On the whole a good and well researched article. Nice to see some logical analysis now and then. I think, what many of the contributors, who have never worked within financial markets, don't realise is that the share price is not a proxy for the value of the company, but a proxy for supply and demand at any given time i.e. if hedge funds and institutional investors have lots of cash and don't like bonds (low returns), then they will buy share today, and the price will be high. If they sell shares tomorrow, and the price is low, does that mean that the "worth" of the company i.e. it's products and sales have changed? If you substitute fashion/trends etc for "cash" you will see that there is no intrinsic logic or "rightness" in a share price or valuation. For example, any rational analysis of the Amazon share price/valuation would suggest that it is barmy. The same could be said for ARM and many other "tech" stocks. But we do know that bubbles happen and they burst and consumers (largely) get burned. All we can say about the Apple share price is that, on any "rational" analysis it is under priced and that we should view it's major competitors, such as Samsung (currently fashionable with tech writers), with suspicion, in view of the opacity of its reporting and history of issuing mis-leading sales figures and paid-for blogs bashing rivals.
The ultimate would be to have so much cash that just the interest alone can keep Apple up and running, then no matter how dark things got or how bad a recession they would be fine. But Apple seem intent on spending this money buying back shares. But that wouldn't be too bad either, being a public company comes with a lot of bureaucracy and reporting requirements: going private again might alleviate that burden and let them focus on tech.
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The ultimate would be to have so much cash that just the interest alone can keep Apple up and running, then no matter how dark things got or how bad a recession they would be fine. But Apple seem intent on spending this money buying back shares. But that wouldn't be too bad either, being a public company comes with a lot of bureaucracy and reporting requirements: going private again might alleviate that burden and let them focus on tech.