I'm not a trader, but it seems to me that the whole "antennagate" thing had a disproportionate effect on the share price. They compare it to MS Vista, or Toyota's brake problems.

It's a one-off engineering flaw. Vista flopped because XP is good enough for looking at LolCatz, and it lacked tangible innovations - a sign that Microsoft's ability to bring innovative products to market has gotten congested. Toyota's brake problems puts people in fear of their lives.

When Apple lost 5% market cap, it was obvious that people were panicking. They could easily afford free bumpers, and a free upgrade to affected customers when the next iPhone comes out, for the price of the downgrades they were getting. If they don't hand out free stuff, it's because they have an even better option - to point out that all phones have reception issues, and maybe then blame AT&T.

Definitely don't buy now. Buy when no one is thinking about apple - i.e. when it's not in the news (or at least when the news is bad).

Which won't happen in the next 5 years.

(just so someone can come back and quote at one of us in 6 months...) Now seems like a reasonable time looking at the fundamentals and ignoring the antenna issue.

How do you know that Apple won't gain even more share and profits than anticipated next year? Shouldn't you be short selling instead?

I think you're falling to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_effect