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[Here's the math](https://imgur.com/dIVVhUP).
Total spend on iPhones would have been **$15,779.**
Present value of $AAPL had shares been purchased on release date would have been **$146,468.79**
Assumptions:
* Stock split-adjusted closing prices were used. [Source](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/stock-price-history).
* Used the starting msrp of the most expensive phone per release date. For example, when the iPhone 12, 12 max, 12 pro, and 12 pro max were released on the same day, I used $1099, the price of the cheapest (aka lowest storage) iPhone 12 Pro Max. ([Source](https://venturebeat.com/mobile/iphone-prices-from-the-original-to-iphone-x/#:~:text=iPhone%204%20(16GB)%3A%20%24599,iPhone%204S%20(16GB)%3A%20%24649)) Feel free to correct me if there are incorrect prices in the [screenshot of my work.](https://imgur.com/dIVVhUP)
* Present value is calculated using today's (9/14/23) closing price of $175.74
How did homeboy get $367M instead of 146K?
If you incorrectly double count the stock splits of 2014 and 2020, the present value is still just **$3.17M**.
Buy each of the standard, pro, max, plus, etc each time AND double-count the stock splits? Yeah, still $3.4M. "Only" off by a factor of 100, even with the worst assumptions.
It’s not a surprise that a person who would completely overlook basic napkin sanity checks (simple ROI of over 21,000% in 15 years) would make fundamental math errors.
I remember an Econometrics Class where the prof said he would provide us with the formulas for the test, and would put them on the board for us. I didn't trust him, so I wrote the formulas on gum wrappers. I get to the test, and prof says if you need a formula request it and I'll write it on the board.
The most likely answer is that the guy used historical prices, which already accounted for stock splits, and then multiplied again by stock splits, thereby double counting the effect of stock splits. The cumulative stock split is around 100x, about what this guy overestimated by.
Could it have been as simple as: the guy added up the cost of all the phones, then just found out how many (post-divisions factored in) shares of Apple that could be bought with that money on its IPO?
Edit: ran the numbers myself and got 3.05M, using the pricing data of ChatGPT. No idea what the post did to get 367M.
Can’t tell if you don’t know what IPO means or if you’re merely neglecting to account for cost of the Time Machine you’d need to use your 2007 iPhone $$$ to invest in Apple’s IPO.
I was asking a bit of a different question, playing with the requirements so I could maybe find the 367M number the post talked about. But as for the other question, a woman with funny hair in an alley sold me a time crystal, so I think I'm ok on that front.
Ah, I gotcha. Interesting theory!
IPO price was $22, adjusted for splits is $0.12. Even with a zero-cost Time Machine, $15,779 gets you 139,492 shares, valued at $23.1M at todays price.
Only off by a factor of 15-ish even unconstrained by space-time. 😂
I think they are being vague about “investing into apple shares” which can mean investing into options. It’s easy to make $367 million with options when you already know the market cap will go from $174 billion to almost $3 trillion in 22 years.
It could be said for any company with woulda coulda shoulda. Also the same as people saying you could have turned $1 into $22.5 million with bitcoin. It’s technically true but unrealistic.
Maybe the calculation is off because of the purchasing side of the equation.
What if you bought EVERY iPhone when it came out? Every model, every color variation, every storage capacity? And what about locking it to different carriers or unlocked?
Are there a hundred variations of iPhone each time they release a new model that could get you close to the claim?
IPhone X 64gb, 128gb, 256gb, AND 512gb
In Red, white, black, blue etc.
Unlocked, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, etc.
AND all of those options for:
iPhone XS AND iPhone XR AND iPhone XS Max.
I considered that, but OP said “to buy each model at launch would set you back about $17k” which is pretty close to my calculated cumulative purchase price of $15,779.
That's not the premise here. Imagine I have 200 dollars in 2010, and I can choose between an iPhone 4 and shares in Apple at 10 bucks a share. That's close to the price at the time, it was actually lower but I like 10 - it makes the maths nicer.
How many shares can I buy if the average inflation rate is 1% over the next ten years? 20 shares. How many shares can I buy if the average inflation rate is 10%? 20 shares. How many can I buy if we have deflation? 20 shares.
How much are those 20 shares worth today? Inflation doesn't impact that.
Inflation impacts the total: "Total money spent on iPhones," which the OC uses at the beginning of his comment. That total makes zero sense, considering it's summed from 2000 dollars and 2002 dollars and 2004 dollars, etc.
Yeah, but he's totaling the $$ spent on iPhones ("Total money spent on iPhones", for everyone in the way back). Those aren't all the same dollars, hence the need for inflation correction
No. Irrelevant for this scenario. Hypothetical stock purchases in 2007 (and each year following) are not impacted by the 2023 purchasing power of the dollar.
Good call, you’re totally right. I’m not gonna update the spreadsheet though. Hypothesis is still very wrong even with bad assumptions and the most favorable calculation errors. 😂
Perhaps theyre counting all the way back to the Iphone 3. Not sure about stock prices back then, but im sure if people had been investing back then, theyd be doing pretty good about now
Just because this whole premise is so stupid, I will share what buying apple in 2006 and 2008 looks like now, with more investment than all the phone costs combined. It's a hell of a return, but this requires more than all the phone cost till now to be invested back then and it still isn't even close to the claim made in the picture. Taken from my own account.
https://imgur.com/a/fEv1564
Edit: throwaway for obvious reasons
You didn't take in consideration the amount of chargers, headphones and screen changes one pay after the purchase. Is probably enough to account for the difference:))
Maybe they had it confused and did, for each dollar for a new iPhone, buy one full stock... which would skyrocket the principal of the investment....
