Why? Land price is a fixed cost which is 1-time investment. Silicon Valley has workforce availability and diversity that other areas don't have together with transportation systems. It's no brainer that tech companies choose to build offices here. Where can you find hundreds of hi tech workers? Don't tell me about NC or Atlanta...LOL...good luck to find any software engineer there. Apple don't just hire high school graduates to design iPhone...Please...
Apparently you are unaware of the NC Research Triangle. And NC was just an example. As someone else stated, there are plenty of other areas in the country that have good universities, friendly business policies, and far cheaper real estate - both for the company and for employees. And land is not a 1-time investment. There are taxes to be considered - whether paid directly by the business or by the employees.
It is interesting to see the extreme CA bias in this thread.
As a shareholder, that almost borders on poor use of Apple's money. High real estate cost + high housing costs = higher salaries = less profit. Put a campus somewhere nice, but cheaper to live like NC or Atlanta.
... or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or Detroit or St. Louis or Minneapolis or Nashville. There are plenty of big cities with solid engineering schools to supply some talent that would welcome Apple's investment instead of wringing hands about more congestion. Footnote to tech world: You can buy a nice four-bedroom suburban house in real America for $200K.
Maybe today you can buy a nice four-bedroom home for $200K there, but I guarantee you that if Apple were to show up and move there the price out housing for increased substantially. This is true wherever anyone goes. So in the end, you're really not getting anywhere. Not only will housing become a major issue because there would be a huge influx of people coming, but these people coming in and working for Apple would also be making a lot more than pretty much everyone else there. This is what raises the price of housing. It's not just a situation where a price is set out of the blue.
macxpress said: Apple's profits are fine. As a shareholder...that makes me vomit when I hear that. It's like a shareholder knows how to run a company better than the company, especially a company like Apple.
Apple's profits are fine, but it is surely any shareholder's – i.e., part owner of the company's – right to believe his or her investment isn't being handled properly. Such a shareholder may be completely wrong, of course....
Sure, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but 99.9% of shareholders don't know how to run a Fortune 500 company such as Apple. They might think they do (aka Armchair Executives), but they don't have a clue. Everything seems so easy sitting at your desk at home. When you're in the CEO office at Apple, things change drastically.
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This actually looks like an internal hard disk drive!
It is interesting to see the extreme CA bias in this thread.
Sure, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but 99.9% of shareholders don't know how to run a Fortune 500 company such as Apple. They might think they do (aka Armchair Executives), but they don't have a clue. Everything seems so easy sitting at your desk at home. When you're in the CEO office at Apple, things change drastically.