Santa's present for Real Steve: AAPL $200

By the way, the reason why Mayank's link is deceptive is

1) He's hiding the fact that Dell has experienced no growth in its stock market value in the last 5 years, and

2) He chose to use "Max" for the time frame on a linear scale, which hides the fact that Dell has been declining in value since 5 years ago.

To put in more simply, if you had bought $1000 worth of AAPL in December 2002, it would be worth almost $20,000 today.

If you put $1000 in a low yield savings account with a 0.5% APR, you'd have something like $1025.

If you bought $1000 of Dell in December 2002, it'd be worth only about $990 today.

That kind puts things in the proper perspective, doesn't it.

@Mayank,

Do you think we're stupid or something? Try comparing market capitalization, which shows you what the companies are actually worth on the stock market.

Apple (AAPL) - $174,188,683,000
Dell (DELL) - $62,472,377,700

That's right, Apple is worth nearly 3 TIMES as much as Dell on the stock market these days.

If you're going to talk about stocks, please don't try to yank our chains by pasting a link to a chart on a LINEAR scale. One might think you are trying to hide something (which you were).

A log chart for the last 5 years shows that actual disparity in market cap growth between Dell and Apple.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=DELL

awesome! I got AAPL for Christmas! (great gift idea)
I hope it continues to go up.

I'm not sure about the details of what that graph is showing, but it's certainly misleading (click on different time scales for an example of why). I suspect your five year scale (which is the ONLY one that shows Dell ahead) includes when Dell was a tiny little company and Apple was already a big one. Naturally Dell has grown more since that time (as a percentage of where it started).

A better comparison is market capitalization. Apple is over 167 billion. Dell... 59 billion. So the market thinks Apple is worth about three times as much as Dell. HP is closer, at 150 billion. IBM is 176 billion.

@ Chris Tucker

Dell is still far ahead of Apple. In reality, Apple, in terms of growth, is no where near the big players: Dell, HP, Microsoft, IBM, etc.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=my&l=off&z=m&q=l&c=DELL

That link should clear some things up.

Dell: Apple should close shop
By Jai Singh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 6, 1997, 2:00 PM PDT

ORLANDO, Florida--When it comes to the state of Apple Computer, everyone has an opinion.

And at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

What a difference a decade makes, eh, Mike? and how much is YOUR company currently valued at, and how much cash does YOUR company have on hand these days?

I'm almost positive it was briefly above $200 last week.

I'm extremely pleased to see it break the $200 mark. I think this is just the beginning, though. I wouldn't be surprised to see it hit $250 by March of 2008.