Apple Is Now Worth $2 Trillion, Punctuating Big Tech's Grip (nytimes.com) 60
It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value. It took it just a two more years to get to $2 trillion. From a report: Even more stunning: All of Apple's second $1 trillion came in the past 21 weeks, while the global economy shrank faster than ever before in the coronavirus pandemic. On Wednesday Apple became the first U.S. company to hit a $2 trillion valuation when its shares climbed 1.2 percent to $467.78 in morning trading. It was another milestone for the maker of iPhones, Mac computers and Apple Watches, cementing its title as the world's most valuable public company and punctuating how the pandemic has been a bonanza for the tech giants. As recently as mid-March, Apple's value was under $1 trillion after the stock market plunged over fears of the coronavirus. On March 23, the stock market's nadir this year, the Federal Reserve announced aggressive new measures to calm investors. Since then, the stock market -- and particularly the stocks of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook -- largely soared, with the S&P 500 hitting a new high on Tuesday.
Pre vs post Steve Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Since then the company has innovated nothing of note and now it's $467 / share, almost exactly 9 times as much.
Re:Pre vs post Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting aside the so-called lack of innovation (I rather think that their chip design counts, also their ecosystem integration), *stability* is something the stock market likes. Apple is good at making money. Innovation gives you a chance to make money, but stability is where people start investing because they believe that it will pay future dividends.
Amazon was more innovative at the beginning than now, but now they're actually making money and their market cap is bigger than ever before. So too with Microsoft and Facebook.
Innovation really isn't everything. We look for it because we like to see the world move forward. What will be the next big disruption? By definition, nobody will know until it happens. But if you're just looking at stock prices, steady, predictable income is where it's at. As long as Apple doesn't look like they're going to be disrupted themselves, this was the inevitable outcome.
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Innovators are often the ones that get left behind in the dust. The paradigm of the smart phone had been floating around since at least the 1990s, and certainly Blackberry was the first one to really develop a "knock it out of the park" device. I don't view the iPhone itself as being incredibly innovative on the technical level. Innovation came in the form of an app store which gave iOS devices a great deal more flexibility than Apple's competitors. There was also the marketing brilliance of Apple, which wh
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1. Multi-touch. People forget the generally available touchscreens of phones pre-iphone. You had a stylus that wouldn't really register until significant force was applied to the screen.
2. A UI designed for fingers rather than a point to click. Try typing with your fingers on the keyboard of a Palm 700w smartphone. They keys were a few millimeters on each side.
3. A desktop (now we call it mobile) web expe
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This is not about how good Apple is but all about how bad M$ and Windows anal probe 10 is. How customer abusive M$ has become and how vulnerable they are to an attack by Apple. The market is currently betting that Apple is in a good position to really stick it to M$. Now Sony can batter on the other side of M$ at the same time, targeting the M$ consumer market. M$ has already declared it is losing consumers by making noises about focusing on business (as excuse for starting to fail in retail). If Sony and A
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nnovation came in the form of an app store which gave iOS
Nope. the first gen iPhone had no app store. Cydia, the third party app store for jailbroken iPhones came out before Apple's own app store. Apple have innovated approximately nothing at all. They're good at turning existing innovations into products.
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'When that slips, as it has been'
You know that we're commenting on a story about how Apple JUST broke the $2 trillion market cap, right? If their sales have been slipping, as you say they've been, why is their valuation up?
Re:Pre vs post Steve Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
There's the Apple Watch, AirPods... never mind. For some, no one (especially Apple) is "innovative" unless they come up with some super-earth shattering invention that's never been seen before. (The later part is the primary difference between "invention" and "innovation", btw.)
I guess the market sees things differently....
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There's an analogy in the music industry. I'm a big Beatles fan. They were and still are recognized as a very innovative band. And yet, they had antecedents who actually made a lot of the innovations (Buddy Holly basically invented the four piece rock band), there were other artists experimenting in the studio, pushing recording technology to the max. What the Beatles did, and what Apple did, wasn't so much to invent a whole bunch of new techniques, but rather find a way to synthesize all these pre-existing
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Re:Pre vs post Steve Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Innovation is good, execution is better.
Apple learned how to execute under Steve, and even more with Tim Cook. Yes, the innovation pace has dramatically slowed, but there was plenty of innovation at Apple in the Bad Old Days, and they couldn't execute for shit, which is why they were Beleaguered Apple back then.
Successful companies have both innovation and execution.
