lock In"?
"Horrifically Crippled"? Well, since you didn't mention any specific models, it is impossible to know what was in that little pea-brain of yours when you vomited out that Apple-Hating bile; but here's some examples:
1. iMac Pro: Released in December, 2017. Pretty damn nice specs, if a bit pricey (but price != "crippling"). Up to 18 core Xeon CPU (that wasn't even really released when they started taking orders for the iMac Pro; so it doesn't get any "fresher" than that!), with a AMD Vega 56 or 64 GPU that was released about a month before the iMac Pro was released. Up to 128 GB of ECC RAM And with a built-in 5k display, with USB-C/TB3, USB-A and 10GigE ports, plus analog audio.
2. MacBook Pro: Last updated about 3 weeks ago. Up to a 6-core i9 CPU. Up to 4 TB of SSD (the fastest in any laptop!) and 32 GB of RAM. AMD Radeon GPUs that can drive up to TWO 5K external displays, PLUS the internal display. And don't forget the whopping 80 Gb/sec I/O Bandwidth, which can be easily and inexpensively (and non-Apple-specifically!) broken-out into up to FIFTY TWO Simultaneous Ports(!!!), in any one of a myriad of combinations (according to the USER's needs; not Apple's whims), and which can even be changed as the User's needs change. This is REALLY unique. Yes, other laptops have USB-C (and some even TB3); but NONE have Apple's FOUR full-speed USB-C/TB3 Ports. Oh, and don't forget, with the recent Refresh, Apple even doubled the number of cores AND the number of full-speed USB-C/TB3 Ports on the 13 inch MacBook Pro; further "UN-crippling" it... Oh, and I almost forgot: The TouchBar and TouchID (an Application-Configurable, unique touch input/display device, which provides a modicum of Touch control without stealing Screen real-estate) and the convenience and security of Apple's excellent Fingerprint sensor. How is ANY of that "Horrifically Crippled"?
Please explain rationally. I'll wait...
Many beat them to it, some several times over.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What's funny is Apple still pretends to be a computer company. They are not and haven't been for a while. They're a consumer electronics company that also makes a few computers now and then. The near-total innattention paid to the Apple Mac line of computers is proof positive of this. Without the iPhone, iPad, and iTunes, Apple would have died long ago.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Trashcan mac is a nightmare to expand or service.
Apple doesn't have parts for the iMac pro
New Macbook pro has soldered storage, so it's a service nightmare again
Apple has no idea what "pro" means
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It has now been definitively proven that Apple understands technology better than all the Apple-critics on Slashdot (and around the world).
Actually, it proves that Apple understand stock market valuations and the processes that drive them better than anyone else.
I'd say that Apple understands marketing and consumers better, not technology. Slashdot is still very much a pro-technology website and is only on the losing side of the decline toward dumbed-down walled-garden computing in consumer electronics.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
if they hadn't built that $1 trillion dollar valuation on the backs of overworked and underpaid Chinese factory workers living and breathing in the pollution from said factories...
Yeah, yeah, I'm a hypocrite because my devices were made by the same abused labor. I get it. But Motorola was manufacturing phones profitably in the United States with the EPA making sure they did it clean and only stopped because it was cheaper to do it in China. At some point if us hypocrites don't speak up nothing will ever improve. Plus I can guarantee that our corporate overlords are eyeing the high salaries of Americans. Global race to the bottom you know...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It has now been definitively proven that Apple understands marketing better than all the Apple-critics on Slashdot (and around the world).
FTFY.