sconosciuto

$200 here we come

On October 6, 1997 Michael Dell said of Apple, "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

https://www.cnet.com/news/dell-apple-should-close-shop/

On that day, AAPL was worth $0.18 per share. AAPL closed at $159.22 or merely 88,355% higher at today's close, just prior to the Q1 '22 earnings report.

If you'd bought both a crystal ball and AAPL on 10/6/97 and sold around three weeks ago at the stock's all-time high of $182.94, the return would have been 101,533.33%.

#gloating

Bought 80% of my AAPL on 17 Nov 2000 @ $0.35/share. The other 20% in 2008 at roughly 10x that.

If only I’d put a few grand more into it back in 2000 (I did have it on hand)…

This calendar year, I had the opportunity to use Apple Maps (AM) extensively in both the US and in Italy. In particular, I used it a lot in Italy to navigate areas with which I was not terribly familiar. I used it for driving directions, transit directions, walking directions, and simply to locate businesses.

I always used AM as the first resort and I estimate it failed me 10%-20% of the time, which is far too often in comparison to Google Maps which almost never failed me. The most egregious example is the time I was trying to find a notable landmark in central Pistoia; AM tried to send me the wrong way down a one way street (at night and in a poorly-lit area! thankfully I am comfortable with the mishmash of signs typically seen on Italian streets). This was a street that was not temporarily restricted to one way nor recently designated one way. Google Maps (GM) sure knew it was a one way street. It took me two torturous loops around the historic center to realize the problem was the incorrect directions at the one way street.

On other occasions AM couldn't find businesses and addresses that I knew existed (GM knew they existed!) or recommended routes that were more complicated than they needed to be, even taking into account modifiers to a route search such as "no tolls".

AM has certainly come a long way since it was the butt of many jokes - these jokes persist even today, nine years later! thanks Scott Forstall! - but at least in my experience it clearly still lags behind GM. If I wasn't such an Apple fanboy, GM would always be my first choice for navigation.

So keep up the good work, AM team... but Google has a lead that might be insurmountable.

I'm all up Tim Cook's butt 24/7 (Apple has played a life-changing role in my life and in my career), that means I always use Apple Maps (AM) first before reaching for Google Maps (GM). Over the course of this year I have traveled internationally quite a bit. I've used both for walking directions, driving directions, transit directions in both US and Europe. I always reached first for AM but too often (meaning about 10%-20% of the time) it let me down and I had to resort to GM.

Sometimes AM simply couldn't find an address that I knew was there. Other times it recommended a route that I knew was not the most efficient one to get where I wanted to be (even taking into consideration use of options such as "no tolls). Most recently, it sent me in a contorted loop around the historic center of Pistoia, Italy while I was trying to reach an historic landmark there. The failure was where AM kept trying to tell me to take a turn into oncoming traffic on a one-way road. I did this loop twice before realizing what was going on. On the other hand, Google Maps almost never let me down.

AM has improved greatly since its craptastic debut and I'm sure it will continue to do so, but GM is still the king. I hope eventually that flips, but I wonder if GM just has too great of a lead for Apple to overcome even with its vast resources and deep pocketbook. One area where I think Apple could find an advantage with its maps product, is the interface. I frequently found GM interface to sometimes be confusing and difficult to navigate to make it do what I wanted it to, at times it really made me work to do simple things.

Fucked around; finding out.