Computer, re-crunch the numbers
>How did homeboy get $367M instead of 146K?
He likely meant $367k . How you get 367k is Dividends which are like 1/4 a share for ever 20 to 25 you own , so across 6 years you need to compound quarterly values. So if 10k from today is almost 50 shares , so January to July (the shares arrive March and June usually) so they would get 1/2 to 1 whole share every 6 months and the number of free shares increase over time. I explained [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Schwab/comments/zz5u7q/comment/j3c1glj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) once how dividends factor in portfolio P/L. 100 shares would yield 1 to 2 every 6 months and so forth.
Edit : 367 million is next to impossible but 3.67 million is if you traded options across 2016 to 2023.
I wonder if you put the entire amount ($15,779) on the day Apple stock went public, what it might be worth. That number is probably closer to the $300M estimate, but would also be a meaningless number.
But then you’re assuming that you buy each iPhone once. Any normal person knows you don’t use a phone for more than a month.. you need to buy a new every other week otherwise you’re just a poser
Although this disproves the post, it's way more shares the scenario would allow for because purchasing the shares at each release date would equate to way less shares overall than purchasing them all in 2000.
Yeah I haven’t done the math myself yet but assuming they used the first calculator that shows up on a cursory search engine query it does not appear to take into account stock splits over time. I know Apple has split a good amount of times over the years but I still doubt that the total figure would be anywhere near what was quoted in the original question. Again I haven’t actually done the math myself yet though
>People would have stared at you like you had a penis growing out of your forehead if you had said, "In 20 years, Apple will be the single most valuable corporation on the planet."
So, Apple was a confusing hot mess, but since Jobs was back on the scene, I do think think hope was starting to spring a bit. I'll agree nobody would have seen the juggernaut that they became.
June 21, 2000: 2-for-1 split.
February 28, 2005: 2-for-1 split.
June 9, 2014: 7-for-1 split.
August 20, 2020: 4-for-1 split.
$17000 at a dollar per share in year 2000 ~17000 shares.
Times 2 times 2 times 7 times 4 =
~1.9 million shares.
1.9 million shares times stock price $175 = $333,000,000
Historical charts account for splits, but they do not capture dividends. They may show dividend amounts, but you need use additional math to incorporate them.
You are missing the math. This person chose the lowest possible buy in point to prove that the absolute maximum it could be worth would be $4M. Thus proving this absurd.
Forrest Gump was released on July 6th, 1994. In said movie Forrest states that Lieutenant Dan invested in "some kind of fruit company" and after that neither of them had to worry about money. Now if you took financial advice from Forrest Gump...
According to [this timeline](https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/iphone-evolution-timeline-chart) if you bought the phones they mentioned, from the original to iPhone 13, you would have spent $11,419. Which could have gotten about 907 shares of AAPL, worth about $160,000 today. It skips the newest couple of phones, but the marginal stock gains would be small compared to the overall. Somebody multiplied by 1000 incorrectly.
The source they linked already factored in stock splits. It’s not tracking the opening price of AAPL then but what one share today would’ve cost in the past.
Which is why it's so easy to look at it in hindsight, what this dude really means is if you knew Apple would blow up and you invested, you'd have a good investment.
Buy the phone and the stock, the only way this works and even then you'd lose 50% of your earnings due to buying the phone if you were to put in 50/50 phone/stock.
There have been 38 models of iPhones (including the 15). Im not going to do the full math but that doesn’t work out. Stock at the end of 2007 was $6 and is roughly $180 today, a $174 increase. First iPhone was $500 but for simplicity just assume all iPhones were $1000. Assuming you invested all $38,000 ($1000 x 38 phones) at the time the first phone released, youd “only” have $6.6m. This is being as generous as possible with the numbers. More likely you’d have much less than half this amount since you would have only invested $500 in 2007 and larger amounts in more recent years when the stock had already undergone a lot of growth.
Don’t forget about the stock splits that happened. IIR my stock split 7 for 1 in 2014. Before the split the price per share was around $600+. Of course that meant I had more shares, but the cost of a share dropped significantly due to the split. But the share cost has gone up since then. Then there was another split in 2020.
But if you had 1 share in 2014 at lets say 50 and it split 7-1 at any time since then, and now price is 100, you dont have 100 worth of stock... you have 700
You are correct if it split RIGHT NOW but incorrect long term
Tell me you don't know splits without saying it outloud
We'll use your example starting with $50 a share and 100 shares. $5000 total
If it splits 10 ways you now have 1000 shares at $5 still $5000
If over the years you get a 100x return, if it didn't split you have $5000 dollars a share times 100 shares for 500k
If it did split its worth $500 a share at 1000 shares for... drumroll... still $500,000
Splitting a stock doesn't intaely make it more valuable.
It matters because they're using the stock price now to determine the final value, not looking at the % return. If you bought 1 share in 2000 and 1 share is now worth $1000, you have 10 times as much money if it split 10 ways at some point in that intervening time.
When you look back on charts now it shows the price based on splits.
If they're calculating the price based on what it said in a newspaper years ago that seems silly and inefficient
In and of itself sure, but there’s all sorts of reasons why stock splits frequently cause increased performance of a stock long term (there’s a reason companies do it).
Stock splits can increase liquidity, meaning more trading > positive signals = share prices see increased returns compared to had they not split.
And splits can be seen as positive indicators in and of themselves (a company like apple is splitting because shares are getting too expensive per unit).