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Look at Microsoft. The most significant innovation the company ever did was when Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter. That wasn't exactly innovative, but he built an interpreter that could be relatively easily ported to different architectures, fit nicely in 8k so it could be burned to a ROM and thrown on an average 8 bit computer of the era. Everything after that was a helluva lot of boldness, some pretty shady dealings, but it all came down to Gates' execution. OS9 was fairly innovative in some ways for a 16
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Innovation is good, execution is better.
Not really: without innovation the execution would be impossible. Both are necessary.
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While both are necessary, necessity does not make them equal. That it can take dozens of attempts at executing the same innovation before it succeeds tells us that it's the execution that's more important. That poor ideas can succeed with good execution tells us that it's the execution that's more important. How often do good innovations succeed with poor execution? Virtually never unless they iterate quickly to fix their execution.
Apple had the Newton back before PDAs were around, but its numerous innovati
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I disagree with you. Making one more important than the other is just showing bias. They're both 100% necessary. Failed execution is more visible because the products reached the consumer markets for you to see. You don't know anything about the many failed startups or internal projects where they couldn't develop the underlying innovations in the first place.
I thin there's also a success bias. What's required for success IMO is (a) having something that is minimally adequate (as in it is actually adequate
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Here's one from sometime in 2011 (the year Jobs died):
"Apple is the Worlds Most Valuable Brand in 2011 with a $153.3 Billion Valuation."
2000/153.3 = 13.046
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When Steve Jobs died Apple was $52 / share.
Since then the company has innovated nothing of note and now it's $467 / share, almost exactly 9 times as much.
$1 to $52 is a much bigger deal than $52 to $467. It isn't that hard to illustrate:
Buy $1 million in shares at $1 each, and you will have $52,000,000 when the stock hits $52.
Buy $1 million in shares at $52 each, and you will have $8,980,769 when the stock hits $467.
Looking at it another way, the DJIA grew from about $8000 to $11,000 during Steve Job's tenure, and he beat that by over 100x
The DJIA grew from about $11,000 to $28,000 during Tim Cook's tenure, and he beat that by about 3.5x
Tim Cook's time at Ap
Top five interpretations of your post (Score:1)
When Steve Jobs died Apple was $52 / share.
Since then the company has innovated nothing of note and now it's $467 / share
So what is the point here? The mind whirls with possibility!
The top five possible points you might have had in mind:
5) Jobs was an anchor dragging down Apple! Look how they soar released from the constrictions of the Black Turtleneck!
4) Jobs was so amazing that he propelled the company to new heights from beyond the grave! All hail the Black Turtleneck!
3) As with so many puzzling texts
Re: Pre vs post Steve Jobs (Score:1)
When Steve Jobs died Apple was $52 / share. Since then the company has innovated nothing of note and now it's $467 / share, almost exactly 9 times as much.
Insightful. Now, if we assume that "value" remained the same or decreased, while "cost" in dollars increased nine-fold, we can conclude that dollar lost ~90% of its value over that period.
But not a Monopoly (Score:2)
Big Tech's Grip (Score:5, Interesting)
$2 trillion is Apple's market cap. It's the value of all of it's stock added up. It isn't how much the company is worth. It isn't even a good indicator of how much you would get if you sold all of your stock, as the more that becomes available on the market the less it's worth. It's also not an indicator of how much money the company has, nor how successful it is. Tesla has yet to turn an annual profit and it's market cap is $350 billion.
If you want to see an industry with a "grip" on the government, check out the defense industry. Contractors deliver sub-standard work, billions of dollars over-budget, and get rewarded with decades-long contracts. Or special export status. Or jobs in the DoD.
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Ah, Data General. Then again, I was always a DEC PDP-11 guy, myself.... ;)
Re:Big Tech's Grip (Score:5, Insightful)
"In 2022 it ought to be worth $4 trillion -- $8 trillion in 2024. .. Assuming socialists don't win and F everything up."
Yeah, a market cap of only $3 trillion in 2022 along with universal health care... that would really suck.
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"In 2022 it ought to be worth $4 trillion -- $8 trillion in 2024. .. Assuming socialists don't win and F everything up."
Yeah, a market cap of only $3 trillion in 2022 along with universal health care... that would really suck.
You think you can enact stuff that takes 1 trillion from Apple alone in the next two years, and that everything will be just rosy?
That's not how anything works. Economies are not static. People and companies don't just sit still while you plunder them.
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Counterpoint: An Apple that didn't face any liability for its employees' medical insurance payouts would probably be worth more.
