Or it does, but the person is smart enough to diversify to avoid suspicion :). Potentially because they tried that several times, each time going back and adjusting the plan.
If someone went back in time and bought stock. It would branch another timeline.
Or
If someone went back in time and bought stock. The timeline is altered and we would know only that the time owned stock. But then does that mean that the future has already happened and the past exists at the same time as the future and both the future and the past is constantly changing?
Are those things mutually exclusive? Apple is sitting on hundreds of billions in cash. They could literally make a million people rich just by gifting the money. But they don't.
IT takes two to tango, the Irish government was ordered by the E.U. to pick up those ten billion or so of taxes but they didn't think it would be the thing to do and didn't demand what was rightfully theirs.
Except, you know, all the sales tax collected in their retail channels. And employment taxes on their 80,000 domestic employees. And property taxes. And real-estate fees. And government testing. And the obscene amounts of duties they pay importing every single thing they make.
That's just for the U.S., in every other country they do business those apply as well (with exception of perhaps the import duties for business done in China).
That's tax they might generate, but most of that is not tax paid by Apple. Consumers pay sales tax and duties go right into the price of the products, employees pay income tax...
You can also credit Apple for the companies that will never see the light because Apple had the tax advantage(not to mention some of its abusive practices towards competition/little guy)
>You can also credit Apple for the companies that will never see the light because Apple had the tax advantage(not to mention some of its abusive practices towards competition/little guy)
You can also credit Apple for the countless iOS developers that have made anywhere from a living to a fortune, that have all paid taxes on their earnings, that have also created likely hundreds of thousands of jobs for everything from customer support to developers inside those iOS development companies, all of which have had income and thus paid taxes, directly as a result of Apple existing.
Because the little guy could have created an operating system, a global supply chain, designed thier own processors, etc. if it wasn’t because of Apple?
> Apple Inc., which is based in California, set up two companies in Ireland: Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe. According to the European Commission, these companies had no employees or real offices but still realized large profits. Apple paid virtually no tax to Ireland, or to any country, on these profits because of a former law in Ireland. In the last year that the law was in effect, 2015, Apple Sales International paid just 0.005% tax, according to the commission.
> When Apple sold iPhones, iPads, and Macs in an EU single-market nation, such as France, the commission said Apple would funnel the profits from France to Ireland and would not pay tax in either country.
The tax deal Apple made with Ireland between 1991 and 2015 allowed them to avoid tax on almost all profits across the EU, booking the profits in Ireland rather than the country of sale and paying less than 1% corporation tax (0.005% in 2014). Given that most of their tech stack comes from publicly funded research, the system is clearly broken.
Public funding is needed for any research with long timescales and no quick route to monetisation. It has given you and Apple, for example, the internet, the world-wide-web, GPS and touch-screen displays.
So the mere mortals should be thankful for the little Apple gives them, right? Small businesses competing with Apple should be just fine as well I guess even if they don't have the same tax advantage.
the tax system should be made simpler... no loopholes (I know it is probably not easy to accomplish, but worth a try) ... because middle class can't afford to avoid taxes like the rich does it.
That's simply not possible. The IRS themselves state that "tax evasion" is illegal, but "tax avoidance" isn't. A "loophole" is the use of deductibles to lower the amount you pay in taxes, that you choose to try to get.
For example, you could get lower taxes by "getting married", even if you're just friends you can get lower tax rates, etc. That's a "loophole". Are we supposed to prove they "really wanted to get married"? Now apply that to potentially all deductables.....
>>For example, you could get lower taxes by "getting married", even if you're just friends you can get lower tax rates, etc. That's a "loophole". Are we supposed to prove they "really wanted to get married"? Now apply that to potentially all deductables.....
Ha ha ... What about a trillion dollar company paying less than 0.9% tax in countries where tax is minimum 13-19% ? Are we supposed to prove they really tried to evade tax? Or companies not paying any tax at all by siphoning profits through fictive loans in places where they pay little or no tax?
I'm not sure if you get this but the issue is not about someone getting married to get lower taxes(even though that would be illegal just like married someone to get permanent residency is illegal).
We both agree on the problem that they should be paying more. I suggest that fixing "loopholes" isn't the solution, and instead may consider a "hard-minimum" for multi-billion dollar companies. No deductions beyond x%.
We both agree on the problem that they should be paying more. I suggest that fixing "loopholes" isn't the solution, and instead may consider a "hard-minimum" for multi-billion dollar companies. No deductions beyond x%.
Deductions do have a use, they may encourage them to "go green" or whatever. But yeah there needs to be an actual minimum.
Large companies spend millions lobbying to keep it that way. It's not a accident that it's legal. They're not just innocently taking advantage of loopholes that just happen to be there. They help create them and keep then that way at the normal tax payers expense.
ultimately it's in their best interest to do so. a legitimate government with sane laws is a lot more lucrative for businesses long term than an authoritative one
>> It's legal to find ways to reduce your tax burden.
Many things are legal. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be illegal. Artificially changing the place where taxes are paid is one of the things that Apple is doing and should be illegal.
Companies like Apple not only use the system but they support it as well. If you want to fix the tax evading think that you will have to fight against Apple along with many other big corp and on top of that with all kind of rich, shady individuals.
Large companies spend millions lobbying to keep it that way. It's not a accident that it's legal. They're not just innocently taking advantage of loopholes that just happen to be there. They help create them and keep then that way at the normal tax payers expense.
I guess you missed where that infographic says "inf. adjusted".
Regardless of inflation adjusted or not, Dutch East India shouldn't be considered given their rampant use of slave labor. doing a lot of business off of slave trade (pretty easy to make money when you're kidnapping people and sailing them across an ocean then selling them), having a nearly absolute monopoly, and uh... being government backed.
Kind of arbitrary to exclude a company because it uses slave labor or other immoral practices. Your list of giant multinationals would be very short indeed. No textile producers for example except for some tiny boutique shops. No petrochemcial companies at all. No agribusiness. Modern society is built on the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised.
>Kind of arbitrary to exclude a company because it uses slave labor or other immoral practices.
No it is arbitrary to say "nuh uh this company back when was worth a trillion dollars, if we adjust for inflation". Apple is literally the first worth a trillion United States dollars, a currency that did not even exist for the first 190 years of the Dutch East India company.
I appreciate how you state that investing has become an internal part of personal finance. I agree with you, but unfortunately nobody taught us this where I am from.
But for investing the market cap is irrelevant, the stock price development is relevant, dividends are relevant, interests are relevant. There are a lot more indicators which are more relevant if you want to invest in a company or not than the market cap.
The trillion dollar mark is an artificial one for sure. But the market capitalization is a good proxy for the financial power of a company.
It's basically what the market values the entire company to be worth. If an alien has $1 trillion dollars, it can theoretically buy Apple (if the shareholders are willing to sell, and if the US regulatory agencies would approve the acquisition.)
When I worked at Apple in the mid-90's (BS before Steve) they lost $1B while I was there. I left and moved away because I didn't want to be there when it was sold or went out of business. Exactly one year later Steve came back. Oh well. Being there at the time not one person would have ever thought Apple could be viable much less worth $1T.
Dave Cutler and his team of OS designers from DEC integrated with Microsoft software engineers to create the NT kernel. Cutler was a crucial figure in DEC, but was waysided by management so he jumped ship, and built the design he wanted to build at DEC (but never got management buy-in for) at Microsoft. All outlined in the book Show Stopper! THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT
Also, if you took a peek at his wikipedia entry, the guy is behind almost every large MSFT OS related initiative in the last few decades: NT, Azure, XBox hypervisor.
Windows NT was a hybrid: the graphics and windowing system is in the kernel for performance reasons (try running X on commodity hardware in the early 1990s) whereas Windows CE was all microkernel.
I wish people would stop saying its a hybrid because of the graphics being moved into the kernel...
That doesn't make it a hybrid anymore than having the filesystem in supervisor/kernel space does. Its a hybrid because its designed/layered like a micro-kernel with the individual subsystems appearing to do message passing and using subsystem managers (I/O manager, process manager, object manager, etc) which monitor/etc the message flows. Yet, instead of doing context/privileged switches when it passes messages/IRP's it simply makes abstracted function calls which hand ownership of the message to other subsystems that exist in the kernel's address space. This means you get a most of the abstraction/stability effect of having a micro-kernel without paying the context switch and message copy penalty.
