There's really two options under the first item: 1a. dividends, 1b. stock buybacks. Apple does all of these things. Recently their cash hoard has declined, whi

There's really two options under the first item: 1a. dividends, 1b. stock buybacks. Apple does all of these things. Recently their cash hoard has declined, while they continue to buy back stock, and increased their dividend. They also do acquisitions all the time, but since they usually buy technology and talent, most of those have a small price tag. The biggest exception since NeXT is probably Beats, which was $3 billion. Apple has occasionally used their cash reserves to spur growth by cornering the market on new technologies. The two I can recall are the time they prepurchased almost the entire global supply NAND flash memory while launching the iPod Nano, and buying up almost every new copy of a certain CNC machine when they launched the "unibody" Macbooks.