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How do you take $1 trillion from Apple? That value of a company is the amount that shareholders are willing to sell it for. How would the government take the $1 trillion, they would have to force the company to give it a percentage of ownership and then sell those shares? The moment something like that was even being contemplated, the value of the shares themselves would decrease because people would start selling their shares -- thereby causing a downward spiral in share prices.
Apple doesnt have cash lying
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Apple has around two hundred billion in cash. It has other assets, too. Not to mention "only"?
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So if Apple is the biggest public company, are there likely larger private companies that we don't talk about?
Well that depends, how do you want to define "larger"? Employees? Revenue? Profits? Cash on hand? Product portfolio? Number of customers? Even some public companies would top Apple on those measures. By revenues, Apple is #11, by profits, #2 (behind state owned Saudi Aramco).
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Tesla has yet to turn an annual profit and it's market cap is $350 billion..
https://www.forbes.com/sites/g... [forbes.com]
It's inflation (Score:2)
It's pretty obvious to anyone who cares to look, that this run-up in the price of stocks (and basically all assets) is just a form of monetary debasement (inflation). It's almost comically ingenious what the financial wizzes have done. Basically after the 70/80s inflation spirals, the central bankers set out to control inflation to create stability. To do this they defined a way to measure inflation (the basket of consumer goods) that was relevant to the common worker. After deregulation, the financial engi
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No, the Defense Industry is peanuts compared to the private sector. Even DoD admits it can no longer demand tech to fit its needs but rather must fits its need around available tech. The Defense Budget simply isn't big enough, over half of which goes to salary, healthcare, upkeep on the physical plant, i.e., the usual for running a large organization. The amount that actually goes for new systems is way below $200 Billion. You won't swing a $20 Trillion economy around for that kind of chump change.
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"It isn't how much the company is worth. "
It's literally the definition of what a publicly held company is worth.
Celebration Giveaway (Score:3)
To celebrate this milestone, everyone that sends Apple a tenth of a Bitcoin gets a free iPhone12!
We can't wait to get it into your hands!!
- Tim Apple
Stock Investors seemed divorced from reality. (Score:3)
Well more to the point, they just care about Stock Price. So we are seeing companies getting huge stock prices not because the company is doing excellent things but because other people are buying stock in these companies.
It is like trying to become friends with the cool kids, not because you actually like them, but because they are the cool kids that everyone wants to be friends with.
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So we are seeing companies getting huge stock prices not because the company is doing excellent things but because other people are buying stock in these companies.
Yeah, the Fed. We have huge stock prices because the stock market draws 30 billion a day from the fed in price supports. A mission to Mars is cheaper, and probably more productive
Remember that when anybody asks why Wall Street flourishes in a shitty economy.
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I though the Tesla Stock was funding a mission to Mars?
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That and the built in over $! Trillion yearly deficits due to past tax giveaways. The current year deficit will be close to $3 Trillion.
Just to make life interesting, Social Security trust fund is running out of money. So is Medicare. The Blue Haired will be looking for blood when those get cut.
That's not the reason for Apple increase (Score:1)
So we are seeing companies getting huge stock prices not because the company is doing excellent things but because other people are buying stock in these companies.
That may well be the reason behind other companies stock price rise, but not Apple.
In Apple's case the stock price stayed low for a long time, all while Apple was doing excellent things.
What has changed for Apple, and the reason for the stock increase, is investors are seeing that Apple is serious about services (read: steady recurring) revenue.
I
Damn! (Score:3)
I should have bought some shares. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing ?
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Back in the '90s, after years of Apple stock hovering between $10 and $12 a share, I watched it climb until it hit $19 and then I sold.
Couldn't imagine it breaking $25 in the next few years and I was getting married and needed so $$$.
*sigh*
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2 trillion of funny money! (Score:1)
It is faith based derivatives and IOUs
Re: Apple Always Judged Differently (Score:1)
Backed by? (Score:3)
Apple was at about 1 trillion market cap in early Oct 2019. Between early Oct 2019 and now, did revenue double? Did profit double? Revenue is up roughly 10% - which is great given all that has happened. Most company's stock prices don't double every time their revenue goes up by 10%.
You can defy gravity and fundamentals for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you. Apple is buying its own shares creating artificial support for the stock.
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Between early Oct 2019 and now, did revenue double?
No, but the Fed printed $3 trillion dollars and injected it into the financial system. That is around $20k for every household in the USA. Some would say printing that much money will reduce it's value and create inflation, but the Fed assures us that everything is fine and there are no bubbles to see anywhere.
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/06... [wolfstreet.com]
In Other Words (Score:3)
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Where are the fucking dividends?! (Score:2)