NT has a crazy awesome design, which is somewhat obscured these days, but has yet to really be surpassed by anyone (IMHO).
Press was brutal so it was pretty depressing, some people were still hopeful when Amelio came in, but after a month he vanished and we never heard much from him any more. They took away everything, plants, drinks, even the popcorn machine supplies to save money. Then we were building a new OS which everyone knew was a nightmare death march.
Best thing the CTO did (Ellen Hancock) was to kill the Copland OS project, which then led to the ultimate decision to buy NeXT, which led to Steve coming back, which lead to $1T. Props to her for doing the right thing.
Back in '96 I was an assistant admin for a network of some 100 Macs in a biotech lab.
My supervisor was a die-hard Apple lover, had a Newton, and a fair bit of Apple stock. They could do no wrong in his eyes.
I was a Mac fan (had a Duo 280c, encouraged my folks to purchase 603 clones) but pessimistic about Jobs return. In my view at the time, he had done damage to Apple with the Mac intro and had failed w/ NeXT, even though I was huge fans of the hardware of each. I just didn't think he had the ability to scale a hardware company. I was hoping for BeOS to be the savior.
Nonetheless, it was exciting to see him return as the interim CEO. My supervisor bought a bunch more stock, think it was something like $7/share, and I gave him alot of grief for being foolish. I'm sure he's living in paradise right now, lol.
No. It is the first PUBLICALY TRADED company on the US STOCK MARKET to be valued at $1T. There have been many companies that have broken that point in inflation-adjusted and NON-inflation-adjusted valuations. Three big ones are the Dutch East India company, the most valuable company in history, Standard Oil, the most valuable US company ever, and Saudi Aramco, the current, most valuable company. I've seen to many articles claiming this today, so I rage wrote this on mobile.
I have found the calculations for these historic companies to be dubious. They mostly calculate the worth of a company in relation to some historical GDP figure and apply that percentage on a modern GDP figure.
Think about it, how can the Dutch East Indies company be worth $7 trillion dollars when the Netherlands today has a GDP of only $900 Billion, which is after centuries of economic growth.
The Dutch East Indies company may have been comparably more powerful in relation to its time though.
The VOC basically owned the entirety of trade in SEA. It's not hard to imagine a valuation of 7 trillion when they had a monopoly of an entire continent's worth of trade (spices!) for two centuries.
The entire world's GDP in 1700 was $371 Billion (1990 International Dollars). That would mean the VOC's value then was ~10x the global GDP, which I find hard to believe.
Or if that doesn't convince you, consider the world population in 1700 was 700 million people. That would mean the Dutch Indies Company's value per person is $10,000!
I'm not as familiar with the VOC as maybe I should be, but the British East India Company actually was the government of India from 1757 to 1858, when the British state took over. Until 1858, the territory of the EIC was administered by a Board of Directors who were responsible to shareholders, not to Parliament.
VOC also functioned as a govt of sorts, establishing colonies in Indonesia and SE Asia etc and having a private army that fought for territorial purposes.
Come on, he had to say something in public. Behind the closed doors he gave hell to the Windows Mobile team just as soon as he got his hands on that iPhone.
Ahh the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra. What an awful name it had. An mp3 player one could slap a larger 2.5" HDD into, and with a replaceable battery. Mine still sits on my desk, a monument to a forgone era. The case front and back are aluminum and removable, which made it easy to spray-paint :)
I do believe all of those are also attributes of the ipod. I definitely replaced both the battery and hardware inside of iPods back in the day, the only downside is that you risked dinging the seal getting it open.
He was just quoting what the best market researchers had told him. We were given a LOT of market research papers with in-depth customer surveys where lots of people said, repeatedly, that they would "never pay money for a phone". If you think back to then, phones were "free" with a 2 year contract.
The idea of getting someone who was used to free to switch over to $600 overnight was, by any reasonable accounts, not going to happen. The market researchers did the safe thing and said that the status quo would continue.
Of course they were horribly wrong, but again, in the moment, trusting literally every expert in the field is not the worst position to take.
After all that I learned to be wary of market researchers.
Consumers are just as bad at predicting the future as everyone else. Market research is great for making iterative improvements or learning what people are frustrated with, but it's data, not knowledge, and definitely not prognostication.
Don't forget iTunes. Part of why iPod succeeded because it allowed stress free easy access to a giant % of the world's music, all at one constant price.
The iPod wasn't revolutionary in any respect, it was a perfectly executed version of what other people were already doing, that had a huge, incredibly well done, marketing push behind it, with even the smallest detail given attention.
Also the white ear buds were genius. Everyone who used them was advertising the product.
That’s true. It took two years for Apple to sell thier first million. It wasn’t until both the music store came online and iTunes was released for Windows that it took off.
But even by 2007, a small percentage of the music people had on iPods were bought through iTunes (less than 10%?) according to Jobs “Thoughts on Music” essay.
The original iPhone pricing was really baffling. Had it not been a really revolutionary device it would have flopped IMHO.
You paid $600 for the phone, and then AT&T added the phone subsidy to your bill anyway (and never took it off), so it was just stupendously expensive. Apple lowered the price pretty soon after launch.
It was worth it to have a browser on a phone that wasn't total dogshit.
I still remember the early iPhone days when german providers heavily subsidized the device. With a simple 30-50 EUR/month plan you paid about 50 € for the device upfront and that's it. Sure, you might argue that the price might be hidden in the monthly fees, but it would have been the same 30-50 plan regardless of if you opt for the iPhone or your run of the mill Motorola, Nokia or Samsung device. Basically the iPhones were sibsidized by all customers and you'd be a fool to select a cheap phone. Also note that these iPhones were unlocked and ready to be sold on eBay once it was time to upgrade.
These days you pay full price stretched over 24 months.
And another I recall, although not sure to whom it is attributed:
"If you asked Porsche owners what they'd like to improve in the car, they'd all say more leg room, a bigger trunk, and better safety features. Congratulations, you just designed a Volvo."
Is that really what Porsche owners would say, though? I've owned a couple of Porsches in the past, and if you asked me, my answer would have been "MOAR...POWER. TIRES...MOAR STICKY." If I wanted a Volvo, I'd buy a Volvo.
I read recently that most BMW owners don't know that their cars are real wheel drive. The enthusiasts are the minority, the majority are the status seekers.
It’s not that the market research was wrong in saying that no one would pay $600 for a phone, it’s that we reached an inflection point where smartphones were no longer primarily phones but became portable internet terminals. Msft should have understood that given the existence of PocketPC devices like the iPaq.
They had strong YoY gains on Blackberry, and Windows Mobile was set to overtake them eventually. By offering lower cost devices that didn't need to pay an extra per user Blackberry fee to the phone companies, MS was out competing Blackberry on price, while executing on their traditional strategy of having multiple partners flood the market with a variety of devices to fit everyone's needs.
(Where everyone was defined as business users.)
There were groups at MS experimenting with consumer focused designs, and even exploring app store types of business models (though they hadn't yet evolved into what Apple eventually released), people did realize that opportunity was there, but it is hard for successful incumbents to change.
Windows Mobile 7, which never saw the light of day, had just gotten a new kernel, support for higher screen resolution, and was setting out to be a really nice OS to use for business users.
Apple also did something else, it showed that the relationship with carriers could be improved. Microsoft had a very hard time getting past carriers testing requirements, they had a very hard time pushing out patches and updates. Apple showed a way by which carriers could be strong armed into being less customer hostile. The same way Apple showed that the music industry could be dragged into the 21st century.
Apple also dramatically brought down the cost of certain technologies, as they have continued to do. A single manufacturer making a huge order for one part drops the price of that part for everyone else. The OEM model Microsoft used for Windows Mobile, with the myriads of device form factors, was not able to create those types of market efficiencies.
While phones were routinely 'free' or $99, iPods were wildly popular in 2007 and routinely cost $300+, and one of the three legs the iPhone stood on was being an iPod.
