Agreed. This hysteria is getting tiresome. I think Apple should simply get rid of investors and go private. I think its big enough and has enough cash to do just that.

I can't tell if this is a joke? Apple couldn't use it's own cash to purchase itself from it's shareholders because the value of the company will always be greater than it's cash.

It's not a joke. There was another thread with lots of people advocating the feasibility of this a few days ago. There are apparently a lot of people here who have no understanding of business finances.

Cash isn't included in the enterprise value, you're thinking of the market cap. A company can simply do stock buybacks until it owns all the outstanding stock itself. It's like an IPO but in reverse. During an IPO a company sells equity and gets cash. During a buyback a company buys equity and pays cash.

If you still believe this is impossible, think what would happen if a company on the day of the IPO decided to immediately and unilaterally reverse every transaction. Everybody would get their money back, and the company would simply get its equity back. It's as if the IPO never happened. Clearly not an impossibility. The only difference here is that because some time passed the investors want some extra return on their investment. That's not an insurmountable problem because Apple is rich.

> If you still believe this is impossible, think what would happen if a company on the day of the IPO decided to immediately and unilaterally reverse every transaction.

Yeah, this isn't a thing the company can do. The board cannot "unilaterally" take shareholders' shares and give them money in return. They can initiate a buyback, but that means buying shares on the open market, and they'd still be a public company even if everyone sold back their shares. Or they can propose a buyout, but that requires a shareholder vote and typically external money.

The first scenario still results in a public company, just with fewer shares. Neither scenario results in the company owning itself.

But when the IPO happens, some shares are already owned by investors (founders, VCs, etc). If you reversed the IPO, the company would still not "own itself", it would be owned by them.

Apple would have to borrow heavily to buy itself back, just like every other company that buys itself back. But if any company could go borrow $400bn in cash, it's Apple.

A company cannot "buy itself back". That doesn't mean anything. The company never owned itself.

I wasn't considering the extreme pedantry that I'm apparently receiving when I made the post. I was using the phrase "buy itself back" as going private. The ownership structure after which point that it is no longer a public company was irrelevant to me at the time I made that comment.

The company can't "buy itself" into a private company either. It doesn't work for a whole host of reasons, one of which being that they aren't sitting on the ~600 billion in cash that would require, another being that buying a bunch of stock back is fundamentally not the same thing as being a private company. But also, if you buy all the stock back, it means by definition that you have liquidated all value in the company (or else we're assuming that the market undervalued the company so much that it thought nothing but the cash on hand was valuable).

If you assume that Apple is going to borrow the 600 billion to buy all its stock, then you are effectively saying that whoever's left holding the "private" company is holding a 600 billion dollar loan. I do not share your optimism that anyone can get a loan large enough to buy Apple.

This is just plain wrong, you have major misconceptions about how publicly owned companies work.

The parent comment isn't wrong.

Apple can't take itself private unto itself, there must be a human owner or owners that own all of Apple stock as a private corporation.

Apple could team up with JP Morgan, Silver Lake Partners, and a dozen other firms to take itself private however, and they along with a likely small class of shareholders would own the private corporation (eg perhaps Tim Cook and Laurene Jobs would would choose to retain their large positions).

There is no possible scenario under which a corporation can exist and continue to exist indefinitely in any of the 50 US states without a human owner somewhere in the chain, even if said owner is buried under a dozen shell companies.

Thanks for the detailed rebuttal. What exactly was "just plain wrong" about what I said?

If "no more growth" is going to be Apple's story to investors, the company needs to start paying a much bigger dividend.

Can you please elaborate, let's say, comparing AAPL with MSFT as an example?

http://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=aapl

http://www.streetinsider.com/dividend_history.php?q=msft

If you exclude the cash horde (edit - the zombies hired to protect the vault full of cash), Apple's P/E ratio is running at around 5 right now. IBM is 10. Microsoft is about 35 if excluding their much smaller cash pile.

Apple is ridiculously "undervalued" compared to any peer in the industry. It is a money printing colossus.

Having said that, the market seems to get shivers around $600B, and that psychological barrier imposes a friction that makes the rules of the game change. No one can stay above that for long, and in the case of Apple its profoundly out of scale numbers makes everyone simply put it in a different universe of valuation.

*hoard. Horde is zombies.

Is that really the whole story ? http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-isnt-really-sitting-o... I honestly don't know and am interested in what you think of this article.

That is an interesting article, but the meat of it contradicts, in a common sense, the title.

For instance, no one thinks that Apple has a big vault with hundreds of billions in it. Like all rational players, they hold most of their negotiables in short term securities. For tax reasons they also have been taking on debt in some areas rather than liberate cash from elsewhere.

But they have an enormous, enormous amount of wealth sitting virtually at a standstill. They have announced that they're going to spend a lot of it to buy back shares (boosting the value of the remaining shares), but they've been doing this so slowly they're adding to their pile quicker than they're spending it.

To stay big, you need to innovate. The releases since Steve's death have been disappointing. Minor changes to existing products. Ok. The apple watch. But really?

Swift may be one of the biggest releases in recent years. However, since it doesn't affect the public, is considered a non-release.

> The releases since Steve's death have been disappointing. Minor changes to existing products. Ok. The apple watch. But really?

Compare: Since Steve returned to Apple (1997) to the point of iPhone being presented (2007) there were almost 10 years of "minor changes." iPod? "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (2001)

Steve Jobs died in 2011. This time now is then an approximate year of the "Lame" sentiment.

Aren't you forgetting the whole OSX thing? And the whole PPC->Intel switch?

What OSX thing? It's been out forever. And, to intel? That's simply platform support. Not, innovation.

You mean NeXTStep? Which always ran on Intel? :)

Name a decent release since 2011 that is innovative.