fear not
facebook will get to it's $1T valuation at some point (probably won't be inflation adjusted to 2012 dollars though)
Apple first earned the title of the world's highest-valued company in 2011, but rumors about the impending iPhone 5 sent its stock soaring to new heights on Monday, earning it a new distinction, that of the highest-valued company in stock market history. Shares of the fruity firm swelled more than 2 per cent on Monday, topping …
While they all hailed the large market cap, I had to Google to find out the more important info:
The company's ``price-to-earnings ratio'' is 15.6, compared to 16.1 for the S&P 500 overall. That suggests investors, unlike analysts, don't believe the company can grow its profits much from current levels.
There you have it. Unless the Board of Apple can pull another rabbit out of the hat like they did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, then the stock is fully valued. With the TV industry in the doldrums and Steve Jobs no longer with them, it's difficult to see how any rumoured new Apple consumer appliance will maintain their momentum.
Like many others, I'm old enough to remember what happened to Apple Computer Inc the last time Steve Jobs departed from the company he co-founded.
Like many others, I'm old enough to remember what happened to Apple Computer Inc the last time Steve Jobs departed from the company he co-founded.
Yep - but this time he ain't coming back, not unless he has his brain in a jar somewhere... sorry that would be in an iJar I suppose.
What you say about P/E ratio makes no sense. That the P/E ratio is low is good isn't it? It means that the value of the stock is based on actual performance, not an inflated hyped up value that has no bearing to reality (compare with Facebook with a P/E of 111, even after its embarassing price drop).
Put it another way, if Apple were as hyped as Facebook, their share price could go up another 7x or 8x what it is now, even without any increase in revenue. Or put it another way still, most investors are rubbish at judging the true value of stocks.
> most investors are rubbish at judging the true value of stocks
This might well be because after all the bailouts and crony stuffing of the recent years, there is so much loose money in the system and so few performing economic areas (people seem to be hoping that the next bubble will lift them out of the doldrums; well, good luck with that) that it sloshes towards anything which might promise a few additional percent of return. There is pensions to pay and there is interest to pay back. Well, good luck with THAT.
Just out of curiosity I checked the Dow Jones. It's back at pre-bust level... NOPE!
Well, I am old enough to know that what you write could have been written back in 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2007.
While I do not think they can grow indefinitely, they have quite a lot of new kit up their sleeves, just waiting for the proper moment to come out.
As for SJ, the first time he left the company was a completely different story - the sales guy was in charge back then.
It was pretty clear at the time that Microsoft was hugely overvalued. And Apple and Microsoft aren't even close to in the same business. And it's also clear that Apple is hugely over-valued to the tune of at least 4 times.
"Mwhahahahahahahaha!" - I don't get this at all, it's market cap. Why would any customer give a toss about market cap unless they were sick in the head?
Its called a sense of humor. I'm mostly laughing at all the people who told me when I got my first Mac in 2005 "Don't get a Mac, they won't even make those in a few more years"
And despite all of your attempts to be a killjoy, I'll enjoy a good gloat. After all the abuse we took over being Mac users we get to finally have a laugh. You fail at buzzkill.
But it doesn't follow that Apple is overvalued now. Look at the respective P/E ratios. Microsoft's was crazy high (well, crazy high by traditional standards, but by the standards of the late 1999 dotcom bubble it was only slightly high)
Apple's P/E is quite reasonable, especially when you back out it's current cash hoard, and is making enough profit to justify it's current valuation, factoring in some modest growth over the next few years - much less growth than they've had lately. If Apple had the crazy P/E that tech darling Amazon does its stock price would be about 13000!
Of course, a tech company is always riskier in the long run than an oil company. You wouldn't want to buy a tech company's stock and then not check prices for 10 years. But this would be a pretty reasonable thing to do as an Exxon investor. The risk of iPhone becoming obsolete (or smartphones as a whole) in a decade is much higher than the risk of oil becoming obsolete in a decade - hopefully we can obsolete it before it runs out...
I really like the light switches and plug sockets in my house, they are very snazy. They have a retro 1950s roundedness to the corners and a satisfying clunk when you plonk a light on. You could say, that on many levels, they just work! Maybe I should find out who makes them so that I can become a fan of the company!
The point is dear Dana.. they got so so so much of your money for so so so very little in return..
No matter how you justify it to yourself.. The reality is you paid too much for too little, and will do so again and again.
As a non anything fanboy All I can say is HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE....
"I listened to for years to.Microsoft talk about how it was Microsoft or nothing. Its not anymore."
All I remember was Microsoft giving Apple money because Apple were bankrupt, effectively. I've said it before and I'll say it again- MSFT/AAPL aren't in the same business.. Yet.
Additionally, I've noticed how the BBC are massive Apple Fanbois where the tiniest piece of good news about Apple get major articles.
