> And throwing off $150B in operating cash flow (6 months). I think stock buybacks are lame but what can they spend this on really? A moon launch and base?
It would be great if they could spend a bit of that (dunno, 20B? 40B?) in fixing bugs and improving documentation.
It's not cool or fancy, but would surely help cement Apple as an even greater development environment, no?
>Apple spent something like a half-trillion on share buybacks. They could have averted this crisis a decade ago by thinking strategically.
I don't understand the fixation on this. Share buybacks strengthen the stock price of the company, which the company can leverage in the future to raise more capital if needed (by re-releasing new shares to the market). From that perspective, they are better than dividends.
Besides, right now, Apple isn't strapped for cash as they have around ~50 billion on-hand and could raise more if they wanted to. So Apple can still invest more in fab processes if that's what they want.
> why a company like that would have a cash stockpile so gigantic (around 200 billion USD) for so long without a long-term plan shared with stakeholders?
In the past 10 years, Apple has bought back over $400B worth of Apple stock, mostly at under $200/ share. This has massively reduced the number of shares on the market and been hugely rewarding to shareholders. They have shared their plan with shareholders, pretty much every quarter they put updates on how it's going.
> But when you are Apple the sums are so huge and the choice of places you can invest so limited, that giving it back to the shareholders and letting them decide is pretty much your only option. A good problem to have.
Crazy thought but I know one larger entity to park the money in and it's the US treasury. Apple has no positioning to improve things like infrastructure and public education.
Stock buybacks should be a clear signal that taxes can go up at that bracket of the economy.
> It's not a tech company anymore it's just a financial engineering scheme for large shareholders. If you're a shareholder, good for you!
Not sure what point you're trying to make with this low-effort falsehood. Buy backs are purchased with operating profits, if most of their profits were derived from their massive cash hoard you could label them as an Investment arm or something, but it's coming from their successful business operations and Apple's goal with its Buy Backs and Dividends is to move to a net zero-cash balance, so they have no interest in transitioning into becoming an Investment company.
> Apple is sitting on 300 billion in cash - I expect them to do something with it.
“Do something with it” doesn’t have to be reinvesting within the company. Apple has been doing a good job returning excess cash to shareholders, spending roughly $250 billion since 2015 to reduce shares outstanding from 22 billion to 17 billion.
This only makes sense if you know nothing about Apple's business.
You really think they're doing this to save $50 from ~5m Macs? You really think all this upheaval is for a mere $250m a year in savings? It'll cost them 10x that in pain alone to migrate to a new platform.
Come on now....$250m is nothing at Apple scale. Think bigger. Even if you hate Apple, think bigger about their nefariousness (if your view is that they have bad intentions - one I don't agree with).
> I've noticed apple cutting under-performing products over the years to boost their stock price.
I suspect you're wrong about the motivation. Steve Jobs was ruthless about cutting products that under-performed and/or stretched resources in directions that he didn't feel were strategic.
And Steve Jobs didn't really care much about stock price.
Apple made wifi products when the available options mostly sucked. Now that there are some pretty interesting mesh products out there, and Apple would have to do a lot of development work to match them, I can understand why they've stopped active development. Opportunity cost is a very real thing.
I don't like it, but I don't for a minute believe it has anything to do with their stock price.
>You do know that the cash Apple has in its balance sheet belongs to its shareholders and that Apple can't use that to buy itself and go private?
Not really true - what exactly do you think the current stock buyback program consists of? Apple is using it's cash to buy it's own stock from the market.
> they can't rest on their laurels simply because they're Apple.
No, but they can because they have something like $200 billion cash on hand. Which means if they really care about their stock price they can do a buy back if they want. Or if they are worried about employee compensation due to lagging stock price they can give bonuses, etc.
It would be great if they could spend a bit of that (dunno, 20B? 40B?) in fixing bugs and improving documentation.
It's not cool or fancy, but would surely help cement Apple as an even greater development environment, no?
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