Apple's $18 billion stash

The iTunes store is a loss-leader for Apple. They actually lose money on it. It's an investment for them to get people to buy iPods which they actually make money on.

If you had gone from founding one of the premier computer makers in the world to having the company stolen from you and driven nearly to bankruptcy, then forced to grovel in front of Bill Gates, you might sock away a few pessnies, too.

Steve says, "never again...."

I just hope they're not keeping that $18 billion in US dollars, because if they are, it's lost billions of dollars of actual value over the past few years.

They're saving this money to pay for all the iPhones they have to replace. Look at the forums and see the people who are having to return their phones because the screens are bubbling.

nobody was ever upset when Bill kept 40+ billion for microsoft's war chest... where do you think the money for Yahoo is coming from? Apple is no where close to having the kind of cash power microsoft does.

theyre saving it to buy up the soon to be sold band of radio waves

Great picture, Mike :)

Dude, I'm telling you, they're planning to buy microsoft :)

I'm wondering if Microsoft puts a larger percent of its sales into R&D because their core software business is 99% gross profit vs. 60% or whatever profit apple makes on it's more hardware based lineup.

"I'm surprised to see that Apple only spends 3% of their sales on R&D, while Microsoft spends 14%)"

Are you kidding? Microsoft has a huge R&D department that is likely one of the largest corporate publishers of CS research..

Not that that makes them cool, but they do spend money on R&D.