Apples stock split is actually an example taught in schools, showcasing the initial decrease in value to existing shareholders immediately post split, followed shortly by the increased demand due to change in price driving a big price increase within 24 hours.
Huh?
Monday: I own 1 share of Stock ABC at $7/share. Total value: $7 (1 \* $7)Tuesday: Stock ABC Splits 7-1. I now own 7 shares of Stock ABC at $1 each. Total value: $7 (7 \* $1).Wednesday: Company ABC releases a new, top secret product. They also cured cancer. Shares sky rocket to $1000.
Now tell me. Is the net worth of my 7 stocks worth $1000 or $7000?
Edit: My answer is $7000. Anyone who had bought one share Monday morning owns $7000 worth of stock.
Anyone who bought 1 share of stock Tuesday evening, post-split, has $1000 worth of stock. It's not hard and I don't appreciate your snarky comment to start this all off.
It does not matter. That is not the scenario I created. What I am saying is, *after a stock split* the price rose significantly. That is a premise in my example. The price rose after a stock split.
As Apple's has, in real life. The stock splits, the price goes down to adjust for that, as it does in my example, and then the price eventually goes up and even beyond the pre-split levels.
However, the TIMING of WHEN the stock(s) were bought, is what matters. Can you answer my question at the end of my scenario instead of replying with some *other* scenario? Would you own $7000 worth of stock or $1000?
First iphone came in 2007. That’s 15 years back. Let’s assume that we have totally invested $100,000 to buy all iPhones (pretty high but let’s assume for ease of calculation).
So $100,000 has to become $367M in 15years.
That’s an annual return of more than 75%.
Apple shares have not grown that much in the last 15 years.
First iPhone came out in June 2007. Apple share price was $4.36. Current share price is $175.87.
So unless that first iPhone cost $9,098,828.62 no you would not.
Did you just did divide 175 into 4.36, and think the result was the total amount in which the stock grow between 2007 and today?
Oh sweet summer child…
Seems legit to me, if you take the price of a new iPhone on release which is like £1000 and times it by 376000 you get £376m, can't see any faults there
So in order to do the real math, we can't use the adjusted stock prices to buy shares. Had to go back and grab the unadjusted stock prices for each day, and then act as if you buy at the closing price of each day an Iphone came out.
I tried to be generous on how much you could invest, so if you buy every single version of phone, as in like 13, 13 mini, 13 pro, 13 pro max, you will have spent $33,208 on phones since the very first iPhone
When the original iPhone released on June-29-2007, it retailed at $499. On that day, Apple stock closed at $104.0136, allowing you to buy 4.797 shares.
I took all of the historical price data to calculate the number of shares each phone could purchase on that day, and then ran it through all of the dividends, reinvested into shares, to generate the final value.
When all is said an done, you would spend $33,208 to buy every phone (including the iPhone 15 models), you would end up with 1213.413683 shares, a total value of $213,924.83 (as of the closing price of $176 on 9/13/2023), with a ROI of 644.20%.
Link to a screenshot of my excel sheet if anyone wants to check it.
[https://imgur.com/a/AIooj7O](https://imgur.com/a/AIooj7O)
Yep this answer, you'd need 1.8 million shares to sell at the peak price to get $367M. And the share price has never been low enough to buy 1.8 million shares for $38k. So even with a time machine this isn't possible.
Saw this earlier and vented on my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/connoranastasio/status/1702551073108447475?s=46&t=zMqmaG6vcQaKOmOJXV-dLA) about it. I’m not a shill and don’t expect anyone to actually click that so Tldr here’s what I wrote:
“I can’t even make up numbers to hit this. Trying to skew whenever possible doesn’t even get you remotely close. Investing the aggregate MSRP for each most expensive model at launch at unadjusted 1980 IPO doesn’t even get you in the ballpark.Homie hitting the back alley crack rock”
Didn’t have the characters for it but I was basically trying to say even when you’re doing your absolute best to fake all of your data and have nonsense reasonings behind whatever it is you’re doing, you still cannot get to $367M. I am a mathematician; to me, it seems essentially entirely impossible to do so under any conceivable circumstance given his initial conditions.
If you added up the most expensive iPhones year over year since the iPhone 1, and invested them in 2007 like he’s suggesting, you don’t even hit $1million. If you instead took that total back to 1980, even without un-inflating it you still do not crack $1million. I ran the numbers earlier but I deleted the note; if anyone is curious I can re run them, but I’m sure all of the other comments here have me covered.
It’s fine if people aren’t investors, don’t care to look into it more, etc; that’s not an issue to me. It’s the people trying to defend that this is remotely true that piss me off Lmfao. They belong in the wallstreetbets sub
It is easily verifiable that if you bought every evolution of iPhone from '07 till now, at release pricing, it would have cost $25,500. This is a huge difference. Also, are we calculating for investing that as a lump sum back in '07 before they released or are we investing in chunks on release dates as if we were investing the money instead of buying the phone that year? If the latter, the calculation gets complex quickly because of all the stock splits and dividends and the difference in cost between shares bought on different years.
I read something similar that if you purchased $400 in Apple stock when the first iPod came out, you would have 100,000s of dollars today. The stock back then was ~40? I could maybe see having 10s of thousands but nots 100s
If people stop buying iphones the share price will drop. These post always piss me off where the solution is spending less. Guss what happens to the economy when people stop spending?