It should have been a red flag back then if market researchers and the people that hired them didn't see this as a convergence of music player + phone markets; it was the point of the keynote! I remember people complaining then that they had to carry both their phone and their iPod around back then.
The smartphone market was also growing then, and devices like Blackberries and Treos were popular and cost $200+ on contract. I had been using a Treo since 2005, and remember the pain of getting apps on it and getting it to play mp3s or use GPS maps. When I saw the keynote, it was clear it was just the next logical step.
It's weird that Windows Mobile didn't see these trends. Perhaps it was a case of underestimating the general market interest, though iPod's success should have been a strong hint that consumers really wanted devices of this type and were willing to pay. iPods were more popular than Windows Mobile devices even then.
Finally there's just the 'sit down and use it' factor that the iPhone had. Once you played with it, it was hard to deny that it was the future. The fluidness and straightforwardness of the UI was so far ahead of everything at the time. Best I can think of as a comparison is sitting in a Tesla Model S after getting out of your Honda - it's not a question of if, but how much.
At $599 the iPhone was definitely expensive for the time, but any reasonable businessperson could conclude from watching literally the entire history of technology that component prices are always on a steady decline, and there were other levers to lower price like carrier contracts. When the iPhone went down to $399 a few months later it's success was a foregone conclusion - after all, that was just a bit more than an iPod but with way more capability.
That's where Steve Jobs was really so better than everybody else. One should never be afraid to put what's behind, and start again on something new. This thing is often repeated in case of failures, but I've realized this is even more so true in terms of success. Success is harder to put behind and start over.
The big part of this is 'continuity'. If something works well, you are tempted to take the next obvious steps in the process. And you should. But after while its not hard to see that you are max'ing out the net utility you could extract out of it. At that point, one must stop, relook and not be afraid to start on something all over again.
Also this is so very true at an individual level as well. Never stop having a life. So many sports people retire between 35 - 40, then their whole life falls apart. This is also true with people have some early career success, I have seen endless examples of people reaching career peak by 30 - 35 and then everything falls apart, may be because they lucked out, but largely because they just can't start again. You have to start with a new purpose when you come to an end of an existing path.
Or time is expensive, and it shows your loss sooner or later.
The phones were actually free back then. There was no BYOD discount on any of the major networks.
The most I've ever spent on a phone was $200 for a Motorola Razer after damaging my first one before it was upgrade time.
Now I use a Moto G4 Play, and it's great. Why anyone would spend more than $200 on a phone unless there is a business requirement (ie, it makes you money) is beyond me.
No, the price was built into the contract. The few whack jobs that used a phone that they paid for outright got screwed because the model didn't even consider that.
It was obvious to me right during Jobs’s demo that iPhone would completely destroy everything that came before and take all the profits. And price is much easier to lower than it is to raise, and Apple did lower it about 2 months after releasing.
Marketing probably correct if you asked that question about the current set of incumbents that were out. Blackberry, Palm, and the rest of the phones with keyboards were not worth $600. I think Marketing's failure was not factoring in the new product category that was being defined. Honest mistake, honest miscalculation, and great quotable from Ballmer.
Good lesson about market research. What they really learned is that people don't pay money for a phone. Asked if they would like to, they said "not really."
Windows doubled down on the lower price range thing, which was disastrous for both the branding and the development of windows mobile. Everyone associated it with crap phones and they were stuck developing for last year's devices.
When it comes to pricing I'd never rely on what people are saying. They may not like the price, but the only thing that counts is the actual, potentially reluctant vote with their wallet.
Well, back in 2003 or 2004 I got myself a pretty damn expensive Sony Ericsson P910i (for €700 or so) in the hopes it would provide functionality that remotely resembled that of an iPhone. It was okish, but disappointing in some areas. I actually bought 3rd party software for it, including GPS software with an external bluetooth GPS module, which worked pretty well. Nokia also had their communicator lineup, which was similarly expensive.
While these weren't mainstream, they did exist and sold well enough to warrant multiple generations of them, and were more expensive than the initial iPhone was at release - so I don't understand the people who said nobody would buy that thing. This combined an expensive music player that sold a ton of units with a phone for more or less what you'd pay for a decent higher-end phone + an iPod in those days. The moment I saw it, I knew I'd buy one. The lack of installable 3rd party apps and a GPS unit was something I immediately identified as an issue, but it was clear what direction they would be going in. I eventually had to wait until the 3G was available in Europe - which also addressed both issues (although the GPS receiver was absolute crap).
He was right. Hardly anyone did buy a $600 phone. Apple had to reduce the price within 6 months, the next year Apple and AT&T did the standard subsidization model.
I went to grad school with a guy who, the day Apple stock hit $14 a share, decided to spend $500 of his grad student stipend to buy some. He figured Apple's cash on hand was worth more than $14 a share.
This is what I tell everyone when they kick themselves for not buying BTC when it was $0.25.
You would have sold them the second they hit $1.00. The only people I know who got rich off BTC are those who found an old wallet on an old drive in their garage.
It never made "sense" to invest in bitcoin, and it still doesn't.
If you had done so, you would have made money, but it was a "bad" bet. It wasn't a company, you had no real information to go off of. No earnings reports, no statements, nothing. It was as blind a bet as you can get. If you were technically knowledgeable in the area I guess you could have "predicated" that it would be used to buy drugs and thus go up in value, but to this day we have highly technically competent people saying "this is fucking stupid, this is overvalued, this is useless." It's a religious debate at this point.
Throwing .1% of your investment portfolio at it, whatever, why not. I do that with derpy shit stocks all the time (looking at you, HMNY, what a fun ride). But I don't think anybody should be salty about "missing the boat" on Bitcoin or other coins. If you wanna be a millionaire, do drop shipping or something. Stream. Flip houses. There's way less risk averse, proven ways to make extra money. Bitcoin just seems "so easy." Get rich quick.
I agree about the saltiness, but not so about BTC being a bad bet, considering it held great promise for a relatively small investment and, I myself, was sold on the way BTC was presented by Satoshi. No matter what happens to BTC now, at least from it's founder's point of view, BTC is a huuuge success.
Define "rich". I know someone who had an almost 20x ROI with BTC and is still holding it since 2013 I think. That is _VERY_ good ROI, I think. But the invested sum was a paltry $1000 that was a lot for him at the time.
The earliest point at which AAPL reached $14 (roughly $3.57 in post-split shares) was Nov. 1999. If they'd purchased 36 (500/14) shares, they would now have 1008 shares, worth roughly $200K.
So, absolute best case and assuming they held until the all-time high, roughly a 400x return. There would be another ~$30K in dividends, assuming no dividend reinvestment.
AAPL allowed us a period of cost-free unemployment for six months. This was back in the days when the stock was more go-go than it is even now. Wife and I had a period of about six months between jobs, and we had a lot of AAPL. We lived off the gains (and probably a call contract or two), and by the time we both had jobs again, we had more than we started with.
In the early 2000s I spent $1800 on a set of 18in chrome rims for an early 90s Accord, the wheels were almost half the value of the car. I use to do the calculations for if I had spent that money on AAPL instead of something so incredibly wasteful. It's easy to beat yourself up looking back in retrospect at dumb decisions.
If I never ate my favorite food during highschool (sushi) I'd probably have an extra 2k in the bank I could have spent on Apple.
If I hadn't ever played WoW, I could have had 540 to spend on Amazon. I probably also wouldn't have been as fat growing up.
If I had not paid for that dumbfuck YOLO trip to Singapore near the end of college, I'd have 2k to throw at Netflix. Or, actually, BP, this was right during the spill.
In other words, Amen man. So now I think today - why do I still go out to eat sushi, instead of tucking it away for another Microsoft buy? Why do I still play Overwatch with my friends here and there instead of spending another hour or two learning something? Why do I still blow assloads of cash on trips once or twice a year?
I guess, what the hell else am I gonna do with my time and money? Keep it till I die? I ride a motorcycle, I could die tomorrow. Actually, my family has a history of heart disease, I could die literally right now lol.
As long as peeps are putting away enough money to survive a crisis, and following the basics of investment principles re: their retirement, they're doing life "right," in my unprofessional opinion.
