They don't need to convince you that there's a chance for 4x growth, they need to convince those specific individuals that there's a chance. And those engineers are immersed in a culture that could affect their perception of Apple's potential.

Apple is targeting its next 10 years' growth in three key markets: Laptops, VR/AR, and EVs. How big is each market cap?

Laptops?

I remember seeing a slide a while back (2017ish) where 70% of Apple's revenue was from iPhones, 5% from iPads and 2% from Macs. No way in hell do they consider that a big growth market.

Apple Silicon

Laptops didn’t shrink to such a tiny part of Apple’s revenue because of poor performance, Apple is at its core a consumer electronics company, and the paradigm for what devices consumers mainly use shifted with the times.

VR/AR is miniscule with relatively high potential. We'll have to wait and see what they come up with, it could be great, it could be niche, no way no to know.

EV has huge potential, but has a lot of competition, and Apple would be late to the party and without any serious advantages, technological, ecosystem, or otherwise. On the contrary, they'd have to build delivery and repair networks from scratch ( assuming they delegate all manufacturing). Even for their endless financial reserves, it seems very improbable they'd get anywhere serious within 10 years in the EV market.

Laptops - that's a tough market with lots of competition and long retention ( as in people rarely upgrade, and tend to stick to manufacturers), many of it Apple simply cannot and could not overcome ( Windows will probably remain the de facto enterprise standard for some more time). They finally have a serious technological advantage beyond more abstract, subjective or niche ones ( better UX or light or long batter life) advantages.

Also apple forays into new niches are generally hit or miss, though they do at least keep at it until it works like Apple Watch and Apple TV (which was near useless for the first 3-4 years).

It's not really that much of an outlier -- AAPL has had pretty ridiculous growth in each of the previous 4-year periods this century as well.

    2021-12-28   $179.29   4.19x
    2017-12-28   $ 42.77   2.14x
    2013-12-28   $ 20.00   2.65x
    2009-12-28   $  7.56   2.87x
    2005-12-28   $  2.63   6.57x
    2001-12-28   $  0.40   3.33x
    1997-12-28   $  0.12

I agree this can't go on for too much longer, if only because governments will eventually stop Apple if they control too much of the economy. But is there room for another 4x? Maybe?

Apple being a $12 trillion company in four years just seems pretty low probability to me.

Would you have you ascribed a low probability to Apple being $3T as of Dec 2021 back in Sep 2019 (when it hit $1T)?

yes, and with each rapid doubling, the probability of further doubling decreases.

What you aren't taking into account is that the larger you are, the more difficult it is to grow. You can even see this in Apple's growth since 2005 slowly declining.

The last couple of years have been absolutely bonkers. 4x-ing from here would be 17x their valuation in 2017. Controlling for inflation, the probability of that happening given their current valuation seems ridiculously low.

Lol, yeah they would be worth 12T at that point. Either the dollar implodes and Apple becomes a sovereign nation or 4x aint happening.