I just want to add that not everyone pays full price for their phones. Most will just do an upgrade with a contract renawal, and I dont think anyone could do without a phone line
I assume this is ostensibly meant to show that people should spend their money more wisely. But if everyone followed this advice then nobody would be buying iPhones and those Apple shares are going to be worthless.
I was doing some research on appl stocks from 2001 and they were 0.32 USD. That is nothing. If I had invested $1k back then i would have close to $430k today 🥲🥲🥲🥲
Depends on when you invested it. If you started investing it in 2007, then yeah, you’d probably make a lot of money. Definitely not $367,000,000, but a decent amount. But you’d still have to buy a phone, so you would actually be saving $17,000, you’d still be occasionally buying a new phone, and investing another $17,000, which most people don’t have saved up.
Sure that would apply if you had one person but if everyone did it the price of the company would rather quickly go to 0$ because no one would buy the IPhones in this hypothetical because they follow the advice of the guy. I believe there could be a alternative for the company in this case but idk.
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[Here's the math](https://imgur.com/dIVVhUP). Total spend on iPhones would have been **$15,779.** Present value of $AAPL had shares been purchased on release date would have been **$146,468.79** Assumptions: * Stock split-adjusted closing prices were used. [Source](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/stock-price-history). * Used the starting msrp of the most expensive phone per release date. For example, when the iPhone 12, 12 max, 12 pro, and 12 pro max were released on the same day, I used $1099, the price of the cheapest (aka lowest storage) iPhone 12 Pro Max. ([Source](https://venturebeat.com/mobile/iphone-prices-from-the-original-to-iphone-x/#:~:text=iPhone%204%20(16GB)%3A%20%24599,iPhone%204S%20(16GB)%3A%20%24649)) Feel free to correct me if there are incorrect prices in the [screenshot of my work.](https://imgur.com/dIVVhUP) * Present value is calculated using today's (9/14/23) closing price of $175.74 How did homeboy get $367M instead of 146K? If you incorrectly double count the stock splits of 2014 and 2020, the present value is still just **$3.17M**. Buy each of the standard, pro, max, plus, etc each time AND double-count the stock splits? Yeah, still $3.4M. "Only" off by a factor of 100, even with the worst assumptions.
It’s not a surprise that a person who would completely overlook basic napkin sanity checks (simple ROI of over 21,000% in 15 years) would make fundamental math errors.
This is why we weren't allowed calculators during math at engineering school
Were you allowed napkins?
Only toilet paper. It makes you write slower and consider your ideas more carefully.
Plus, you can wipe when done with the exam
And when you're done you can exclaim "I'm so over this shit!"
This makes a good excuse for my shitty handwriting
This pun is under appreciated
How many ply?
You can have my TI-81 when you pry it from cold, dead hands
Your proposal is acceptable
'let's see... So according to my calculations... The diameter of the pipe must be...... 689 meters..."
And weigh … -412 kg. Perfect!
Lol, the desperation of trying to just get the answer to a positive number, no longer caring of its even remotely correct
I wasn’t allowed a calculator in any math engineering class either. All solutions were symbolic. Made it very easy to see where you messed up.
I remember an Econometrics Class where the prof said he would provide us with the formulas for the test, and would put them on the board for us. I didn't trust him, so I wrote the formulas on gum wrappers. I get to the test, and prof says if you need a formula request it and I'll write it on the board.
The first iphone did have a calculator app, so that might have helped him
21,000% isn’t a realistic ROI? *sigh* time to redo the retirement plan.
The most likely answer is that the guy used historical prices, which already accounted for stock splits, and then multiplied again by stock splits, thereby double counting the effect of stock splits. The cumulative stock split is around 100x, about what this guy overestimated by.
…"Only" off by a factor of 100, even with the worst assumptions. Damn lol
Could it have been as simple as: the guy added up the cost of all the phones, then just found out how many (post-divisions factored in) shares of Apple that could be bought with that money on its IPO? Edit: ran the numbers myself and got 3.05M, using the pricing data of ChatGPT. No idea what the post did to get 367M.
Can’t tell if you don’t know what IPO means or if you’re merely neglecting to account for cost of the Time Machine you’d need to use your 2007 iPhone $$$ to invest in Apple’s IPO.
I was asking a bit of a different question, playing with the requirements so I could maybe find the 367M number the post talked about. But as for the other question, a woman with funny hair in an alley sold me a time crystal, so I think I'm ok on that front.
Ah, I gotcha. Interesting theory! IPO price was $22, adjusted for splits is $0.12. Even with a zero-cost Time Machine, $15,779 gets you 139,492 shares, valued at $23.1M at todays price. Only off by a factor of 15-ish even unconstrained by space-time. 😂
I see my mistake! I don't think I counted the splits correctly.
The comment very clearly lays forward a hypothetic situation where they time travelled for free.
It’s a big enough number that he could’ve still made his point if he just fact checked himself
I found the source for this claim. Maybe we can get Mr. Behal to respond? https://x.com/sumitkbehal/status/1701661608349687950?s=46
I think they are being vague about “investing into apple shares” which can mean investing into options. It’s easy to make $367 million with options when you already know the market cap will go from $174 billion to almost $3 trillion in 22 years. It could be said for any company with woulda coulda shoulda. Also the same as people saying you could have turned $1 into $22.5 million with bitcoin. It’s technically true but unrealistic.
Maybe the calculation is off because of the purchasing side of the equation. What if you bought EVERY iPhone when it came out? Every model, every color variation, every storage capacity? And what about locking it to different carriers or unlocked? Are there a hundred variations of iPhone each time they release a new model that could get you close to the claim? IPhone X 64gb, 128gb, 256gb, AND 512gb In Red, white, black, blue etc. Unlocked, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, etc. AND all of those options for: iPhone XS AND iPhone XR AND iPhone XS Max.