Sure I didn't buy a lot of stock at 18, but I did have a part time job, which let me go out to eat with my friends and take girls to movies and buy a car to drive us to Ren Fest in (with enough leftover to put together a SICK pirate outfit). I had enough saved to make it easy to buy my books in college. Playing WoW was fun and relaxing, oh well. That YOLO trip to Signapore beat a bit of that cultural close mindedness out of me as I engaged with a bunch of other students from around the world... and it got me a job in Taiwan after college, which was eye opening in ways I never could have imagined. Same with my trips today.
I could have done things differently and have more money right now, but if I had more money right now I guess the only difference is my apartment might be slightly nicer (maybe, I love my apartment), my motorcycle would be slightly faster (maybe, the one I have is kinda perfect for my style), and my clothes would be slightly more expensive (maybe, I'd probably just shop at Uniqlo anyway). I honestly can't think of anything really different about my life right now. Maybe when I retire I'll be like "dude you asshole, if you'd bought 30 more Apple stocks we could be on a boat right now." But then again, I might just die before then, so, shrug.
Where in my post did I indicate that I live paycheck to paycheck, have nothing saved up for retirement, or don't have an emergency fund?
Shitloads of Americans are in a tenuous fiscal situation because our education system has been gutted, our healthcare system is a bad capitalist joke, and thus wealth disparity is shockingly bad here. These used to be things that affected me, but now I'm fortunate enough to be a software engineer and so they don't.
Repeating (for the second time) a comment I made here in 2010: "Back in Macworld Boston 1996, I bought one share of Apple stock at $16 and got a framed commemorative stock certificate. It went into a box when I moved later that year and I completely forgot about until I found it a couple of weeks ago. It's worth almost $1,000 now!"
In the meanwhile, I sold off some of it, but a good chunk of it went into the downpayment for my house last year.
Everyone talks about Apple as the best possible investment, but an investment in XEM or XRP (Nem or Ripple or Stellar Lumens) in early 2017 surpassed all of Apple in its 30 year history.
My money is on Google, Facebook or Amazon eventually surpassing Apple though
No, what gives a share value is that someone else is willing to buy it from you for a certain price. The fact that it represents fractional ownership is why someone is willing to pay a certain price to buy it from you. But fundamentally, the value only exists as long as there is a counterparty.
Yes, yes, and cash only has value because someone else is willing to give you something for it. Congrats, you've realized that it's all made up and nothing is fundamentally valuable!
>No, what gives a share value is that someone else is willing to buy it from you for a certain price.
What the heck? This is absolutely wrong. The fundamental basis of the value of a share is that it results in gaining a portion of the company's profits. The company makes money and then pays some of that out to shareholders. Even companies that make zero money now have shares valued at least in part on expectations of what money they might make in the future.
Sure, humans are obviously not perfect at anticipating and researching and calculating all this by any means. We are not homo economicus either. There is room for irrationality, for misjudgements, etc. But even with all that shares are just that, shares. The actual ownership of a public company is about shares (yes, there can be different classes in some cases). They represent power and returns, even if it's decentralized.
So a share does in fact have an innate value in terms of the actual cash it can spin off for a shareholder and the input to the company it gives them. Multipliers will vary based on risk and future projections and such, but it's perfectly possible to hold a lot of boring stocks that may not grow much but just print money, consistently, year after year with minimal management. This is not at all the same as cryptocurrencies or any pure asset, where what you ultimately get from it depends purely on what someone else will pay you for it.
Good for it. Becoming a trillion dollar company selling quality products people love. Not data mining everything about your life and using it for advertising (Google), ruthlessly destroying competition (Microsoft), or destroying the environment (Exxon). How old fashioned.
They're not free. They just don't cost money. Arguably they're very expensive.
This is a distinction most people don't grasp. I didn't, myself, until recently when a briefing from the legal department resulted in scouring the word "free" from eight web sites and replacing the word with "at no cost."
DDG claims to have multiple searches, like local or specialized search engines, but if Bing shuts down they would probably be in trouble.
That said it’s irrelevant. Microsoft is happy to keep the competition alive for Google and I bet they are winning some revenue from their DDG deal, so it’s a win win.
And if DDG gets big enough, and it probably is already, they can develop their own web crawler - because in case you don’t know, it’s the crawling part that’s really expensive.
A privacy filter over Bing is fine by me. Lately I've been switching to incongnito every time I search for any product, video or anything to do with news or politics. It's getting ridiculous. I should just switch to DDG permanently.
Yes. Google seems to think that a single video totally changes what you prefer, especially if it is some popular topic like politics or music. OTOH it'll take a lot of ted lectures and programming videos to make your feed more oriented to words those. Is it me, or does anybody else notice this?
It really depends on how susceptible the particular user is to the cost of being a part Google's ad network. If Google's ad network intelligently informs you to make better consumer decisions, then you can argue that you get paid to use Google's services. But unfortunately, too many people derive extreme negative value from being a part of it by being manipulated into making decisions that harm their lives. Even poorer people could easily be paying thousands of dollars in cost to their health (sugary drink and alcohol ads), bank account (financial scam ads), and community destruction (political misinformation ads).
And literally billions of people don't have the money to spend on products like that but are able to use them because they can pay with their data, which has no cash value to them.
That doesn't really make any sense, right? How can those folks' data be worth very much if they don't have the money to pay a subscription fee for Google?
Rich folks are effectively subsidizing access for the poor. This is an advantage of Google's business model which is often overlooked by richer folks (who can easily afford subscription fees and Apple products).
Any financial analyst would tell you their ad revenue, or even their market position would be at serious risk without each of the products you mentioned. Building and maintaining product suite is the cost on the ad revenue.
They align with the needs and wants of billions of people.
Now Apple might be ahead. But its not hard for them to lose all of that. Apple as of now is not useful to the masses in most countries. Google is.
There is a reason why companies like Dell and Microsoft ruled so much in the 90s to the 2005. Once you exhaust Steve Jobs's established product lines, you are just selling expensive cosmetic shining gadgets offering little in extra value compared to Samsung or Dell. At that time is when Google like companies will outshine Apple.
Scary thing for Apple is the new Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems. Steve Jobs is no more, and its already showing.
In fact one big revolutionary product from Google could change everything for Apple. The raw utility of Google search still far exceeds that of iPhone. And that's just one product. Maps, YouTube, Android etc have very large utility to common masses compared to iPhone.
There is a reason why companies like Dell and Microsoft ruled so much in the 90s to the 2005. Once you exhaust Steve Jobs's established product lines, you are just selling expensive cosmetic shining gadgets offering little in extra value compared to Samsung or Dell. At that time is when Google like companies will outshine Apple.
Dell and Microsoft won when the user is not the customer - enterprise sells. Apple brought in the “consumerization of IT”. People have been predicting the death of Apple and the failure of the iPhone for 8 years. They swore Android and especially Samsung was going to take over. Samsung in fact is seeing price pressure and they are struggling - not Apple.
>Steve Jobs is no more, and its already showing.
It's interesting how many years people will still repeat that. He's gone for 7 years now. If Tim Cook wasn't fit for the job, it wouldn't have grown from $350 billion the year then Jobs leave Apple to where it is now.
>Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems
It really doesn't. Apple has their fuckups time to time, like Pippin, G4 Cube, Ping, Maps or 'you're holding it wrong' iPhone 4.
We can still complain about their walled-garden approach to software distribution, particularly the extortionist 30% fee and handicapping of non-native apps. Or their kowtowing to the Chinese censors.
I said it was extortionist, not baseless. Of course they deserve a fee. But it's extortionist in the sense that you have no choice, if you want to sell to worldwide mobile users with deep pockets. Apple also forces as many payments as possible to go through their network, and bans apps that try to take payment outside the store if the app does not provide sufficient justification. In fact, they could just probably charge 50% and developers would keep paying them...
> Steam charges 30% to be on its store
Pretty sure Steve Jobs didn't set the 30% price point by looking at the Steam store, lol. More likely it was the other way around and Steam is 30% because the App Store is 30%...
Apple was the first to lead with this egregious fee. They should be forced to unbundle the fee into optional components, e.g. five components of 6% each, minimum 2 components must be chosen (12%).
