Ask HN: Why do investors see Apple as a $3T company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do investors see Apple as a $3T company?

4 pointsretskrad7 comments

I love Apple products and I use all of their devices but at the end of the day, they are the least important company compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. The world would go down without Google. Governments and businesses run on Microsoft suite of apps. The internet runs on AWS and Azure. Businesses would go under without Meta. If Apple went bankrupt today, it would suck but people would just use Android and Windows devices. The economy will not be impacted because App Store developers will just migrate over to Androids App Store and sell their devices there.

I guess the argument is that Apple is a money printing machine but so is all of these other Silicon Valley companies.

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The world wouldn't go down without Google. They clearly have an advantage in many areas, but there are plenty of options for business app hosting, email, and even search that are roughly equivalent to "without an iPhone I'd just use Android". If you didn't have Google, you'd still have Apple's services, and you'd just use Office365 and Bing or Fastmail or, hell, Zoho. Do you want to? Maybe not. Could you? Sure you could. The world would continue spinning.

The world won't go down without AWS and Azure. There are any number of hosting services that can provide similar services, even if it would require relearning, and in a worst case, people would just go back to racking servers and hiring bare-metal admins. A totally functional cloud Internet could certainly exist with Linode and Akamai, with a little Hetzner in the mix.

No businesses would go under without Meta. The world would be a better place without Meta. Like, what's the worst case scenario here? People can't log into Facebook, or use their Oculus? Oh no! What are we going to do?!

There would probably be some serious weirdness if Microsoft went under. Likely more so than Apple. But, they're at a 2.5T market cap. Perhaps they're just undervalued - it's just not cool to defend Microsoft - rather than this being a situation with Apple being overvalued.

Google and Meta's dominance in advertising has more to do with two-sided markets than superior technology. If they were gone, something else would take its place.

For one thing, Apple is the only company outside China (who knows what really is happening there?) that really makes money on smartphones.

So why do Samsung, Huawei and the rest bother?

Why did Amazon attempt a Fire phone?

I think it’s because there is a certain prestige about being involved with smart phones. It makes a company look like it is hip and cool, particularly if it is part of an authoritarian Chaebol which can create its own reality and socialize any of its losses. So far as Huawei they are based in China which is not a capitalist economy.

The Germans were looking for buyers for this technology for decades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train

they almost sold one to Orlando, FL until Disney made it clear they weren’t going to be part of it if it stopped at any other theme park. That Maglev comes nowhere near being profitable and nothing in China really has to.

The thing I personally don't understand about Apple's valuation is the China risk. Their current revenues and profit margins require global supply chains (especially between US and China) remain stable.

Not saying that's necessarily a bad bet to make, and Apple obviously have a lot of leverage with supplier countries given their size, but they're extremely exposed to geopolitical risk when compared to Google or Microsoft. I guess I just think the valuation should be adjusted down for that risk a bit.

Flight to quality. They think apple will preserve capital better through inflation / us currency devaluation than other things. Just my opinion.

based on this logic, I think the farming/food industry should have the most valuation.

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