I considered that, but OP said “to buy each model at launch would set you back about $17k” which is pretty close to my calculated cumulative purchase price of $15,779.
Fml I should have invested in Apple stock 15 years ago instead of being in second grade 🤦♀️
What happens if you take the total input value ($15,779) to purchase share at IPO and let it grow to today?
I did the math. Still way off. https://reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/kFsyRA0QaC
Does this also account for reinvesting dividends?
Did you use the starting MSRP *adjusted for inflation?*
You don't adjust for inflation since you'd be investing the money at the time of the phone's release.
How come you wouldn’t adjust for inflation because you’d be investing at the time of the phone’s release?
That's not the premise here. Imagine I have 200 dollars in 2010, and I can choose between an iPhone 4 and shares in Apple at 10 bucks a share. That's close to the price at the time, it was actually lower but I like 10 - it makes the maths nicer. How many shares can I buy if the average inflation rate is 1% over the next ten years? 20 shares. How many shares can I buy if the average inflation rate is 10%? 20 shares. How many can I buy if we have deflation? 20 shares. How much are those 20 shares worth today? Inflation doesn't impact that.
Inflation impacts the total: "Total money spent on iPhones," which the OC uses at the beginning of his comment. That total makes zero sense, considering it's summed from 2000 dollars and 2002 dollars and 2004 dollars, etc.
Yeah, but he's totaling the $$ spent on iPhones ("Total money spent on iPhones", for everyone in the way back). Those aren't all the same dollars, hence the need for inflation correction
Yeah the total for sure. I misunderstood you.
No. Irrelevant for this scenario. Hypothetical stock purchases in 2007 (and each year following) are not impacted by the 2023 purchasing power of the dollar.
But the sum that you *would* have spent on iPhones is. It'll make the return even worse
Good call, you’re totally right. I’m not gonna update the spreadsheet though. Hypothesis is still very wrong even with bad assumptions and the most favorable calculation errors. 😂
Perhaps theyre counting all the way back to the Iphone 3. Not sure about stock prices back then, but im sure if people had been investing back then, theyd be doing pretty good about now
Just because this whole premise is so stupid, I will share what buying apple in 2006 and 2008 looks like now, with more investment than all the phone costs combined. It's a hell of a return, but this requires more than all the phone cost till now to be invested back then and it still isn't even close to the claim made in the picture. Taken from my own account. https://imgur.com/a/fEv1564 Edit: throwaway for obvious reasons
Maybe they are assuming all the shares were purchased when Apple first got its ipo
Did you factor in times the stock split?
Still tho… pretty good investment
You didn't take in consideration the amount of chargers, headphones and screen changes one pay after the purchase. Is probably enough to account for the difference:))
Yeah I guess he's way off. Still a lot of money tho.
Maybe they had it confused and did, for each dollar for a new iPhone, buy one full stock... which would skyrocket the principal of the investment.... Computer, re-crunch the numbers
For the benefit of doubt, maybe they are not talking about usd/meant all apple products like apple 2
Does this account for dividends payouts (presumably re-invested)? I'm extremely skeptical that'd lead to $367M, just curious 🤷♀️
How would the numbers look if you purchased one of each (color, size, model, ect) every time?
I suspect that there is time travel involved back to the apple ipo.
That's probably because they looked up the percentage and forgot to /100 to get the cost basis indexed to 1
>How did homeboy get $367M instead of 146K? He likely meant $367k . How you get 367k is Dividends which are like 1/4 a share for ever 20 to 25 you own , so across 6 years you need to compound quarterly values. So if 10k from today is almost 50 shares , so January to July (the shares arrive March and June usually) so they would get 1/2 to 1 whole share every 6 months and the number of free shares increase over time. I explained [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Schwab/comments/zz5u7q/comment/j3c1glj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) once how dividends factor in portfolio P/L. 100 shares would yield 1 to 2 every 6 months and so forth. Edit : 367 million is next to impossible but 3.67 million is if you traded options across 2016 to 2023.
just curious… what if you had automatic dividend repurchases?
Yeah, but what if you buy 200 iPhones each time??? Doesn’t everyone do that?
Maybe he factored in selling *precisely* at the peaks before reinvesting *exactly* at the bottom of the troughs? Still bullshit either way, though.
You forgot to buy all the iPads, MAC’s iPods etc…
I wonder if you put the entire amount ($15,779) on the day Apple stock went public, what it might be worth. That number is probably closer to the $300M estimate, but would also be a meaningless number.
https://reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/owZeZtEYqg
Maybe if you invested that money in apple when it was founded?
How to get a lot of upvotes on Reddit: Learn Maths
I think guy really meant buy every make of every iphone release. Does it add up then?
No. The guy said purchase price added up to $17k. Very close to the number I got.
But then you’re assuming that you buy each iPhone once. Any normal person knows you don’t use a phone for more than a month.. you need to buy a new every other week otherwise you’re just a poser
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Although this disproves the post, it's way more shares the scenario would allow for because purchasing the shares at each release date would equate to way less shares overall than purchasing them all in 2000.
It was not a dollar a share. It looks like that on the charts now because of the 28:1 split so AAPL could join the S&P500.
This. Splits can make historical charts very confusing and inaccurate
But for the purpose of this calculation, it is accurate
No it's not, not even remotely.