That would subject each service fee component to competitive quality/demand forces within Apple, e.g. app search, trials/CRM workflow, app distribution. Developers and users can both exert choice on the subset of fees applied to a transaction, so they can provide performance-based feedback to Apple.
Even a monopolist can compete with itself, to improve service and product.
The same types of customers. For instance, back in the day around 2003-2006 Sprint sold J2ME games and apps that once you purchased them, you could redownload them on new phones.
This is what decentralized platforms fix. I'd rather keep the money as an app owner, and split the difference with the consumer(or just keep all of it). Even better if there's an avenue to avoid the government taking 50% too.
And what exactly is the alternative option for them there? They can either follow the rules in China or completely lose all of their business. That is on China, not Apple.
And I'm really curious why people here are not mentioning Apple gave Chinese gov access to icloud data for Chinese people. Kind of double standard I have to say...
People savage Google yesterday for launching a censored search in China. Apple essentially gives iCloud to the Chinese government and the outrage levels don't seem to be the same.
Its because google has 'don't be evil' as its unofficial motto. Googlers joined google because they agreed with their ethics. People at apple knew what thy were getting into and consumers knew and expected it to remain the same. Change causes chaos in humanity.
At least letting us know that they don't like it so at least I know it's against their principles and they might push back in other cases when asked. That they seemed so willing to do it should be the fear, not that they had to (and by the way, they didn't have to, losing all of their business is an option for principled companies).
Their walled garden approach is looking smarter and smarter with every EU fine that gets thrown at Google.
As an aside: As an engineer, I dislike their walled garden approach; but I love their approach as a consumer. To be frank, most companies have bad taste and poor UX design. Apple doesn't knock it out the park all the time, but their products are consistently good and their design guidelines for iOS apps enforce some of the same quality. So yeah, I'll take a walled garden approach if the garden is beautiful.
I'm starting to see a lot of people charging Facebook/Apple/Google/Amazon with anti-competitive behavior, and yet most of the charges (including a lot of the ones the EU charges Google and Apple for) are just normal business behavior. Nobody cares about whether your smaller firm can compete against larger companies or not.
As a consumer, I don't give a damn if Apple is "mean" to your business. Learn to compete better.
If these companies are stopping a better product from coming to the market then by all means lets throw antitrust at them; but if your product is just a clone and/or lower quality product that cannot get users, nobody cares.
While I might agree in general (or at the least for consistent application), my point was that often things that help you hurt others. What the law considers anti-competitive and what I consider anti-competitive are different, and I wasn't addressing the law at all. People should just be aware that their consumer choices may harm others that they cannot easily see, that's all.
I don’t think you were around before the App Store. The carrier were a lot stricter about what you could sell through thier stores and the carrier took a 70% cut.
Not to mention the cut the publishers, wholesellers, and the retail stores use to take when you sold boxed software.
selling luxury consumer goods that at best are "nice to have" - you need to look deeper than "oil = bad" if you truly want to assess the impact of a company. It just seems you're more concerned with 1984 than with brave new world
I'm an Apple fan - congratulations to Apple - but on the other hand Apple being the biggest company in the world is pretty uninspiring. After seeing Tesla build a mass market electric car factory, or SpaceX launching a Roadster into space, a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank making phones and headphones feels like a wasted opportunity.
It is really hard for large companies to innovate. Especially with so little competition (I like to think that android and apple users are different demographics). It is the same case with Intel. Sometimes I'm mad at them as they are wasting valuable human time because of slower processors.
>“Apple’s $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018,” said David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland. “That puts this company in perspective.”
The comparison would be Apple net income (~$50B) vs. GDP, not market cap (which has units of USD) vs. GDP (which has units of USD per year).
That’s debatable. There are a number of ways to calculate GDP. One is the sum of value added, as in the value of the end product minus the value of input. Another is the total sum of income from labor and assets. Since it includes time spent it is not really net profit but it’s not turnover either. It’s some hybrid but, I would say it is closer to net profit.
Quite a funny hybrid indeed: if I pay you to take my money, and you pay me to take your money, somehow GDP would have increased.
It's a measure of economic activity (of which our little give-and-take game would be an example) and it is meaningful under the assumption that all that activity happens for more rational reasons than just trolling economists. Note that our little give-and-take game would be a very expensive example of such trolling, if somehow the tax-man got involved.
No, 5 to 1 has been the ratio in recent decades. I know this was true in 1990s when I studied this issue, and it could not have changed that much in 20 years. So 100 trillion would be my assumption.
> I feel like I'm missing a big bucket or two. Not sure what though.
Considering how huge an employer the public sector is in the US, it stands to reason there's a huge value to in the government-as-an-enterprise, even if only considering cash value of assets, such as real estate (including natural resources!) and equipment (including military).
Of course, it might be very tough to calculate, if one includes every public entitity down the the local level and takes into account the debt of each entity.
Yeah, that was a real howler. I really hope he was somehow misquoted, because the comparison literally does the opposite of put something in perspective.
I think it puts it in perspective as a magnitude of money, which I'd assume was all he meant to do. I don't think he was suggesting that Apple actually accounts for 5% of GDP, but was just using it to illustrate how monumental $1T is.
It is implicitly, but this is often obscured because currency is both a medium of exchange and a store of value. Accounting makes the distinction between your income statement (which has a time period attached, usually either quarterly or annually, and is focused on dollars exchanged with other entities) and your balance sheet (which is a snapshot quantity at a particular point in time, and is focused on dollars stored). GDP is part of a country's income statement - it reflects how many goods & services were produced & sold within the country.
The comparison is still valid even if the units don't quite match. For example, if you flip the comparison you get "The US's total gross domestic product for 2018 is equal to 20 times the Apple's total market cap" which is a pretty reasonable statement. If you want to talk about Apple's net income per year, that is a totally different statistic.
It's worth noting that this is the first U.S. company to hit $1 trillion, not in the world. Also, it's still intraday, so Apple has not technically reached that point yet.
Apple is the first public company to reach a trillion. There are arguments that Aramco is worth vastly more, but it's not publicly traded, so it's hard to put a number on it.
This will be very controversial, especially in HN, but market cap doesn't mean shit.
Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity.
Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.
> Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor.
I wish this was true, but I think you’re severely overestimating Apple’s competitors... In the last 5 years, noone has even approached them, neither in hardware nor in software, even though the formula is painfully obvious (high quality hardware that keeps working/updating, and non-annoying easy-to-use software that’s friendly to powerusers).
Your numbers are completely wrong...apple just had $50B in revenue for its weakest quarter...last quarter they had $60B and in their strongest quarter Q4 they had $89B pre trump tax cuts. If their current growth rate stays the same Apple will hit $280B revenue and $65B in profits.
I’m not sure how you are calculating equity but they have $240B in plain cash. They have so much in IP, and extremely low interest loans.
Market cap does mean something, it’s literally the most meaningful value the world puts on a company
Replacing means that Apple doesn't innovate further.
This always happens with big companies, Nokia, Ericsson, Yahoo, they are replaced by new companies.
5 years ahead for the big company means no progress.
Apple is where it was 5 years ago in terms of innovation. They havent done anything new that was meaningful and only reap the benefits of what jobs invented 15y ago.
I think about such a large number this is and I really am not surprised. Apple has created a product that I use all throughout the day. I won’t leave home without it and I’ll drive back if I forget it. It’s so addictive that I have to take active steps against using it too often around my wife or kids.
Besides my family there are 5 possessions I get mildly depressed if I don't have. My iPhone, my Bragi dash, my Tesla, my house, my Bitcoin. Maybe 2/3 of these I can see being usurped by something better - I'll leave it to the reader to guess.
Speculative investments are like gambling. Don't be sorry for Apple. Try FB...they may hit the trillion dollar cap as well..who knows...it's all just speculation.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadI wonder if we were time travelers in that old timeline.
If someone went back in time and bought stock. It would branch another timeline.
Or
If someone went back in time and bought stock. The timeline is altered and we would know only that the time owned stock. But then does that mean that the future has already happened and the past exists at the same time as the future and both the future and the past is constantly changing?
Omg my head hurts now.
