I think you're off base. It's simply not runway at this point. That like 200 years of runway at their peak losses.

It's pretty simple why they have such a big cash pile. They literally don't have a better place to put it.

> It's simply not runway at this point

Not saying it is.

The last time Apple’s culture was re-forged, runway was an existential priority for Steve. It remained a priority for the rest of his life. As such, it remains one today. Call it a ritual, if you like; an act once practical, now maintained for being part of a culture.

The limitless alternative to amassing cash piles is returning it to shareholders. Apple does that, but it is averse to accelerating its pace.

Apple's operating expenses for the last year was around $200bn.

This a little misleading, as it's hard to imagine Apple making zero revenue well, ever. They could possibly be losing money, but there is no plausible scenario where they lose that much money. It's hard to imagine a scenario where they lose even an order of magnitude less money than that.

Just imagine the unlikely scenario that a pandemic shut down factories in China.....

That would probably also cut expenses. And if they got into a severe product shortage they could also turn off a lot of marketing.

What would they actually sell?

Services revenue is something they appear to be pushing hard and it seems to do well financially.

During a severe supply shortage they would sell nothing but they would also have lower expenses so the loss would be manageable.

Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, purchases of books, movies, TV shows, music their 30% cut of App Store revenues and subscriptions; the $99 developer fee for the App Store; Final Cut and Logic; Apple Card interest fees, iCloud subscriptions, probably other smaller scale things.

That’s less than 30% of their revenue. Right now, they can’t get new tv shows produced because of Covid.

> What would they actually sell?

iPhones produced in India, presumably.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Made-in-India-iP...

Or in any other place.

Or iPhones produced in Brazil

https://www.gizchina.com/2020/04/21/apple-plans-to-assemble-...

Overpriced iCloud storage, for starters. Or their 30% cut from all the apps sold in the App Store.

Even if they sold zero iPhones next year, there's still a lot of iPhones in the world that need services and apps.

Apple charges less for iCloud storage than Dropbox.....

And a lot more than Google Drive or even the 1TB Office365 gives you along with all the apps you were actually paying for.

I don’t know if the pricing adjusts regionally but when I just checked for here, the google drive plans are exactly the same price as the iCloud plans, bar the bottom Google plan which is twice the price for twice the storage of the bottom iCloud plan.

How exactly is that “a lot more”?

Well all of the equivalent iWork apps are free....

Or worse than Scarface’s example - everything they have in China gets permanently appropriated by the government, and they have to rebuild all the supply chains somewhere else.

They of course can always do a buyback or dividend (unless of course there's some tax reason why it's beneficial to defer till later).

> That like 200 years of runway at their peak losses.

Perhaps they want to be prepared for losses much larger than their peak historical losses.

Yep, same problem Warren Buffett has.

Also in this era the tech industry was highly competitive and cutthroat and cash reserves were a war chest against attacks and for rapid expansion (acquisitions). MS and others had similar cash reserves as a strategic asset.

>In 1997, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy [1] That experience deeply scarred the company's culture. Prior to that, Apple didn't hoard cash (relative to revenues). Afterwards, it did

In 1996, Apple's market cap was ~$3B and they had about $1.7B in cash and short term investments.[1] That's over half the value of the company. If they had proportional amounts of cash today they would have a trillion dollars.

I think the context of the talk about bankruptcy wasn't leverage like most companies have now, but simply that people might stop buying Macs and no revenue would be coming in.

The hoarding of cash I associate with Fred Anderson, who was CFO from 1996-2004.

[1]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193-96...

> That's over half the value of the company

This is a sign of distress. The equity markets were attributing minimal value to the non-cash parts of the business.

In 1996, Apple had about one fifth of its net turnover in cash. Today, it’s close to four fifths. Operating-to-operating metrics are a better indicator of management’s preferences than operations-to-markets.

Well, they lost like $800 million in 1996, which is why the market value was low, but look at the preceding years. Going back to 1992, revenue was $7-11B and they had $1-1.5B in cash and short term investments.[1] So $1.7B was not that much different, and asserting they acquired the culture in '97 is plainly wrong. Having a lot of cash was a consistent theme.

[1]See "Item 6. Selected Financial Data"

> Going back to 1992, revenue was $7-11B and they had $1-1.5B in cash and short term investments

...which is closer to the 1996 ratio of cash to revenue than today’s.

Similar thing happened to _all_ of corporate japan. Bubble era left a strong desire to hoard cash. Thus Japan Inc has vast reserves of cash. Ironic, but such reserves have not help valuations even during this pandemic.

There is a lesson on corporate financing here, but I am not sure what it says.