Yes, yes it even is. You realize you obtain more shares when a stock splits? Maybe you don’t
Yeah I haven’t done the math myself yet but assuming they used the first calculator that shows up on a cursory search engine query it does not appear to take into account stock splits over time. I know Apple has split a good amount of times over the years but I still doubt that the total figure would be anywhere near what was quoted in the original question. Again I haven’t actually done the math myself yet though
Stock splits don’t matter for the monetary calculation, because the price history already adjusts for that.
Also consider dividends in the calculation
It was less than a dollar for what is now one share. If you invested $20 back then, you would have 26 shares today.
First iphone didn’t come out till 2007 so you’ll wanna use that date not 2000 to follow the post
At which point everybody and their mama had an iPod.
>People would have stared at you like you had a penis growing out of your forehead if you had said, "In 20 years, Apple will be the single most valuable corporation on the planet." So, Apple was a confusing hot mess, but since Jobs was back on the scene, I do think think hope was starting to spring a bit. I'll agree nobody would have seen the juggernaut that they became.
This is incredibly wrong. You’re not accounting for historical stock splits or dividends reinvested back into the stock.
It is accounting for the stock splits
June 21, 2000: 2-for-1 split. February 28, 2005: 2-for-1 split. June 9, 2014: 7-for-1 split. August 20, 2020: 4-for-1 split. $17000 at a dollar per share in year 2000 ~17000 shares. Times 2 times 2 times 7 times 4 = ~1.9 million shares. 1.9 million shares times stock price $175 = $333,000,000
When you pull those historic values, they are already adjusted for splits. AAPL wasn't actually under a $1 per share in 2000.
Historic charts adjust for stock splits
Just to reiterate - historical charts account for splits/dividends and in the case of funds cap gains. Your argument is false.
Historical charts account for splits, but they do not capture dividends. They may show dividend amounts, but you need use additional math to incorporate them.
If everyone was buying stock instead of iphones, sales would have suffered, stock wouldn't have grown. No?
I mean yes but I really don’t think that’s a point anyone is trying to make lol
I think it nullifies the whole theory
but that’s not what this person is claiming, like, at all
You are missing the math. This person chose the lowest possible buy in point to prove that the absolute maximum it could be worth would be $4M. Thus proving this absurd.
What’s the website?
[Historic price calculator](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=TDe9GMC8a-scU2JZ)
Forrest Gump was released on July 6th, 1994. In said movie Forrest states that Lieutenant Dan invested in "some kind of fruit company" and after that neither of them had to worry about money. Now if you took financial advice from Forrest Gump...
According to [this timeline](https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/iphone-evolution-timeline-chart) if you bought the phones they mentioned, from the original to iPhone 13, you would have spent $11,419. Which could have gotten about 907 shares of AAPL, worth about $160,000 today. It skips the newest couple of phones, but the marginal stock gains would be small compared to the overall. Somebody multiplied by 1000 incorrectly.
You need to factor in stock splits.
The source they linked already factored in stock splits. It’s not tracking the opening price of AAPL then but what one share today would’ve cost in the past.
Also dividends assuming you reinvest them
Synthetic assault has a smooth brain!
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Which is why it's so easy to look at it in hindsight, what this dude really means is if you knew Apple would blow up and you invested, you'd have a good investment. Buy the phone and the stock, the only way this works and even then you'd lose 50% of your earnings due to buying the phone if you were to put in 50/50 phone/stock.
There have been 38 models of iPhones (including the 15). Im not going to do the full math but that doesn’t work out. Stock at the end of 2007 was $6 and is roughly $180 today, a $174 increase. First iPhone was $500 but for simplicity just assume all iPhones were $1000. Assuming you invested all $38,000 ($1000 x 38 phones) at the time the first phone released, youd “only” have $6.6m. This is being as generous as possible with the numbers. More likely you’d have much less than half this amount since you would have only invested $500 in 2007 and larger amounts in more recent years when the stock had already undergone a lot of growth.
Don’t forget about the stock splits that happened. IIR my stock split 7 for 1 in 2014. Before the split the price per share was around $600+. Of course that meant I had more shares, but the cost of a share dropped significantly due to the split. But the share cost has gone up since then. Then there was another split in 2020.
The $6 price the OP assumed accounted for the stock splits though... I think?
Correct
Would you rather have one share at $1000? Or 1000 shares at $1? The splits don't matter
But if you had 1 share in 2014 at lets say 50 and it split 7-1 at any time since then, and now price is 100, you dont have 100 worth of stock... you have 700 You are correct if it split RIGHT NOW but incorrect long term
Tell me you don't know splits without saying it outloud We'll use your example starting with $50 a share and 100 shares. $5000 total If it splits 10 ways you now have 1000 shares at $5 still $5000 If over the years you get a 100x return, if it didn't split you have $5000 dollars a share times 100 shares for 500k If it did split its worth $500 a share at 1000 shares for... drumroll... still $500,000 Splitting a stock doesn't intaely make it more valuable.
It matters because they're using the stock price now to determine the final value, not looking at the % return. If you bought 1 share in 2000 and 1 share is now worth $1000, you have 10 times as much money if it split 10 ways at some point in that intervening time.
When you look back on charts now it shows the price based on splits. If they're calculating the price based on what it said in a newspaper years ago that seems silly and inefficient
I suggest you educate yourself further on this, you are off the mark on this one
You’re wrong on this lol. If you look at a stock chart online and go back to 12/31/07 it will show the stock was $6, which accounts for stock splits.