A bit like saying we could go back three thousand years and corner the market in nifty sea shells
That's just for the U.S., in every other country they do business those apply as well (with exception of perhaps the import duties for business done in China).
It's tax that would not have been paid if Apple did not exist.
>and duties go right into the price of the products,
And if the government said "Apple must now pay 50% on every dollar they make" guess what would go right into the price of the products...
>employees pay income tax.
Business owners must pay the federal government 6.2% of every dollar their worker makes until that annual salary reaches $113,700.
Then 1.45% of all pay regardless of how high it goes for medicare.
And unemployment insurance in whatever state.
You can credit Apple with generating those taxes, but they don't get credit for paying that tax on their profits.
>"Apple must now pay 50% on every dollar they make" guess what would go right into the price of the products...
Yes, Apple's prices would go up to compensate, and consumers would be footing the bill.
>Business owners must pay the federal government 6.2% of every dollar their worker makes ...
Business owners must collect that amount, so my pay is reduced by that amount - I am paying that tax, the employer is just the tax man's agent.
You can also credit Apple for the countless iOS developers that have made anywhere from a living to a fortune, that have all paid taxes on their earnings, that have also created likely hundreds of thousands of jobs for everything from customer support to developers inside those iOS development companies, all of which have had income and thus paid taxes, directly as a result of Apple existing.
> When Apple sold iPhones, iPads, and Macs in an EU single-market nation, such as France, the commission said Apple would funnel the profits from France to Ireland and would not pay tax in either country.
(according to Apple!)
https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-ap...
For example, you could get lower taxes by "getting married", even if you're just friends you can get lower tax rates, etc. That's a "loophole". Are we supposed to prove they "really wanted to get married"? Now apply that to potentially all deductables.....
Ha ha ... What about a trillion dollar company paying less than 0.9% tax in countries where tax is minimum 13-19% ? Are we supposed to prove they really tried to evade tax? Or companies not paying any tax at all by siphoning profits through fictive loans in places where they pay little or no tax?
I'm not sure if you get this but the issue is not about someone getting married to get lower taxes(even though that would be illegal just like married someone to get permanent residency is illegal).
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/05/-sp-luxembo...
Deductions do have a use, they may encourage them to "go green" or whatever. But yeah there needs to be an actual minimum.
Apple doesn't make money to support governments.
Sure, but governments do support Apple and its employees.
Implying otherwise is dishonest and ridiculous.
Apple doesn't make money to support society and pay for the social infrastructure it uses to help it be successful.
FTFY
Many things are legal. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be illegal. Artificially changing the place where taxes are paid is one of the things that Apple is doing and should be illegal.
Companies like Apple not only use the system but they support it as well. If you want to fix the tax evading think that you will have to fight against Apple along with many other big corp and on top of that with all kind of rich, shady individuals.
Source: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-...
I'd say the Washington Post is off by maaaaaaaybe an order of magnitude, or more.
Regardless of inflation adjusted or not, Dutch East India shouldn't be considered given their rampant use of slave labor. doing a lot of business off of slave trade (pretty easy to make money when you're kidnapping people and sailing them across an ocean then selling them), having a nearly absolute monopoly, and uh... being government backed.
No it is arbitrary to say "nuh uh this company back when was worth a trillion dollars, if we adjust for inflation". Apple is literally the first worth a trillion United States dollars, a currency that did not even exist for the first 190 years of the Dutch East India company.
It's basically what the market values the entire company to be worth. If an alien has $1 trillion dollars, it can theoretically buy Apple (if the shareholders are willing to sell, and if the US regulatory agencies would approve the acquisition.)
Mind you, HAL is one letter behind IBM.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction#Microso...
Also, if you took a peek at his wikipedia entry, the guy is behind almost every large MSFT OS related initiative in the last few decades: NT, Azure, XBox hypervisor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler#Microsoft_(1988_to...
That doesn't make it a hybrid anymore than having the filesystem in supervisor/kernel space does. Its a hybrid because its designed/layered like a micro-kernel with the individual subsystems appearing to do message passing and using subsystem managers (I/O manager, process manager, object manager, etc) which monitor/etc the message flows. Yet, instead of doing context/privileged switches when it passes messages/IRP's it simply makes abstracted function calls which hand ownership of the message to other subsystems that exist in the kernel's address space. This means you get a most of the abstraction/stability effect of having a micro-kernel without paying the context switch and message copy penalty.
NT has a crazy awesome design, which is somewhat obscured these days, but has yet to really be surpassed by anyone (IMHO).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652502
My supervisor was a die-hard Apple lover, had a Newton, and a fair bit of Apple stock. They could do no wrong in his eyes.
I was a Mac fan (had a Duo 280c, encouraged my folks to purchase 603 clones) but pessimistic about Jobs return. In my view at the time, he had done damage to Apple with the Mac intro and had failed w/ NeXT, even though I was huge fans of the hardware of each. I just didn't think he had the ability to scale a hardware company. I was hoping for BeOS to be the savior.
Nonetheless, it was exciting to see him return as the interim CEO. My supervisor bought a bunch more stock, think it was something like $7/share, and I gave him alot of grief for being foolish. I'm sure he's living in paradise right now, lol.
See article for numbers: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-...
Think about it, how can the Dutch East Indies company be worth $7 trillion dollars when the Netherlands today has a GDP of only $900 Billion, which is after centuries of economic growth.
The Dutch East Indies company may have been comparably more powerful in relation to its time though.
https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...
The entire world's GDP in 1700 was $371 Billion (1990 International Dollars). That would mean the VOC's value then was ~10x the global GDP, which I find hard to believe.
Or if that doesn't convince you, consider the world population in 1700 was 700 million people. That would mean the Dutch Indies Company's value per person is $10,000!
Kidding aside, I agree: I'm also quite dubious of this article's claim on the East India company being worth as much as was computed.
He was just quoting what the best market researchers had told him. We were given a LOT of market research papers with in-depth customer surveys where lots of people said, repeatedly, that they would "never pay money for a phone". If you think back to then, phones were "free" with a 2 year contract.
The idea of getting someone who was used to free to switch over to $600 overnight was, by any reasonable accounts, not going to happen. The market researchers did the safe thing and said that the status quo would continue.
Of course they were horribly wrong, but again, in the moment, trusting literally every expert in the field is not the worst position to take.
After all that I learned to be wary of market researchers.
Creating entirely new markets takes vision.
The iPod wasn't revolutionary in any respect, it was a perfectly executed version of what other people were already doing, that had a huge, incredibly well done, marketing push behind it, with even the smallest detail given attention.
Also the white ear buds were genius. Everyone who used them was advertising the product.
But even by 2007, a small percentage of the music people had on iPods were bought through iTunes (less than 10%?) according to Jobs “Thoughts on Music” essay.
You paid $600 for the phone, and then AT&T added the phone subsidy to your bill anyway (and never took it off), so it was just stupendously expensive. Apple lowered the price pretty soon after launch.
It was worth it to have a browser on a phone that wasn't total dogshit.
These days you pay full price stretched over 24 months.
"If you asked Porsche owners what they'd like to improve in the car, they'd all say more leg room, a bigger trunk, and better safety features. Congratulations, you just designed a Volvo."
Or maybe I didn't get the joke.
https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
They had strong YoY gains on Blackberry, and Windows Mobile was set to overtake them eventually. By offering lower cost devices that didn't need to pay an extra per user Blackberry fee to the phone companies, MS was out competing Blackberry on price, while executing on their traditional strategy of having multiple partners flood the market with a variety of devices to fit everyone's needs.
(Where everyone was defined as business users.)
There were groups at MS experimenting with consumer focused designs, and even exploring app store types of business models (though they hadn't yet evolved into what Apple eventually released), people did realize that opportunity was there, but it is hard for successful incumbents to change.
Windows Mobile 7, which never saw the light of day, had just gotten a new kernel, support for higher screen resolution, and was setting out to be a really nice OS to use for business users.
Apple also did something else, it showed that the relationship with carriers could be improved. Microsoft had a very hard time getting past carriers testing requirements, they had a very hard time pushing out patches and updates. Apple showed a way by which carriers could be strong armed into being less customer hostile. The same way Apple showed that the music industry could be dragged into the 21st century.