The BBC: faking impartiality for years...
Also, all it will take for Apple's stock to tumble is if the idiotic city investors stopped buying Apple stock because they think their own iDevices are better than sliced bread.
I did hear on radio 4 this morning that inflation adjusted IBM was much larger than Apple
(Talking about the BBC, where "much larger" means "larger market cap".)
I have no idea offhand what IBM's historic largest market cap is, but in the early '60s it was trading close to $600 a share, which in today's dollars is around $4200, according to my handy online inflation calculator. So that seems plausible.
Really, reporting "largest market cap ever" without adjusting for inflation is worse than meaningless - it's deliberately misleading. And taking it as a sign of historic success (rather than simply success relative to the current market) is stupid.
Quite, my Dell works well (or it would without the crappy work enforced security software - not Dells fault), and cost a third of the cost of the equivalent Apple device. So, well done you for keeping up Apple share price - it's nice kit, but a bit overpriced for what you get.
There is no equivalent Dell, HP or Sony to an Apple Macbook pro - not one. You might find same cpu/mem/gpu, but Apple have engineered their mainboards so that you actually have "battery management" (as in you do not have to replace your battery every odd year, every four to five is good enough ), movement sensors and a lot of other little things. Then, you have BSDUnix with an easy to use ui and all the tools you could dream of, in there, ready for use ... like grep, sed, vi, dd, otool ... Mac OS X 10.4 feels more recent than Windows 7. Current Mac OS X is 10.8 ... You might prefer Wordpad and Notepad, your choice - MS Word cannot even format text properly when you delete stuff, it is always creative for you. Worse, even SAP employees, who use word a lot, tell me they have to copy paste text into notepad to get rid of the formatting then paste it back into word - I have not looked into it, tbh, but it sounds terrible. I did three months worth of their work in a day!
That, and when you open a macbook pro in a public place, heads turn ...
Apple have engineered their mainboards so that you actually have "battery management" (as in you do not have to replace your battery every odd year, every four to five is good enough ), movement sensors and a lot of other little things
As have other manufacturers. Battery life for my Dell and Lenovo laptops is close to the theoretical maximum for a LiIon battery - and what's more, I can replace them easily, using OEM or aftermarket batteries. My laptops all have tilt sensors and/or accelerometers and have survived considerable abuse (I've dropped the Lenovos onto hard surfaces plenty of times). And, yes, they call contain "a lot of other little things"; we call those "parts".
you have BSDUnix
Unixes of various flavors and Linuxes of various distributions are readily available for non-Apple laptops.
an easy to use ui
Subjective.
all the tools you could dream of, in there, ready for use ... like grep, sed, vi, dd
All of which I have on all my Windows machines, courtesy of Cygwin (and there are alternatives, so I have a choice).
Mac OS X 10.4 feels more recent than Windows 7
Subjective to the point of meaninglessness.
[random rambling about Microsoft Word]
Here's an idea: when you add sentences to a paragraph, try to make them relevant.
I fixed Dells, they overheated, the cheap sleeve bearing fans in my gaming laptops died again and again. Keys fall off, the plastic cases groan and squeak.
I had a dell go back for service SEVEN times. And yet the refused over and over to lemon it out . With Dell you get what you pay for. A poorly built, cheap plastic laptop, and the worst of India tech support.
I'll pay more for what I ACTUALLY get.
> In the case of the Catholic church, unless they reinstate indulgences, there's really no other way of getting a return on your investment.
Bingo! http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/05/02/catholic-church-allows-indulgences-again/
Apparently the RCC has decided that the wages of sin is not death after all. You just get a bit of a beating.
“Mind you, if we take inflation into account, Microsoft's bubble-era valuation looks even more impressive.”
Yes, and so does its decline.
Ballmer has recently re-iterated his intention to compete with Apple. Apple has not bothered reciprocating. Why? It’s clear who has the ideas, and who is taking direction.
Oh, and regarding the cost of Apple products, the money I have spent on Apple products has produced a far more enjoyable experience, less frustration, and more productivity. The money I have wasted on Microsoft goes beyond the over-pricing of its software. It’s the time wasted on making things work.
Yes, Apple have the ideas, they have the solid state MP3 player, initially invented by Diamond. They have the GUI desktop, initially invented by Xerox. They have the mobile phone, initially invented by a consortium - Racal and Siemens & Motorola seem to spring to mind. They have the tablet computer, the first tablet OS was an MS effort, but tablets have appeared in Sci-Fi for decades. They had the Newton pad PDS, first PDAs were by Psion.
Apple copy things which exist and generally make an excellent job of it, they do not do new products lines or concepts. I like quit a bit of Apple stuff, I just don't pretend that it's anything but a nice, well polished version of what has already existed, with a little good time to market thrown in.