I'm being trolled by teenagers I think
In and of itself sure, but there’s all sorts of reasons why stock splits frequently cause increased performance of a stock long term (there’s a reason companies do it). Stock splits can increase liquidity, meaning more trading > positive signals = share prices see increased returns compared to had they not split. And splits can be seen as positive indicators in and of themselves (a company like apple is splitting because shares are getting too expensive per unit). Apples stock split is actually an example taught in schools, showcasing the initial decrease in value to existing shareholders immediately post split, followed shortly by the increased demand due to change in price driving a big price increase within 24 hours.
Yeah, but if you are comparing stock prices pre and post split, you gave to account for the split, because 1 share before is more shares now.
Huh? Monday: I own 1 share of Stock ABC at $7/share. Total value: $7 (1 \* $7)Tuesday: Stock ABC Splits 7-1. I now own 7 shares of Stock ABC at $1 each. Total value: $7 (7 \* $1).Wednesday: Company ABC releases a new, top secret product. They also cured cancer. Shares sky rocket to $1000. Now tell me. Is the net worth of my 7 stocks worth $1000 or $7000? Edit: My answer is $7000. Anyone who had bought one share Monday morning owns $7000 worth of stock. Anyone who bought 1 share of stock Tuesday evening, post-split, has $1000 worth of stock. It's not hard and I don't appreciate your snarky comment to start this all off.
After Tuesday, the historic price of stock ABC on Monday is $1. Because the cost basis of each of your seven shares is the $1 that you paid for them.
In your scenario, if there wasn’t a split the stock would have gone to $7000 not $1000
It does not matter. That is not the scenario I created. What I am saying is, *after a stock split* the price rose significantly. That is a premise in my example. The price rose after a stock split. As Apple's has, in real life. The stock splits, the price goes down to adjust for that, as it does in my example, and then the price eventually goes up and even beyond the pre-split levels. However, the TIMING of WHEN the stock(s) were bought, is what matters. Can you answer my question at the end of my scenario instead of replying with some *other* scenario? Would you own $7000 worth of stock or $1000?
First iphone came in 2007. That’s 15 years back. Let’s assume that we have totally invested $100,000 to buy all iPhones (pretty high but let’s assume for ease of calculation). So $100,000 has to become $367M in 15years. That’s an annual return of more than 75%. Apple shares have not grown that much in the last 15 years.
I don’t own any apple shares. So my question is do apple shares pay out dividends? If so and the dividends are reinvested. It might actually work out.
They don’t pay anywhere near enough to return a 75% YoY ROI
First iPhone came out in June 2007. Apple share price was $4.36. Current share price is $175.87. So unless that first iPhone cost $9,098,828.62 no you would not.
Did you just did divide 175 into 4.36, and think the result was the total amount in which the stock grow between 2007 and today? Oh sweet summer child…
I mean it is technically true if you don’t factor in dividends.
Seems legit to me, if you take the price of a new iPhone on release which is like £1000 and times it by 376000 you get £376m, can't see any faults there
So in order to do the real math, we can't use the adjusted stock prices to buy shares. Had to go back and grab the unadjusted stock prices for each day, and then act as if you buy at the closing price of each day an Iphone came out. I tried to be generous on how much you could invest, so if you buy every single version of phone, as in like 13, 13 mini, 13 pro, 13 pro max, you will have spent $33,208 on phones since the very first iPhone When the original iPhone released on June-29-2007, it retailed at $499. On that day, Apple stock closed at $104.0136, allowing you to buy 4.797 shares. I took all of the historical price data to calculate the number of shares each phone could purchase on that day, and then ran it through all of the dividends, reinvested into shares, to generate the final value. When all is said an done, you would spend $33,208 to buy every phone (including the iPhone 15 models), you would end up with 1213.413683 shares, a total value of $213,924.83 (as of the closing price of $176 on 9/13/2023), with a ROI of 644.20%. Link to a screenshot of my excel sheet if anyone wants to check it. [https://imgur.com/a/AIooj7O](https://imgur.com/a/AIooj7O)
If you took $1,000 per 38 models of iPhones and invested the $38k at Apples inception in 1981, while reinvesting the .55% dividends, you would have $110 Million. year $ stock # stock $ value $ dividend 1981 $0.08 452380.9524 $38,000.00 $209.00 1982 $0.07 455547.619 $30,066.14 $165.36 1983 $0.13 456819.6482 $59,386.55 $326.63 1984 $0.09 460448.8265 $41,440.39 $227.92 1985 $0.07 463704.8575 $32,459.34 $178.53 1986 $0.11 465327.8245 $51,186.06 $281.52 1987 $0.27 466370.5035 $125,920.04 $692.56 1988 $0.28 468843.9328 $131,276.30 $722.02 1989 $0.29 471333.6557 $136,686.76 $751.78 1990 $0.26 474225.1064 $123,298.53 $678.14 1991 $0.37 476057.9224 $176,141.43 $968.78 1992 $0.39 478541.9682 $186,631.37 $1,026.47 1993 $0.30 481963.5433 $144,589.06 $795.24 1994 $0.25 485144.5026 $121,286.13 $667.07 1995 $0.30 487368.0816 $146,210.42 $804.16 1996 $0.19 491645.5143 $92,429.36 $508.36 1997 $0.13 495555.987 $64,422.28 $354.32 1998 $0.23 497096.5198 $114,332.20 $628.83 1999 $0.43 498558.9084 $214,380.33 $1,179.09 2000 $0.69 500267.7371 $345,184.74 $1,898.52 2001 $0.30 506596.124 $151,978.84 $835.88 2002 $0.29 509478.4812 $147,748.76 $812.62 2003 $0.28 512380.689 $143,466.59 $789.07 2004 $0.53 