Apple also dramatically brought down the cost of certain technologies, as they have continued to do. A single manufacturer making a huge order for one part drops the price of that part for everyone else. The OEM model Microsoft used for Windows Mobile, with the myriads of device form factors, was not able to create those types of market efficiencies.
It should have been a red flag back then if market researchers and the people that hired them didn't see this as a convergence of music player + phone markets; it was the point of the keynote! I remember people complaining then that they had to carry both their phone and their iPod around back then.
The smartphone market was also growing then, and devices like Blackberries and Treos were popular and cost $200+ on contract. I had been using a Treo since 2005, and remember the pain of getting apps on it and getting it to play mp3s or use GPS maps. When I saw the keynote, it was clear it was just the next logical step.
It's weird that Windows Mobile didn't see these trends. Perhaps it was a case of underestimating the general market interest, though iPod's success should have been a strong hint that consumers really wanted devices of this type and were willing to pay. iPods were more popular than Windows Mobile devices even then.
Finally there's just the 'sit down and use it' factor that the iPhone had. Once you played with it, it was hard to deny that it was the future. The fluidness and straightforwardness of the UI was so far ahead of everything at the time. Best I can think of as a comparison is sitting in a Tesla Model S after getting out of your Honda - it's not a question of if, but how much.
At $599 the iPhone was definitely expensive for the time, but any reasonable businessperson could conclude from watching literally the entire history of technology that component prices are always on a steady decline, and there were other levers to lower price like carrier contracts. When the iPhone went down to $399 a few months later it's success was a foregone conclusion - after all, that was just a bit more than an iPod but with way more capability.
Reveryone was predicting a “True Video iPod”. An iPod with a widescreen display and all touch.
http://medialoper.com/video-ipod-delay-may-be-a-bad-thing-af...
>Eventually you won’t really need a PC, because all your work will be in a sort of cloud.”
>Suddenly there was an explosion from across the table. “MARC, THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!” It was Gates.
To go all in they would have had to kill the PC. In the same way, MS didn't embrace browsers and the Internet for a long time.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17667776
No matter how right they may be.
If you want that sort of position, burying your own ideas deep and hide them in shame (use them to impress interns if you must) is the only way to go.
The big part of this is 'continuity'. If something works well, you are tempted to take the next obvious steps in the process. And you should. But after while its not hard to see that you are max'ing out the net utility you could extract out of it. At that point, one must stop, relook and not be afraid to start on something all over again.
Also this is so very true at an individual level as well. Never stop having a life. So many sports people retire between 35 - 40, then their whole life falls apart. This is also true with people have some early career success, I have seen endless examples of people reaching career peak by 30 - 35 and then everything falls apart, may be because they lucked out, but largely because they just can't start again. You have to start with a new purpose when you come to an end of an existing path.
Or time is expensive, and it shows your loss sooner or later.
The most I've ever spent on a phone was $200 for a Motorola Razer after damaging my first one before it was upgrade time.
Now I use a Moto G4 Play, and it's great. Why anyone would spend more than $200 on a phone unless there is a business requirement (ie, it makes you money) is beyond me.
No, the price was built into the contract. The few whack jobs that used a phone that they paid for outright got screwed because the model didn't even consider that.
Are you also surprised that people spend over 50000€/$ on a car? The answer is simple: because it turns out that having nice things is nice.
Windows doubled down on the lower price range thing, which was disastrous for both the branding and the development of windows mobile. Everyone associated it with crap phones and they were stuck developing for last year's devices.
This is very true. Internally the devices we had to use were very nice. The most responsive phones I've ever used were internal test devices.
That and my Motorola Q9H. Amazing device from a different era.
While these weren't mainstream, they did exist and sold well enough to warrant multiple generations of them, and were more expensive than the initial iPhone was at release - so I don't understand the people who said nobody would buy that thing. This combined an expensive music player that sold a ton of units with a phone for more or less what you'd pay for a decent higher-end phone + an iPod in those days. The moment I saw it, I knew I'd buy one. The lack of installable 3rd party apps and a GPS unit was something I immediately identified as an issue, but it was clear what direction they would be going in. I eventually had to wait until the 3G was available in Europe - which also addressed both issues (although the GPS receiver was absolute crap).
Now even Apple offers a payment plan.
I thought he was nuts. I was an idiot.
You would have sold them the second they hit $1.00. The only people I know who got rich off BTC are those who found an old wallet on an old drive in their garage.
If you had done so, you would have made money, but it was a "bad" bet. It wasn't a company, you had no real information to go off of. No earnings reports, no statements, nothing. It was as blind a bet as you can get. If you were technically knowledgeable in the area I guess you could have "predicated" that it would be used to buy drugs and thus go up in value, but to this day we have highly technically competent people saying "this is fucking stupid, this is overvalued, this is useless." It's a religious debate at this point.
Throwing .1% of your investment portfolio at it, whatever, why not. I do that with derpy shit stocks all the time (looking at you, HMNY, what a fun ride). But I don't think anybody should be salty about "missing the boat" on Bitcoin or other coins. If you wanna be a millionaire, do drop shipping or something. Stream. Flip houses. There's way less risk averse, proven ways to make extra money. Bitcoin just seems "so easy." Get rich quick.
"I wish I had kept my 1,700 BTC @ $0.06 instead of selling them at $0.30, now that they're $8.00!"
https://twitter.com/gregschoen/status/70261648811761665?lang...
Had he held on to his until the very peak, he'd be sitting on $30 million. That's rich.
With BTC, 20x isn't that crazy. I'm talking about 50,000x if you dig up an old enough wallet.
So, absolute best case and assuming they held until the all-time high, roughly a 400x return. There would be another ~$30K in dividends, assuming no dividend reinvestment.
Apple stock was the downpayment on my house.
Thanks, Steve!
If I hadn't ever played WoW, I could have had 540 to spend on Amazon. I probably also wouldn't have been as fat growing up.
If I had not paid for that dumbfuck YOLO trip to Singapore near the end of college, I'd have 2k to throw at Netflix. Or, actually, BP, this was right during the spill.
In other words, Amen man. So now I think today - why do I still go out to eat sushi, instead of tucking it away for another Microsoft buy? Why do I still play Overwatch with my friends here and there instead of spending another hour or two learning something? Why do I still blow assloads of cash on trips once or twice a year?
I guess, what the hell else am I gonna do with my time and money? Keep it till I die? I ride a motorcycle, I could die tomorrow. Actually, my family has a history of heart disease, I could die literally right now lol.
As long as peeps are putting away enough money to survive a crisis, and following the basics of investment principles re: their retirement, they're doing life "right," in my unprofessional opinion.
Sure I didn't buy a lot of stock at 18, but I did have a part time job, which let me go out to eat with my friends and take girls to movies and buy a car to drive us to Ren Fest in (with enough leftover to put together a SICK pirate outfit). I had enough saved to make it easy to buy my books in college. Playing WoW was fun and relaxing, oh well. That YOLO trip to Signapore beat a bit of that cultural close mindedness out of me as I engaged with a bunch of other students from around the world... and it got me a job in Taiwan after college, which was eye opening in ways I never could have imagined. Same with my trips today.
I could have done things differently and have more money right now, but if I had more money right now I guess the only difference is my apartment might be slightly nicer (maybe, I love my apartment), my motorcycle would be slightly faster (maybe, the one I have is kinda perfect for my style), and my clothes would be slightly more expensive (maybe, I'd probably just shop at Uniqlo anyway). I honestly can't think of anything really different about my life right now. Maybe when I retire I'll be like "dude you asshole, if you'd bought 30 more Apple stocks we could be on a boat right now." But then again, I might just die before then, so, shrug.
"X% Americans live paycheck to paycheck"
"Y% American have nothing saved up for retirement"
"Z% Americans don't have $SMALL_AMOUNT for an emergency"
etc etc.
Your post perfectly explains why.
Shitloads of Americans are in a tenuous fiscal situation because our education system has been gutted, our healthcare system is a bad capitalist joke, and thus wealth disparity is shockingly bad here. These used to be things that affected me, but now I'm fortunate enough to be a software engineer and so they don't.
