The last product launch Apple did that truly would have encouraged a reaction like that would maybe be the M1 macs. Otherwise the iPhone and most of their other products change too little year over year for that to happen
Apple's valuation is in no way related to its services, or products. That ship has sailed a long time ago. "fair price discovery" is absolute bullshit and at this point, number goes up because number goes up.
I disagree completely. Tesla, AMD and now nVidia are irrational exuberance stocks. Apple is a money printing machine, with no end of their dominance in sight. They put a lot of that capital into buying back stock, thus making it rise themselves.
As someone who switch from Android to iPhone just a few years ago, it's insane how quickly I got engulfed in the ecosystem and now have Apple everything in my house.
At this point, I don't even know how I'd switch back to Android even if I wanted to (and I don't). Once they've got their claws in, they've got you—and you're happy about it.
I have 2x big Homepods for my stereo system, Airpods Pros when I work out, Airpods Max for office, iPhone 13 Mini, iPad Pro for when I want to consume, Macbook Pro for work, Apple Watch for hiking, subscribe to iCloud+. All this within the last 2 years.
I'm about to buy Macbook Airs as gifts for my family.
Heck, I might even buy a Vision Pro when it comes out.
Apple is so good at its ecosystem thing. Luckily, I own AAPL.
Nvidia isn't irrational. ML and associated technologies will be pervasive ans Nvidia dominates the space. Their chips will be ubiquitous, in your microwave.
That doesn't make these ideas good, but mobile apps are frequently a bad idea and everyone still makes one.
In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone.
It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor.
I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
>It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
I agree. DirectX still makes a very strong case for itself with ease-of-use, extra features and strong performance. That's the big reason I mention it's not fully replaced, because frankly it's not (and I say this as an ENORMOUS DXVK apologist).
That being said, DirectX doesn't feel like the titan of the industry it once was. If you're shipping a multiplat title and intend to hit PC, PS5 and Xbox in one fell swoop, targeting Vulkan makes it a cinch. It wouldn't be as "native" as a DirectX-first title, but it does offer SPIR-V cross-compilation and a huge degree of control over how you present your program. It is not neccesarily easier to use, but I feel like I'm seeing it more now that game engines are supporting it. If Nintendo continues to develop their Vulkan drivers from what they were on the Switch, it's very likely that we will see a write-once-port-anywhere GPU API.
Oh, and there's Metal too. Sorry pal, nothing nice to say about you. Go home, tell dad to let Vulkan play with you in the GPU sandbox.
Stock buybacks create a steady demand that’s price inelastic. I think one side effect of that is it suppresses natural price discovery.
Another part of it is passive investing in indices and etfs cause money to flow disproportionality into the biggest stocks by market capitalization. This is a positive feedback cycle for the largest companies in the index.
These stocks may well go higher. But they are also at levels right now where you are unlikely to get a good return on them if you invest long term from here.
I would neither invest in them nor go short against them.
Buybacks don’t necessarily “suppress” price discovery, they’re just another mechanism for imputing per-share price, like revenue, margin, etc.
If you wish, it’s trivial to filter out the effect of buybacks. Look at market cap over time instead of price over time. Look at market cap divided by revenue over time, instead of market cap divided by share price over time.
Buybacks are not always the best use of capital, but with BRK as a key shareholder, you feel that it must make sense in their circumstance. The same money Apple invested in buybacks, its competitors have invested in dubious hiring sprees and unchecked R&D.
I wouldn’t add to my apple position, but I wouldn’t consider selling any time soon. The folks at BRK know better than me!
I think you misunderstand me. What I’m saying is that price inelastic demand for the stock through buybacks puts upward pressure on the stock price, no matter the current price, preventing the normal market process of price discovery from working well.
This then is amplified by passive investment. I think that’s what makes buybacks so effective.
I’m not saying anything about it making it harder to determine the intrinsic value of a stock, which I think is what you’re talking about.
I'd say the valuation is related to its services in that Apple's good reputation is based on consistent services. But it's certainly not proportional. Number goes up because everyone who sells demands to make a profit, just like with houses.
When I was planning to buy a phone last year, it could have gone either way, iOS or Android. After a lot of analysis, I settled on iOS for my needs, and while I like Android UX more, there just weren't any good options at the time. My previous two phones were OnePlus, but they have also gone to shit, and last year's Pixel also didn't get any good reviews. And now I'm planning to buy an Apple Watch for its health features.