Odd. I find the opposite, with Windows & Linux things 'just work' but on a Mac, unless I use only Apple products, getting things to work is a right pain in the arse! and since I can't stand ipods, ipads or iphones, th eonly apple product I use is a macbook air and that was down to it being tiny and light at the time I needed a tiny & light laptop...
My Macbook has been more trouble than a Linux PC, that is for sure!
Oi, you. GDP is a unit of monetary flow, ie money per arbitrary chunk of time, in this case dollars per year. That's not quite comparable to valuation, ie what you'd have to plunk down now to buy all of the thing. So please don't try. Find yourself a better made-up-on-the-spot thing to compare to, that at least has comparable units, there's a good el reg hack, thanks.
Really? My brain has almost no memory worth a damn, fails epically at remembering numbers long enough to do anything useful with them (e.g. addition, subtraction, remembering my own f*cking phone number, etc.) It can't remember faces at all. And about the only thing I can store for any length of time is music.
And I could have done without the dodgy eyesight too.
If the computer between my ears is the best computer, I really need to get a refund, but it turns out Deity, Inc. offers no warranty whatsoever—not even the EU-mandated minimum of two years!
At least Apple offers some half-decent customer support.
"Which leads your Reg hack to wonder what other companies might beat Apple's current valuation, once currency inflation is taken into account. The Dutch East India Company comes to mind. Are there others?"
The Yanks might not like the Brits much... But when it comes to corporate shenanigans... We dun it first...
South Sea Bubble anyone?
http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/South-Sea-Bubble/
According to Radio Four about thirty seconds ago, if we allow for inflation, IBM circa 1967 was worth around twice Apple's current value and is thus the winner of the all-time most valuable company of all time (so far). So there.
Actually, that surprised me. I would have assumed one of the oil companies to have taken the top position.
Thank you sir! (Or madam) - Clearly I am in the upper bracket of El Reg commentards, as I remember when IBM held this crown, and various articles pointing out that they were in effect richer than several countries by miles ... this was in the 70s. I was surprised I had to read so many comments before it was mentioned.
Contemporary fanbois might do well to ponder this, and look where IBM is today.
A quick gander at wikipedia gives....
Company with $781b worth in 2005 which if it's worth roughly the same amount now is more valuable than Apple.
Apple would be (currently) the most valuable company by share value, Aramco is private so it's value is actually based on what it's really worth.
What do you mean "it's value is actually based on what it's really worth"? There is no value it's "really worth", other than what someone will pay for it. The only way to truly value a privately held company is to put it up for bid and see what someone will pay for it, and the buyer is left to come up with his own value for it based on it's earnings and prospects for future earnings. i.e., the same way people try to value public companies like Apple, by looking at their current earnings and determining what they believe about their prospects for future earnings.
FYI - there was an articlein FT in 2010 where someone estimated Aramco's value at $7 trillion. There's going to be a wide range of estimates for private companies, because they don't release their financial information in the way public companies do. There are also no consequences for overestimating the value of a private company you can't or have no intention of trying to buy...
I like how the haters here who spend a considerable amount of time just on this site talking about apple are calling fanboys sad for cheering a company.
Yes, that may be true but it's infinitely less sad than spending each day hating on a company on the internet.
Fact is, apple make good hardware and software. People are getting fed up with windows. So until someone can come up with a good bit of hardware with quality software on top of it, apple will continue to do well.
I don't really understand the "good software, good hardware argument".
You might be confusing "pretty" for quality. But it would be difficult to argue that an 11 year old franken-GUI with all sorts of crap tacked on and cut out and welded together is a good software product. Especially with the outmoded, rubbish video drivers. And the mac 10.x.0 false start release cycle.
The hardware is not fantastic, I have had two faults for which I was only covered by extended apple care, and would have been screwed by a out of warranty repair otherwise. Both faults were detailed online as something which regularly happens to macs.
So maybe iOS is the "good hardware, good software" you are talking about? Again, I would call it pretty. I don't see anything which indicates a particularly interesting software implementation. It certainly feels a little more robust than OSX, but then iOS doesn't have to do an awful lot. And hasn't really innovated in its design space ver 6 iterations.
Perhaps you can enlighten me without using any emotionally charged phrases as to where the "good" stuff is.
(To save time, comment Sent from my iPad)
>> "I don't really understand..."
>> "franken-GUI with all sorts of crap tacked on..."
>> "the outmoded, rubbish video drivers..."
>> "I would call it pretty..."
Wow. talk about emotionally charged phrases. Such angst! Such passion!
You should really let them be and think of your own. Stop wasting yourself hating a face-less company that has done nothing to you.
You'll be happier, trust me.
-dZ.
Someone gave me an OSX Mac laptop to play with. I was being very openminded and checking it out generally and having fun.
I crashed it in less than 10 minutes.
