bwik

Privacy has finally come into its own as a premium product.  Many products do not interest me.  Privacy does.  Privacy is a value-add that is worth a tremendous amount of money to customers.  Apple will be able to monetize its superior privacy just as Facebook monetizes the opposite.

Without addressing the elementary basic definition of stock buybacks, I will say that it is entirely possible to make hundreds of billions of dollars disappear if you do big stock buybacks at high prices before share prices fall.  For example, GE used to be worth 600 billion dollars, now worth about 70.  So over 500 billion dollars in market cap was lost, or around 90% of value disappeared.  IF they sank $200 billion into stock buybacks during the max share price period, then $180 billion of that money simply disappears.  There are not many ways to make 180 billion in cold hard cash just disappear, but share buybacks at this scale is one of the ways.  

I don't think AAPL will fall 90%, but any steward of say $200 billion needs to think about that.  They had US dollars and they decided to vastly increase the risk of that asset by investing it in Apple stock at a very high price.  

Let's assume Apple revenue declines 5% per year for the next 10 years.  Now how much employment growth will there be?

Even expecting the current revenue level 10 years out is a massive task for Apple.  It is far from certain.

Potentially vulnerable "legacy OS?"  10.3.3?  It's been one week since OS 11 came out.  One.  Week.

That's like looking at a fit 40 year old and saying "pull the plug doctor, he's practically dead anyway."

How fascinating.  Cook has 1 vote.  There are about 100 million voters who vote.  So there are 99,999,999 voters who aren't Tim Cook.  We need to focus hard on what matters to those 99,999,999 voters.  

It might be more intelligent for Tim Cook to remain absolutely silent on political issues.