I'm using Ubuntu on an old HP laptop right now which is working fine for me, but maybe, far off into the future, I will buy one of those Macbooks. I just don't like Apple's software, but as an overall package they're good and I don't see any better options right now, I wish there were better options, like something with Apple's hardware, but with better software.
I think what you mean is that OS X is in the family tree of Linux, but it's more like an estranged third cousin.
> It is a Unix-based operating system
> macOS makes use of the BSD codebase and the XNU kernel,[14] and its core set of components is based upon Apple's open source Darwin operating system.
There are quite a few inaccuracies in this comment for one sentence.
MacOS and before it Mac OS X do not have “Linux” roots. The operating systems are based on Darwin which has roots in FreeBSD (which is emphatically not Linux).
You could say it has Unix roots or BSD roots, although they have diverged significantly. MacOS for example runs on a Mach micro kernel rather than the monolithic kernel you’d find in a Linux or BSD distribution.
As far as the user land goes MacOS does ship a full BSD shell environment and not a GNU/Linux one.
1 - The inevitable conclusion of Apple's walled garden is that once they fail to demonstrate organic revenue growth, they will begin converting their platform control into revenue, at the expense of users. In ways that make the App Store look quaint.
2 - I'm allergic to tech elitism, and I like messing with people who distilled their social litmus test down to the icon colors for non-standard SMS reimplementations.
3 - MacOS and power users are obviously so far off Apple's priority list at this point that relying on it as a work platform is a poor risk decision.
This. Great hardware, probably good software in most cases, but rather toxic elitist culture that you can't discuss with reasonably. And lies, so many lies, not worse than other manufacturers but they don't try to act like saviors of universe/privacy/whatnot, which they aren't if you actually follow things a bit.
I feel this one. I've had an iphone in the past and I didn't like it much. My current phone is a OnePlus which I really like, but their new offerings aren't appealing. Something about Samsung I don't enjoy, possible the ads. Pixel isn't available in my country.
I've ordered a Sony phone. The appeal is 3.5mm jack and a bezel instead of a cutout - I've never used the front camera on my phone so it's obtuseness irritates me. The OnePlus had a pop-up, great solution.
However, if this one doesn't work out or the next time I need a new one the options are poor I think I'll be compelled to switch.
They have a Nike/Coke kind of grip on the market. But that kind of stuff can flip on a dime if Apple begins to be 'not cool'. They have survived releasing bad products(butterfly keyboards and bad antennas). They survived from being the cool thing young adults use and migrated over to the phone your mom uses.
I really can't see any obstacles for their domination of the Veblen good tech market. And that market is incredibly profitable, where Asus has significantly tighter margins.
I'll probably end up buying some total market ETF since even 100k in a good performing Apple is only ~7-15% per year, 7k-15k... but the risk is insane. Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
Might be longer term but I think the new macbook pros don't have the same quality feel as the old ones. I got new airpod pros and the new case feels cheap to me. Very small signal against and longer term. The vision pro could be a new iphone. I still think the valuation is crazy but thats a problem with most tech imo.
> Might be longer term but I think the new macbook pros don't have the same quality feel as the old ones.
“Old ones” being?
I used to own a 2015 15” MBP and currently have both a 2017 15” MBP and 16” M1 Max MBP and they feel equally quality to me, with the main difference being that the M1 model has more empty space in its case due to its increased thickness, which is a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make because it allows for cooling that doesn’t struggle.
I think the 2017 ones would be the old ones. I'm not sure when the change to the case happened. I'm talking about the current 14" ones with the more rounded corners vs the version that was more folio like.
Don't take investment advice from strangers and all that, but...
I bought a single share of AAPL in 1/2008. Then another share in 10/2008. I slowly expanded my investment as it split. It's the second-highest performing stock or fund I've owned over that 15yr period ($TSLA is the highest).
$AAPL pays a dividend. Reinvest the dividends and go long.
Piling on, because not taking internet strangers' advice is good advice itself, but I was told one "buy what you use." If you like Apple and their products and believe in the company, own part of it. This isn't good advice in a silo, because it doesn't make a full portfolio, but I have stuck to it since I started investing and it's been generally good advice.
In developing countries, it's a prerequisite to have iPhones if you want to be viewed as high class. Period. But iPhone penetration is very low in these countries. This means there's only one way to go for Apple in these countries; up.
IMO APPL has much more downside risk than upside benefit at this price. Yes, they have a locked-in consumer customer base, but they are very much resting on their laurels. That would be fine, but not at this kind of multiple, in my opinion.
