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Comment by MiguelVieira | Hacker News Reader

If you'd bought $10,000 of AAPL stock when this article was published (June 1997), it would be worth about $523,000 today, excluding dividends.

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If I told you to buy $10,000 of Blackberry stock today, would you do it?

Buying AAPL in 1997 is as crazy as buying Blackberry today. The difference is Steve Jobs, but some people thought he was nuts too back in 1997.

Also interestingly, how much money you need to have to be able to invest 10K into a single risky investment. Realistically you would either have to be irresponsible or be quite comfortable already.

500K today is a very nice sum, but it is only life changing if you are in the category that would not have had the 10K to invest in the first place.

Didn't Steve jobs sell 1.5 million shares in 1997? It caused a 12 year low in the company's stock price..

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Steve-Jobs-Confirms-A...

Jobs made several poor decisions around Apple's stock, including after he came back. A few choices cost him billions of dollars (which would now be tens of billions for his wife). Fortunately for him, money wasn't something that he obsessed over.

You're talking about a guy who got in trouble for having his subordinates make up a fictitious board meeting to get a better strike price for his options.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/06/steve-job...

Oddly, if you had bought $10,000 of Blackberry stock when the article came out and dumped it a year after the iPhone, you would have done quite well.

Didn't it multiply by more like 210x since then? So your 10k should be worth $2,100,000.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL

Hindsight is 20/20. At that point in time buying Apple stok was akin to throwing your money away in the forseeable future.

I just really wish I bought 10 bitcoins when they were 40 a pop ..

Damn you, captain Hindsight!

Hah, "only" $40 a pop. Remember the first ever Bitcoin purchase? 10,000 BTC for a $25 pizza?

I spent $4,500 on a G3 + 17" monitor in '98... it was an amazing machine :)

I spent $3,899 on a Macintosh SE in 1987. ($8,000 in today's dollars).

It was a lot slower.

$3,400 on IIsi in 1991... one of the first 'affordable' color Macs. That was an amazing machine and I still remember the magic.

$2500 on an Apple //e in 1983. Monochrome screen, 1 floppy drive. No printer, no modem, no 80 column card.

$2699 on a 1GHz G4 Powerbook in 2003. Didn't even have a DVD recordable, had to shell out another $300 for a firewire one and another $300 for 256MB more memory.

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