In 2001, a PowerBook G4 would have set you back $3500. Suppose instead that you had purchased $3500 in Apple stock instead of the computer…that stock would now be worth about $110,000. Even an original iPod’s worth in AAPL ($399) would be worth almost $12,000 today.
[source] Hat tip to Jason, the force behind the invaluable Kottke.org.
I don’t have the nerve to investigate what, say, $500 of Apple stock would have grown into had I purchased it the year I started using Macs, 1985.
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In 1984 or 1985, my friend Pilch hauled “The Macintosh” out of his closet and gave it to me. It was to me, at the time, a fancy typewriter; enough so that I could shelve my actual typewriter. It’s specs? 128k of RAM, no hard drive, 400k floppies, an 8″ x 6″ screen. I had no reason to use a Windows machine until 1989, when I started working for a seating (i.e. ergonomic chairs,) company. Soon enough into my job there I came to grapple and sort of master MS-DOS, mostly as a way to solve various computer glitches. I have come to use Apples at home, and Windows at work, for over twenty years.
Anybody who was a dual system user as I was back in the late eighties, will state today the obvious: Microsoft was going to converge on the Apple Mac user interface and experience one way or the other. This is irrespective of the fact that Apple turned itself into a boutique computer maker even as it continued to raise the bar, Still, I remember mousing around a DOS shell at work, while the fun user experience awaited for me at home.
That Mac users are said to be smug seems to be a projection for the most part. If asked today, I would tell a newbie that I use a Mac, recommend it, and, “But, suit yourself.” I wouldn’t also tell: “I’m using a six year old Mac, desktop while at work we’re on our third generation of Wintel in six years.”
It’s apples and lemons.
Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?
Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. (Charles Brooker – The Guardian)
Did Microsoft copy Mac OS for Windows 7? Yes … uh, wait … no … (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes – ZDNet)
Can Apple Unseat Microsoft? (Gabriel Madway – Reuters)
Apple trades at around 24 times forward earnings estimates, as does Google Inc., which has a similar market capitalization and is viewed as another potential challenger to Microsoft.
Microsoft trades at roughly 16 times forward earnings.
Apple’s last quarterly results blew past Wall St. estimates and sent its shares to a record-high $208.71.
While the stock has retreated in recent weeks in a broad market pullback, analysts have a price target as high as $280 on Apple, which would give it a market value of $250 billion.
Following its quarterly report last month, analysts also boosted their price targets on Microsoft to as high as $36, which would take its market cap to $320 billion.
Apple’s shareholders have been handsomely rewarded over the past decade, with its stock up close to 900 per cent. Over the same period, Microsoft’s shares have fallen around 35 per cent.
There’s something scarily efficient and agile about having a market cap 70% of your leading competitor when your market share is 20 times smaller. Zune, anyone?
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I had no problem with the mouse.
Although I had thousands of hours ‘in’ on this mechanical word processor called a typewriter, when I first started using a computer it was 1984.
I recall that it was in September of 1984 that my friend Pilch hauled The Macintosh out of a closet and gave it to me. At the time it was about a $2,400 gift, and, in 1984 those many hundreds of dollars was an unimaginable sum for mw, Pilch’s slack-to-a-fault long haired pal. But he had no use for it. He was a programmer doing project work for Burroughs and I have no idea what he was using for a computer. Still, his setting the Mac 128k given to him aside soon enough became my unbelievable gain.
It’s hard for me to relate to what the original Mac platform offered–me–even though I used it for eight years. As a user you would stick the system floppy into it, load in the system into temporary memory and follow on with the program disc, do the same, do your work, and save to a third floppy. The 128k ram is one eighth of a megabyte, and the Mac floppy had a capacity of 400k. On this machine you could process words, draw, paint, play the first version of Sim City, and, a few years later, desktop publish on Adobe Pagemaker and print to a laser printer. One would shuffle floppies in and out with a satisfying click and whir and sound of the drive stylus.
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Susan received her refurb MacBook today. She saved $200 on, literally, last week’s Core Duo lineup, now that Apple has bumped the nifty notebooks to Core Duo 2. Well, once again, she’s got the faster computer after 8 years in the bridesmaid spot. (She might add here, ‘You’re still married to your Mac.’) Me? My sound designing demands an OS9 machine so my Mirror Door dual 1.25ghz isn’t headed upstairs into the Apple Museum (5 oldies stored there including an original Macintosh,) yet it does seem a MacBook Pro would restore my honor.
The MacBook, as many who don’t know, need to know, is about the sleekest bundle of software and hardware integration ever achieved in its form factor at its price, ($1,099 for the new white ones). Still, I really have no reason to, say, borrow her machine, except for. . .
iBooth. There’s a camera embedded in the upper edge of the screen’s frame. Neat.
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