This week my wife popped into Whole Foods to pick up a few items. The bad news? Whole Foods is expensive. The good news? My wife paid for the expensive foodstuffs with her Apple Watch. We marveled at that for a moment while waiting for dinnertime traffic to exit the Mall parking lot.
Think about it. All that was required to complete the purchase was a tap to Watch. Beep. Done. A secure transaction took place where the inconvenience of the purchase could only have been improved if someone else bought the goods.
Now, think about this. Apple has more cash on hand than most developed nations. When we got home and settled in for the evening I checked on APPL; Apple’s stock. In the five years or so since co-founder Steve Jobs died, Apple’s stock has gone from about $50 a share to almost $150 per share. The company’s market cap is pushing $800-billion and Apple hoards over $250-billion in cash scattered around the world.
By comparison, once high and mighty Sony is worth barely $40-billion. HP $32-billion. Tesla is affordable at $54-billion, about $5-billion more than General Motors. Just looking at cash equivalents, Apple could just about buy a car company, Disney, and Sony.
‘Dear Apple, spend money.’
The key takeaway from that quick analysis is obvious. Apple needs to buy something, and even in an inflated stock market where valuations don’t match reality, Apple has some room and plenty of opportunities. The problem here is that Apple seems to have lost its creative mojo. No, not the mojo needed to make pretty products. Sir Jonny Ive may be working in absentia, but few can argue that the AirPods and Watch and MacBook Pro models are not pretty. Appliances, yes. And pretty.
The problem here is that Apple can’t figure out what to do with the money other than buyback stock, which helps to inflate the stock price from time to time (what with fewer shares on the market), and give money to shareholders as dividends (who already are doing well thanks to the manipulated and inflated stock price, but somehow are deserving of more because lack of creativity).
‘Dear Apple, spend money.’
That’s my May Matra for APPL. Instead of spending some of that cash pile, Apple short changes the Mac line which has become little more that beautiful appliance-like toasters, limits the number of iPhone models sold, and still can’t make enough AirPods to satisfy demand. The most creative thing Apple has done with the waning iPad line is to introduce a $329 model. That competes well with dirt cheap Chromebooks and plastic Windows 10 wannabe tablet notebook hybrids, but will that vanilla iPad be remembered as the best iPad Apple could make?
‘Dear Apple, spend money.’
I’m not even too worried about where it gets spent. How about building a virtual private network for all your customers to use. Maybe up the free 5GB iCloud storage limit to 50GB. Embarrass Google by buying up DuckDuckGo and making it the default search engine on everything Apple makes that connects to the internet. In fact, how about blocking ads and trackers on Safari. By default.
Market disruptions come in many forms. Through the years, Apple has disrupted many technology markets, the watch industry, the music industry, and the headphone industry. It’s time to disrupt something else by throwing around some of that cash pile.