AAPL vs. MSFT

"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.

I can't see the charts well!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.