Too much risk of them becoming "uncool", no longer the default choice, increasingly less frenetic phone upgrade cycles, etc. They have very strong competition on the hardware side as well IMO, especially with the rise of folding phones and the like offering something that you simply can't get with apple. Of course, they can always produce one, but..
Here are a couple of things to consider, to help you determine if you should buy $APPL or not:
* Do you think the stock is currently undervalued? If yes, at what price would you consider it to be fairly valued? Overvalued?
* Can you afford to lose the money?
* Is there another investment opportunity that offers a better risk/reward ratio?
It doesn't matter if you are correct in your assessment of Apple's continued dominance of their market if most investors agree with you, because then that assessment is already baked into the price of the stock. The only way to beat market is to take a contrarian position and be right.
If your goal is not to beat the market, then you should probably not be picking individual stocks.
More like that lots of these insiders, shareholders, etc are preparing to sell their stock once it hits magic numbers such as "$3TN market cap" or "$200 a share" as it is constantly being reported on the news again.
The market is testing your psychology to jump in at those extreme prices with the retail folks just falling for it and losing money again.
> Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
Great move and not bad and one of the good opportunities to jump in after ignoring the mania. [0].
But then there was Meta that did 200% in 6 months when it was $88. Now the stock has recovered as others have noted. I and some others in [1] also ignored Meta's stock panic, bought in as low as $89 when nearly everyone was screaming about Meta going down to $0 and now people want to buy Meta stock at $290 today.
May as well consider buying Berkshire Hathaway, you get exposure to Apple that expires when they no longer think it’s a good place to park your money, which will likely be the point that you want to exit at, too.
A great opportunity to sell some AAPL stock with almost everyone screaming $3TN, AAPL at $200 a share, etc.
What is the point of buying at the all time high with stocks like this, when last year almost everyone was scared to buy in 2022 during the layoffs spree?
By the time it hits either $3TN market cap or $200 a share, Tim Cook probably would have sold some by then.
Note that "Services" revenue includes App Store and AppleCare, among other various items (I think also Google's search deal with Safari).
It's very easy to score if you start running halfway between 3rd base and home plate.
The other thing is that "wearables" wouldn't be nearly as successful without the preexisting Apple ecosystem of iPhone and Mac. There's a reason Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhone, and it wasn't "courage", it was "cash". ;-)
Jobs was a lot more charismatic and had a much more massive presence on the stage and in the public eye, which goes a long way. He was also much more of a product guy, and I think more people can resonate with that better than they can with Cook as a logistics guy.
I miss Steve. A real bastard of a man but nobody could create products, and point out the flaws in a product, better than him. Absolute genius.
I think Apple has suffered with its innovation since Steve died because there is no one left that great to say "no" to a product, or feature. Tim Cook might be a good businessman but he is not a product innovator, and that's Apple's biggest problem right now.
Maybe so, but I feel users are getting more of what they’re asking for these days. Bringing back ports on the MacBook Pros and not going for ultimate thinness. The changes in iOS/iPadOS that make it more useful as a standalone device.
Jobs also seem to have tighter control of the company and what it engineered even if it meant somewhat displeasing the financiers, marketing to some degree.
Ah, is it once again time to calculate the value of my worst investment ever, a second-generation iPod 10GB...
You see, as a student I had a bit of Apple stock bought sometime around 2001. The next year I sold those shares for a tidy 50% profit (so I thought!) and spent all the money on a brand new iPod. Only 500 euros for thousands of songs in your pocket and blazing FireWire upload speeds, amazing!
At roughly 600x appreciation accounting for stock splits, looks like those shares would be worth over $300k today.
Absent the stock sale, how long would it have taken you to afford an iPod with only surplus funds? (i.e. saving $166 euros more, sacrificing nothing else)
And what would you value the music listening happiness of that timespan at?
Maybe it was a good investment! Music is pretty nice, and the iPod was great.
I honestly tend to agree. At that time, an hour each day of personally selected music probably made me happier than holding on to some stock whose real upside started many years later. (There was plenty of time for me to buy AAPL again later but I mostly didn't.)
And imagine if you bought tons of bitcoin for 0.1$ and sold for 60k... we all have been there, no point torturing yourself. Life has other qualities, and money will only get you so far even these days
Maybe your iPod purchase was the trigger for the butterfly-effect that made Apple to be a $3T company. Would you have not bought that iPod, possibly you would sit on some worthless Apple penny stocks (and you'd have no iPod).
