That's the thing about Apple, they have $165 billion but they have no idea what to do with it. The only R&D they seem to be able to think of is how to make their consumer boxes shinier. No moonshots, no diversification. That's why Wall Street doesn't see any huge upside.
Says someone with no more insight than the rest of us on what's going on internally at Apple. Recent hires and job postings suggest that they're angling for the wearable electronics market, and I would bet they'll be years ahead of the Pebble of Galaxy Gear when they do announce something.
Would people prefer that they be like Google, with piles and piles of R&D projects that go public, get users, and are shorty abandoned? Ask me how long Google has been working on MMS support in Google Voice for. I honestly wish they'd never bought Grand Central, at least it would have improved in the last several years.
I suppose part of my problem is that I'm using it on iOS. Still no iOS 7 update, and there are some really braindead interface decisions in the client.
My personal favorite: Text conversations get new messages from the bottom. But when you open the app, it doesn't automatically load new messages. How do you get them? Pull to refresh. At the top of the conversation.
Yup, scroll up past several pages of messages to get to the start, pull to refresh, then go back down to read the new texts. Brilliant.
Apple is traded cheaply to its P/E. That's true. But I think any attempt to explain that in a single sentence is certainly flawed. It's complicated. Apple is widely held. There is ENORMOUS open Options interest in the stock. Etc. There are many reasons it's not trading at its ATH's.
So I think you're wrong about your conclusion but I also think you're wrong about your premise. Product development cycles take several years. It took 3 years to follow the iPhone with the iPad -- essentially just a big iPhone and a product that they started working on before the phone. There were 6 years between iPod and iPhone. It's not like cash is the only constraint here.
I of course do believe in Apple, and I use their products, and yes I'm definitely long on their stock. And I see so many people today frustrated by their low P/E. It delights me. Every month I dollar cost average into it and the longer it stays in this "cheap" P/E range the better.
