Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Corporate, Odds and ends
AAPL vs. MSFT
So we all have heard the reports over the past summer and these first winter months: Apple's stock is doing well. I'd like to forget the questions of "how can they keep this up" and "what happens next" for just a moment, and instead look at what the stock has done over the past five years, especially when compared to Microsoft over the same time period (just for the sheer glee that's in it).Reader Peter Koritschan, who works for UBS (the bank which recently gave Apple stock an estimated price target of $74US per share), was kind enough to produce some graphs for us. When viewing the chart above, consider that the original 5GB iPod was introduced in October of 2001, the 2G iPods in April of 2003, and the iPod photo in October of 2004. Also, the iTunes Music Store had its debut in October of 2003, and the G5 iMac showed up in August of 2004.
Microsoft had...um...Windows ME, XP? Just to reiterate, up is good and down is bad, right? More charts after the jump.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Joshua said 11:10AM on 11-29-2005
Can you make the charts bigger?
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PuterSaurus said 11:34AM on 11-29-2005
Yes, please make the charts bigger!
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Sean Flanagan said 11:30AM on 11-29-2005
Microsoft also had the XBox, XBox 360 (tee hee), a number of computer peripherals, revisions to its Office suite, new versions of WMP, MSN, and MSNBC, among other things.
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Mark said 11:37AM on 11-29-2005
i'm glad i got AAPL stock when i did!
now i'm rollin' in the dough! (well, not really... i couldn't afford that many shares.)
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Peter Koritschan said 12:06PM on 11-29-2005
4. I agree... I also wish I had more shares... it's a great return, but with only 10 shares that I have... :)
Dave: cool post, thanks :)
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Alan Ward said 12:36PM on 11-29-2005
Just a factual correction.... the ITMS debuted in April 2003. October 2003 was the Windows version of iTunes.
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Chris Coleman said 12:44PM on 11-29-2005
Not sure if it means much, but AAPL and GOOG seem to be performing very similarly...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=goog
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nellardo said 11:25PM on 11-29-2005
Google and Apple's stock look similar - they're both going up - but they aren't actually strongly correlated - if you look at their prices since Google started trading, the correlation between them (in a statistical sense) is about 0.108 - i.e., they're pretty much independent variables.
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Brent said 1:07PM on 11-29-2005
For the long-term investors:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=AAPL&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=msft
Apple has a price-to-earnings ratio of 44+. This means it will likely take many, many years to realize earnings already built into the current stock price. It's only a matter of time until it trades sideways (similar to the way Intel did). Then it might be iPod Invisa time for shareholders. ;-)
I guess Apple is still worth speculating on short-term (and MSFT is not), but that 5 year comparison is misleading to most investors. Apple, now, is probably too expensive to hold over a longer period of time and see any appreciation.
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jomy said 1:33PM on 11-29-2005
Try this on for size 1045x635pixels courtesy of BigCharts.com
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/charts/big.chart?symb=AAPL&compidx=aaaaa%3A0&comp=DELL%2C+MSFT&ma=0&maval=9&uf=7168&lf=16777216&lf2=0&lf3=0&type=2&size=4&state=8&sid=609&style=380&time=12&freq=1&nosettings=1&rand=3839&mocktick=1
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Brian Allen said 2:13PM on 11-29-2005
If you change the time period, you can get any kind of graph out of this data. For example including back to 1984, you would see that MSFT is 40000% ahead of Apple.
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Don Wilson said 2:21PM on 11-29-2005
You can't compare undersized charts and show proof that they're better than something else, especially when Microsoft is worth more than 5 times more than Apple, just as Google is worth almost 3 times more.
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tom barta said 5:02PM on 11-29-2005
The way I look at it: 95% of the computing world is STILL using Windows. Millions of people don't have iPods yet. The Video iPod is drawing huge interest from content providers. Apple hasn't BEGUN to see serious growth yet. Lots of things CAN go wrong. Some things will. But, I'll bet my money for another year.
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Philip said 11:27PM on 11-29-2005
That 44 times earnings is boosted by the high level of cash per share which should really adjust the share price, and by the fact that Apple is not only looking safe for music players and 5-20% of the personal computer market, but Apple also looks unstoppable in music and movie distribution, and home entertainment hubs / digital video recorders. If Aple executes correctly, there's nothing a significant number of very large corporations can do to keep them out. Maybe the stock will trade sideways. Maybe it will cruise on up to $200 over the next 18 months. Maybe a mac mini PVR is going to come before HD TV or a new PC for a lot of people.
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Ken C said 5:14AM on 11-30-2005
Interesting, so Google and Apple are not very correlated...perhaps, they'd be good hedges for each other. I mean, you want to find stocks that have good returns that aren't correlated, don't you?
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miscblogger said 6:37PM on 11-30-2005
I can't see the charts well!
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Seth Brundle said 2:43PM on 11-30-2005
"Microsoft had...um...Windows ME, XP? "
I guess you never bothered to go beyond your own cdrom wallet for that totally uninformed analysis. Microsoft has released dozens of products in that time frame (many if not most arent even consumer products) - just because you didnt buy them doesnt mean they dont exist.
Apple has had a great 18 months and looks like a good growth stock. That short history does not put it in the category of long term blue chip tech like MSFT.
A sadly typical uninformed armchair excel chart comparison of two stocks that from an informed investor's perspective arent even in the same category.
"up is good and down is bad, right?"
I guess you were front row center for the dot-com crash of 2001.
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