There is no other brand on the planet with a consistent and comprehensive product lineup as Apple. Just going to apple.com, one can see everything the company does. On top of that they made $387B in revenue last year. That is more than the GDP of New Zealand, Hong Kong or Finland for example.
Their product lineup is so simple compared to competition, that it's often the easiest to recommend their products to tech illiterate population.
Almost all android and laptop manufacturers release so many products that the many choices making buying a product frustrating as if they are designed for the sale and not use.
iPhones are also really affordable when you factor in that you can sell them later for a decent value.
66 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadAt this point, I don't even know how I'd switch back to Android even if I wanted to (and I don't). Once they've got their claws in, they've got you—and you're happy about it.
No wonder their growth and expansion continues.
I'm about to buy Macbook Airs as gifts for my family.
Heck, I might even buy a Vision Pro when it comes out.
Apple is so good at its ecosystem thing. Luckily, I own AAPL.
That doesn't make these ideas good, but mobile apps are frequently a bad idea and everyone still makes one.
In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone.
It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor.
I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
That being said, DirectX doesn't feel like the titan of the industry it once was. If you're shipping a multiplat title and intend to hit PC, PS5 and Xbox in one fell swoop, targeting Vulkan makes it a cinch. It wouldn't be as "native" as a DirectX-first title, but it does offer SPIR-V cross-compilation and a huge degree of control over how you present your program. It is not neccesarily easier to use, but I feel like I'm seeing it more now that game engines are supporting it. If Nintendo continues to develop their Vulkan drivers from what they were on the Switch, it's very likely that we will see a write-once-port-anywhere GPU API.
Oh, and there's Metal too. Sorry pal, nothing nice to say about you. Go home, tell dad to let Vulkan play with you in the GPU sandbox.
Another part of it is passive investing in indices and etfs cause money to flow disproportionality into the biggest stocks by market capitalization. This is a positive feedback cycle for the largest companies in the index.
These stocks may well go higher. But they are also at levels right now where you are unlikely to get a good return on them if you invest long term from here.
I would neither invest in them nor go short against them.
If you wish, it’s trivial to filter out the effect of buybacks. Look at market cap over time instead of price over time. Look at market cap divided by revenue over time, instead of market cap divided by share price over time.
Buybacks are not always the best use of capital, but with BRK as a key shareholder, you feel that it must make sense in their circumstance. The same money Apple invested in buybacks, its competitors have invested in dubious hiring sprees and unchecked R&D.
I wouldn’t add to my apple position, but I wouldn’t consider selling any time soon. The folks at BRK know better than me!
This then is amplified by passive investment. I think that’s what makes buybacks so effective.
I’m not saying anything about it making it harder to determine the intrinsic value of a stock, which I think is what you’re talking about.
I'm using Ubuntu on an old HP laptop right now which is working fine for me, but maybe, far off into the future, I will buy one of those Macbooks. I just don't like Apple's software, but as an overall package they're good and I don't see any better options right now, I wish there were better options, like something with Apple's hardware, but with better software.
macOS is based on Unix; Linux is Unix-like [1]. Neither macOS nor OS X are based on Linux.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like
> It is a Unix-based operating system
> macOS makes use of the BSD codebase and the XNU kernel,[14] and its core set of components is based upon Apple's open source Darwin operating system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_operating_systems
MacOS and before it Mac OS X do not have “Linux” roots. The operating systems are based on Darwin which has roots in FreeBSD (which is emphatically not Linux).
You could say it has Unix roots or BSD roots, although they have diverged significantly. MacOS for example runs on a Mach micro kernel rather than the monolithic kernel you’d find in a Linux or BSD distribution.
As far as the user land goes MacOS does ship a full BSD shell environment and not a GNU/Linux one.
1 - The inevitable conclusion of Apple's walled garden is that once they fail to demonstrate organic revenue growth, they will begin converting their platform control into revenue, at the expense of users. In ways that make the App Store look quaint.
2 - I'm allergic to tech elitism, and I like messing with people who distilled their social litmus test down to the icon colors for non-standard SMS reimplementations.
3 - MacOS and power users are obviously so far off Apple's priority list at this point that relying on it as a work platform is a poor risk decision.
I've ordered a Sony phone. The appeal is 3.5mm jack and a bezel instead of a cutout - I've never used the front camera on my phone so it's obtuseness irritates me. The OnePlus had a pop-up, great solution.
However, if this one doesn't work out or the next time I need a new one the options are poor I think I'll be compelled to switch.