Tried an iPad, again, had lots of fun, didn't crash at all. I can see why they dropped the "Computer" bit from their name and are concentrating on iOS ;) I think ultimately they will turn into something like Bose (product promotion by lawyers) or a very fucked-up version of Bang & Olufsen :P
Incidentally I can't believe they were so un-tech-savvy that they didn't notice Cisco already have an operating system called IOS, do they not know what a search engine is ;)
"Incidentally I can't believe they were so un-tech-savvy that they didn't notice Cisco already have an operating system called IOS, do they not know what a search engine is ;)"
If they insist on using Bing as a search engine, it's no suprise they don't find anything!
Incidentally I can't believe they were so un-tech-savvy that they didn't notice Cisco already have an operating system called IOS, do they not know what a search engine is ;)
> Perhaps you can enlighten me without using any emotionally charged phrases as to where the "good" stuff is.
Owned an imac since 2004 - Number of crashes (H/W, S/W) : Zero
Macbook since 2007 - Number of crashes (H/W, S/W) : Zero
Macbook Pro since 2012 - Number of crashes (H/W, S/W) : Zero
My Solaris servers at work since 2006 (i do not own them!) - Number of crashes (H/W, S/W) : Zero
Interface is so easy, everyone in the family uses it without any problem. We use them for everyday home (and some business) use: Internet, email, photo, movie office (openoffice), etc.
My smarthone is andriod based. Fine until I tried to upgrade. No luck since HTC cant be bothered!
I do not waste my time fixing/rebooting/reinstalling/etc. You want quality, you pay for it.
There was an excellent piece of work by Radio4's more or less which looked at this. It goes:
US DOD (although strictly speaking this is several separate organisations army/navy/air force etc)
China PLA
Walmart
McDonalds (although strictly speaking a series of franchises)
NHS
Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786
Well, BR had some unbelievable hardcore technology. For example the Deltic diesel motor commissioned from Napier.... 3 crankshafts arranged parallel in a triangle ... no cylinder heads ....
based on a Junkers design, but expanded, Junkers never successfully managed to do more than 2 crankshafts AFAIK. Also, apparently a junior lad in the Napier design workshop made the fateful step of figuring out that the 3rd crankshaft had to rotate the opposite way to make it all work properly!
Used in BR locomotives in pairs, also as used in Tjeld/Nasty class fastboats ... http://www.ptf3restoration.org/historyofptf3.html 2 motors, 6200hp total. These boats appear to have been used to harass the North Vietnamese, leading to you-know-what :P
This motor type is still being used in these : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_class_mine_countermeasures_vessel
http://www.ptfnasty.com/ptfDelticdisc.htm
I'm in the market for a new car and have test-driven the US equivalent to a Mondeo and a 3-series. The 3-series is a better car, particularly noticeable when going through the roundabouts and traffic circles in the town where I live. Now, is it $10K better? I don't think so, but others would disagree.
See, it is a subtle trick. Any fool can try to sell their products at an over inflated price, but most don't end with a ridiculously profitable company with swimming pool sized reserves of cash, which suggests something else is at play.
It is of course helpful for you to point out that if Apple tried to not be as successful as they could be, they would not be as successful as they are. I'm sure you will do well at the World Tautology Finals.
"The Governor and Company of Merchants of Great Britain Trading to the South Seas, and other parts of America, and for Encouraging the Fishery", better known as South Sea Company had a share price valuing the company at about £162 million in 1720 which would have been approx £2224179 million in 2005. The company did not produce anything so it was a purely speculative venture. It is not for me to say whether the products of Apple Inc are to be viewed as speculatively valued as I do own any of their products as I view taxation extracted by companies to be tantamount to theft.
It's kind of scary to thing that a company can be that big without generating any meaningful employment. For all their faults, Microsoft were at least involved in a boom that was generating a lot of jobs - lots of people who weren't Microsoft employees were working in jobs that hadn't even existed 10 years before using and supporting Microsoft software, and interfacing it with hardware and software from other companies.
But the iPhone and the iPad? Obviously there's work for developers in creating apps for companies whose websites wouldn't work on the iPad, but I don't think we're talking about huge numbers of people. If every iDevice in the world disappeared in a puff of smoke tomorrow, I don't get the feeling that it would represent a big disruption. If Exxonmobile products all disappeared tomorrow, it'd be a bit more of a problem, and if all the Exchange servers in the world turned themselves off tomorrow, it would probably cost a lot of companies a lot of money to recover, but if all the iDevices stopped working, there'd be a lot of unhappy people, but the wheels would keep turning.
Are you in some way kidding? Apple invented the mobile app store sector*, which last year disbursed over $5 billion to app developers. No jobs generated - can I get some of what you are smoking?
* I'm not saying they invented "apps", "app stores" or "mobile apps", but they damn sure built the market place, got developers and users there, and got the users buying stuff from the developers.