In the meanwhile, I sold off some of it, but a good chunk of it went into the downpayment for my house last year.
My money is on Google, Facebook or Amazon eventually surpassing Apple though
None of those is an investment in something with inherent worth. Hence, I'd not call them an investment, but pure speculation.
A "cryptocurrency" is merely worth what someone else is willing to pay (hence speculative).
What the heck? This is absolutely wrong. The fundamental basis of the value of a share is that it results in gaining a portion of the company's profits. The company makes money and then pays some of that out to shareholders. Even companies that make zero money now have shares valued at least in part on expectations of what money they might make in the future.
Sure, humans are obviously not perfect at anticipating and researching and calculating all this by any means. We are not homo economicus either. There is room for irrationality, for misjudgements, etc. But even with all that shares are just that, shares. The actual ownership of a public company is about shares (yes, there can be different classes in some cases). They represent power and returns, even if it's decentralized.
So a share does in fact have an innate value in terms of the actual cash it can spin off for a shareholder and the input to the company it gives them. Multipliers will vary based on risk and future projections and such, but it's perfectly possible to hold a lot of boring stocks that may not grow much but just print money, consistently, year after year with minimal management. This is not at all the same as cryptocurrencies or any pure asset, where what you ultimately get from it depends purely on what someone else will pay you for it.
Of course, Gambling isn't "investing", and that's all cryptocurrencies are: Gambling assets.
Android, Maps, Docs, Gmail, Navigation, Analytics are all (mostly) free.
This is a distinction most people don't grasp. I didn't, myself, until recently when a briefing from the legal department resulted in scouring the word "free" from eight web sites and replacing the word with "at no cost."
That said it’s irrelevant. Microsoft is happy to keep the competition alive for Google and I bet they are winning some revenue from their DDG deal, so it’s a win win.
And if DDG gets big enough, and it probably is already, they can develop their own web crawler - because in case you don’t know, it’s the crawling part that’s really expensive.
Everything Google does is about advertising and collecting data. Those two things don’t align with my desires.
They align with the needs and wants of billions of people.
Now Apple might be ahead. But its not hard for them to lose all of that. Apple as of now is not useful to the masses in most countries. Google is.
There is a reason why companies like Dell and Microsoft ruled so much in the 90s to the 2005. Once you exhaust Steve Jobs's established product lines, you are just selling expensive cosmetic shining gadgets offering little in extra value compared to Samsung or Dell. At that time is when Google like companies will outshine Apple.
Scary thing for Apple is the new Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems. Steve Jobs is no more, and its already showing.
In fact one big revolutionary product from Google could change everything for Apple. The raw utility of Google search still far exceeds that of iPhone. And that's just one product. Maps, YouTube, Android etc have very large utility to common masses compared to iPhone.
Dell and Microsoft won when the user is not the customer - enterprise sells. Apple brought in the “consumerization of IT”. People have been predicting the death of Apple and the failure of the iPhone for 8 years. They swore Android and especially Samsung was going to take over. Samsung in fact is seeing price pressure and they are struggling - not Apple.
In fact, a lot could change over the coming years.
>Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems It really doesn't. Apple has their fuckups time to time, like Pippin, G4 Cube, Ping, Maps or 'you're holding it wrong' iPhone 4.
Steam charges 30% to be on its store. Same with PlayStation and Microsoft Store.
Seems like it’s the standard distribution fee.
I said it was extortionist, not baseless. Of course they deserve a fee. But it's extortionist in the sense that you have no choice, if you want to sell to worldwide mobile users with deep pockets. Apple also forces as many payments as possible to go through their network, and bans apps that try to take payment outside the store if the app does not provide sufficient justification. In fact, they could just probably charge 50% and developers would keep paying them...
> Steam charges 30% to be on its store
Pretty sure Steve Jobs didn't set the 30% price point by looking at the Steam store, lol. More likely it was the other way around and Steam is 30% because the App Store is 30%...
That would subject each service fee component to competitive quality/demand forces within Apple, e.g. app search, trials/CRM workflow, app distribution. Developers and users can both exert choice on the subset of fees applied to a transaction, so they can provide performance-based feedback to Apple.
Even a monopolist can compete with itself, to improve service and product.
Before that carriers had much higher fees when you sold J2ME apps on feature phones through thier store.
This is what decentralized platforms fix. I'd rather keep the money as an app owner, and split the difference with the consumer(or just keep all of it). Even better if there's an avenue to avoid the government taking 50% too.
And what exactly is the alternative option for them there? They can either follow the rules in China or completely lose all of their business. That is on China, not Apple.
As an aside: As an engineer, I dislike their walled garden approach; but I love their approach as a consumer. To be frank, most companies have bad taste and poor UX design. Apple doesn't knock it out the park all the time, but their products are consistently good and their design guidelines for iOS apps enforce some of the same quality. So yeah, I'll take a walled garden approach if the garden is beautiful.
Quite often anti-competitive actions are beneficial to customers at the expense of other companies.
As a consumer, I don't give a damn if Apple is "mean" to your business. Learn to compete better.
If these companies are stopping a better product from coming to the market then by all means lets throw antitrust at them; but if your product is just a clone and/or lower quality product that cannot get users, nobody cares.
Sorry, but learn to compete.
There is a major difference between what Microsoft was doing back in 90s and what Apple is doing today.
Not to mention the cut the publishers, wholesellers, and the retail stores use to take when you sold boxed software.
Their cut is the same as Google’s and Steams.
Sorry to rain on your paradise, but is there something old-fashioned about using "Double Irish"[1] arrangement to evade legitimate taxes too?
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/apple-s-cash-mountain-ho...
The comparison would be Apple net income (~$50B) vs. GDP, not market cap (which has units of USD) vs. GDP (which has units of USD per year).
It's a measure of economic activity (of which our little give-and-take game would be an example) and it is meaningful under the assumption that all that activity happens for more rational reasons than just trolling economists. Note that our little give-and-take game would be a very expensive example of such trolling, if somehow the tax-man got involved.
~30 trillion in residential real estate
~6 trillion in commercial real estate
~30 trillion in pubic company value
Other big buckets I guess would be undeveloped land & private companies.
~100T sounds pretty plausible but I feel like I'm missing a big bucket or two. Not sure what though.
Considering how huge an employer the public sector is in the US, it stands to reason there's a huge value to in the government-as-an-enterprise, even if only considering cash value of assets, such as real estate (including natural resources!) and equipment (including military).
Of course, it might be very tough to calculate, if one includes every public entitity down the the local level and takes into account the debt of each entity.
What's the other one?
*edited to include link
Historically, adjusting for inflation there are also some really big ones: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/08/22/a-history-...
Apple has roughly $50B in revenue and $120B in equity. Most of it's products could be replaced in less than 5 years by a competitor. Market cap is a measure of public trust among other things but not actual worth or value to society.
A company's value is the free cash flow available to owners from now to kingdom come discounted back to the present.
I wish this was true, but I think you’re severely overestimating Apple’s competitors... In the last 5 years, noone has even approached them, neither in hardware nor in software, even though the formula is painfully obvious (high quality hardware that keeps working/updating, and non-annoying easy-to-use software that’s friendly to powerusers).
I’m not sure how you are calculating equity but they have $240B in plain cash. They have so much in IP, and extremely low interest loans.
Market cap does mean something, it’s literally the most meaningful value the world puts on a company
It is, and not only just on HN. Because Apple has $220B in revenue, not $50.
In the book Ed Catmull wrote that Steve Jobs would say regularly "as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills."
Gives you some pause to realize how quickly Apple's business could be relegated to the trashbin with no new products to pick up the baton.
A competitor could replace most of Apple's current products in 5 years, but where will Apple be in 5 years? They'll be five years ahead.
This always happens with big companies, Nokia, Ericsson, Yahoo, they are replaced by new companies.
5 years ahead for the big company means no progress.
Apple is where it was 5 years ago in terms of innovation. They havent done anything new that was meaningful and only reap the benefits of what jobs invented 15y ago.
Apple is the first trillion-dollar company in the United States, though.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/nov/06/china
http://blog.pmarca.com/2013/03/26/unshackle-the-middle-class...