They have a Nike/Coke kind of grip on the market. But that kind of stuff can flip on a dime if Apple begins to be 'not cool'. They have survived releasing bad products(butterfly keyboards and bad antennas). They survived from being the cool thing young adults use and migrated over to the phone your mom uses.
I really can't see any obstacles for their domination of the Veblen good tech market. And that market is incredibly profitable, where Asus has significantly tighter margins.
I'll probably end up buying some total market ETF since even 100k in a good performing Apple is only ~7-15% per year, 7k-15k... but the risk is insane. Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
“Old ones” being?
I used to own a 2015 15” MBP and currently have both a 2017 15” MBP and 16” M1 Max MBP and they feel equally quality to me, with the main difference being that the M1 model has more empty space in its case due to its increased thickness, which is a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make because it allows for cooling that doesn’t struggle.
I bought a single share of AAPL in 1/2008. Then another share in 10/2008. I slowly expanded my investment as it split. It's the second-highest performing stock or fund I've owned over that 15yr period ($TSLA is the highest).
$AAPL pays a dividend. Reinvest the dividends and go long.
In developing countries, it's a prerequisite to have iPhones if you want to be viewed as high class. Period. But iPhone penetration is very low in these countries. This means there's only one way to go for Apple in these countries; up.
Apple's brand is incredible around the world.
Too much risk of them becoming "uncool", no longer the default choice, increasingly less frenetic phone upgrade cycles, etc. They have very strong competition on the hardware side as well IMO, especially with the rise of folding phones and the like offering something that you simply can't get with apple. Of course, they can always produce one, but..
* Do you think the stock is currently undervalued? If yes, at what price would you consider it to be fairly valued? Overvalued?
* Can you afford to lose the money?
* Is there another investment opportunity that offers a better risk/reward ratio?
It doesn't matter if you are correct in your assessment of Apple's continued dominance of their market if most investors agree with you, because then that assessment is already baked into the price of the stock. The only way to beat market is to take a contrarian position and be right.
If your goal is not to beat the market, then you should probably not be picking individual stocks.
More like that lots of these insiders, shareholders, etc are preparing to sell their stock once it hits magic numbers such as "$3TN market cap" or "$200 a share" as it is constantly being reported on the news again.
The market is testing your psychology to jump in at those extreme prices with the retail folks just falling for it and losing money again.
> Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
Great move and not bad and one of the good opportunities to jump in after ignoring the mania. [0].
But then there was Meta that did 200% in 6 months when it was $88. Now the stock has recovered as others have noted. I and some others in [1] also ignored Meta's stock panic, bought in as low as $89 when nearly everyone was screaming about Meta going down to $0 and now people want to buy Meta stock at $290 today.
Oh dear.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713073
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452587
What is the point of buying at the all time high with stocks like this, when last year almost everyone was scared to buy in 2022 during the layoffs spree?
By the time it hits either $3TN market cap or $200 a share, Tim Cook probably would have sold some by then.
Tim Cook became CEO when Apple had a $364.4 billion market cap. Soon that market cap will be 10x!
Greatest CEO of our generation.
Note that "Services" revenue includes App Store and AppleCare, among other various items (I think also Google's search deal with Safari).
It's very easy to score if you start running halfway between 3rd base and home plate.
The other thing is that "wearables" wouldn't be nearly as successful without the preexisting Apple ecosystem of iPhone and Mac. There's a reason Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhone, and it wasn't "courage", it was "cash". ;-)
Cook didn't really find any major product-market fits, except for Airbuds, and even those I imagine were a longer term vision.
I think Apple has suffered with its innovation since Steve died because there is no one left that great to say "no" to a product, or feature. Tim Cook might be a good businessman but he is not a product innovator, and that's Apple's biggest problem right now.
You see, as a student I had a bit of Apple stock bought sometime around 2001. The next year I sold those shares for a tidy 50% profit (so I thought!) and spent all the money on a brand new iPod. Only 500 euros for thousands of songs in your pocket and blazing FireWire upload speeds, amazing!
At roughly 600x appreciation accounting for stock splits, looks like those shares would be worth over $300k today.
Shit happens.
Same for everybody else. Don't worry about it.
And what would you value the music listening happiness of that timespan at?
Maybe it was a good investment! Music is pretty nice, and the iPod was great.
Their product lineup is so simple compared to competition, that it's often the easiest to recommend their products to tech illiterate population.
Almost all android and laptop manufacturers release so many products that the many choices making buying a product frustrating as if they are designed for the sale and not use.
iPhones are also really affordable when you factor in that you can sell them later for a decent value.