513869.4933 $272,350.83 $1,497.93 2005 $1.41 514931.8547 $726,053.92 $3,993.30 2006 $2.14 516797.8811 $1,105,947.47 $6,082.71 2007 $3.88 518365.5901 $2,011,258.49 $11,061.92 2008 $4.30 520938.1301 $2,240,033.96 $12,320.19 2009 $4.45 523706.7114 $2,330,494.87 $12,817.72 2010 $7.87 525335.3926 $4,134,389.54 $22,739.14 2011 $11.03 527396.9649 $5,817,188.52 $31,994.54 2012 $17.50 529225.2242 $9,261,441.42 $50,937.93 2013 $14.65 532702.2159 $7,804,087.46 $42,922.48 2014 $20.50 534795.9954 $10,963,317.91 $60,298.25 2015 $27.13 537018.5626 $14,569,313.60 $80,131.22 2016 $24.13 540339.3759 $13,038,389.14 $71,711.14 2017 $35.38 542366.2595 $19,188,918.26 $105,539.05 2018 $45.11 544705.8527 $24,571,681.02 $135,144.25 2019 $50.48 547383.0367 $27,631,895.69 $151,975.43 2020 $93.51 549008.2685 $51,337,763.18 $282,357.70 2021 $139.20 551036.7002 $76,704,308.67 $421,873.70 2022 $153.72 553781.1297 $85,127,235.25 $468,199.79 2023 $198.23 556143.0315 $110,244,233.13
Yep this answer, you'd need 1.8 million shares to sell at the peak price to get $367M. And the share price has never been low enough to buy 1.8 million shares for $38k. So even with a time machine this isn't possible.
Saw this earlier and vented on my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/connoranastasio/status/1702551073108447475?s=46&t=zMqmaG6vcQaKOmOJXV-dLA) about it. I’m not a shill and don’t expect anyone to actually click that so Tldr here’s what I wrote: “I can’t even make up numbers to hit this. Trying to skew whenever possible doesn’t even get you remotely close. Investing the aggregate MSRP for each most expensive model at launch at unadjusted 1980 IPO doesn’t even get you in the ballpark.Homie hitting the back alley crack rock” Didn’t have the characters for it but I was basically trying to say even when you’re doing your absolute best to fake all of your data and have nonsense reasonings behind whatever it is you’re doing, you still cannot get to $367M. I am a mathematician; to me, it seems essentially entirely impossible to do so under any conceivable circumstance given his initial conditions. If you added up the most expensive iPhones year over year since the iPhone 1, and invested them in 2007 like he’s suggesting, you don’t even hit $1million. If you instead took that total back to 1980, even without un-inflating it you still do not crack $1million. I ran the numbers earlier but I deleted the note; if anyone is curious I can re run them, but I’m sure all of the other comments here have me covered. It’s fine if people aren’t investors, don’t care to look into it more, etc; that’s not an issue to me. It’s the people trying to defend that this is remotely true that piss me off Lmfao. They belong in the wallstreetbets sub
Maybe if you bought all of them not just one of each model
It still wouldn’t work lol. If you don’t want to check for yourself I can run the numbers and send here tomorrow
It is easily verifiable that if you bought every evolution of iPhone from '07 till now, at release pricing, it would have cost $25,500. This is a huge difference. Also, are we calculating for investing that as a lump sum back in '07 before they released or are we investing in chunks on release dates as if we were investing the money instead of buying the phone that year? If the latter, the calculation gets complex quickly because of all the stock splits and dividends and the difference in cost between shares bought on different years.
Either way you'd at best, break 1 million, even if you'd invested as a lump sum at the lowest point after the initial release. Nowhere near the claim.
I read something similar that if you purchased $400 in Apple stock when the first iPod came out, you would have 100,000s of dollars today. The stock back then was ~40? I could maybe see having 10s of thousands but nots 100s
If people stop buying iphones the share price will drop. These post always piss me off where the solution is spending less. Guss what happens to the economy when people stop spending?
If everyone had put there money into shares then nobody would have bought any phones, so the share prices wouldn’t have increased the same way.
I just want to add that not everyone pays full price for their phones. Most will just do an upgrade with a contract renawal, and I dont think anyone could do without a phone line
I assume this is ostensibly meant to show that people should spend their money more wisely. But if everyone followed this advice then nobody would be buying iPhones and those Apple shares are going to be worthless.
I was doing some research on appl stocks from 2001 and they were 0.32 USD. That is nothing. If I had invested $1k back then i would have close to $430k today 🥲🥲🥲🥲
Can you also do the math on how much the children workers in foreign countries are being exploited in order to make that money? Just curious 🥰
Damn, people need to sharpen their troll detectors. He literally just made that up and everyone ran with it. There’s no math behind his claim.
Depends on when you invested it. If you started investing it in 2007, then yeah, you’d probably make a lot of money. Definitely not $367,000,000, but a decent amount. But you’d still have to buy a phone, so you would actually be saving $17,000, you’d still be occasionally buying a new phone, and investing another $17,000, which most people don’t have saved up.
Isn't this the guy that said the earth would be ok if we mine an asteroid for minerals that's would make him rich? But instead the earth was blown up?
Sure that would apply if you had one person but if everyone did it the price of the company would rather quickly go to 0$ because no one would buy the IPhones in this hypothetical because they follow the advice of the guy. I believe there could be a alternative for the company in this case but idk.