48 ms·

APPL $3T valuation isn’t far off – but no thanks to Vision Pro, argues Bloomberg

19 points by retskrad 3y ago

digitalengineer 3y ago
> Many of Apple's product launches have not moved the stock price, even though it continues to dominate global markets. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/12/history-apple-stock-increases.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/12/history-appl...
- Shawnj2 3y ago
  The last product launch Apple did that truly would have encouraged a reaction like that would maybe be the M1 macs. Otherwise the iPhone and most of their other products change too little year over year for that to happen
ohgodplsno 3y ago
Apple's valuation is in no way related to its services, or products. That ship has sailed a long time ago. "fair price discovery" is absolute bullshit and at this point, number goes up because number goes up.
- rapsey 3y ago
  I disagree completely. Tesla, AMD and now nVidia are irrational exuberance stocks. Apple is a money printing machine, with no end of their dominance in sight. They put a lot of that capital into buying back stock, thus making it rise themselves.
  - codq 3y ago
    As someone who switch from Android to iPhone just a few years ago, it's insane how quickly I got engulfed in the ecosystem and now have Apple everything in my house. At this point, I don't even know how I'd switch back to Android even if I wanted to (and I don't). Once they've got their claws in, they've got you—and you're happy about it. No wonder their growth and expansion continues.
    - senttoschool 3y ago
      I have 2x big Homepods for my stereo system, Airpods Pros when I work out, Airpods Max for office, iPhone 13 Mini, iPad Pro for when I want to consume, Macbook Pro for work, Apple Watch for hiking, subscribe to iCloud+. All this within the last 2 years. I'm about to buy Macbook Airs as gifts for my family. Heck, I might even buy a Vision Pro when it comes out. Apple is so good at its ecosystem thing. Luckily, I own AAPL.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Nvidia isn't irrational. ML and associated technologies will be pervasive ans Nvidia dominates the space. Their chips will be ubiquitous, in your microwave. That doesn't make these ideas good, but mobile apps are frequently a bad idea and everyone still makes one.
    - rapsey 3y ago
      nVidia's lead is likely to get chipped away from all sides. Apple is untouchable.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        By whom? Nobody even competes with Nvidia on the hardware side: https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/ In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone. It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor. I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
        ohgodplsno 3y ago
        >It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones. You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
- slashdev 3y ago
  Stock buybacks create a steady demand that’s price inelastic. I think one side effect of that is it suppresses natural price discovery. Another part of it is passive investing in indices and etfs cause money to flow disproportionality into the biggest stocks by market capitalization. This is a positive feedback cycle for the largest companies in the index. These stocks may well go higher. But they are also at levels right now where you are unlikely to get a good return on them if you invest long term from here. I would neither invest in them nor go short against them.
  - gen220 3y ago
    Buybacks don’t necessarily “suppress” price discovery, they’re just another mechanism for imputing per-share price, like revenue, margin, etc. If you wish, it’s trivial to filter out the effect of buybacks. Look at market cap over time instead of price over time. Look at market cap divided by revenue over time, instead of market cap divided by share price over time. Buybacks are not always the best use of capital, but with BRK as a key shareholder, you feel that it must make sense in their circumstance. The same money Apple invested in buybacks, its competitors have invested in dubious hiring sprees and unchecked R&D. I wouldn’t add to my apple position, but I wouldn’t consider selling any time soon. The folks at BRK know better than me!
    - slashdev 3y ago
      I think you misunderstand me. What I’m saying is that price inelastic demand for the stock through buybacks puts upward pressure on the stock price, no matter the current price, preventing the normal market process of price discovery from working well. This then is amplified by passive investment. I think that’s what makes buybacks so effective. I’m not saying anything about it making it harder to determine the intrinsic value of a stock, which I think is what you’re talking about.
- Mechanical9 3y ago
  I'd say the valuation is related to its services in that Apple's good reputation is based on consistent services. But it's certainly not proportional. Number goes up because everyone who sells demands to make a profit, just like with houses.
- lapcat 3y ago
  Apple generated $95 billion in sales and $24 billion in net income just last quarter. What more do you want?
abhaynayar 3y ago
When I was planning to buy a phone last year, it could have gone either way, iOS or Android. After a lot of analysis, I settled on iOS for my needs, and while I like Android UX more, there just weren't any good options at the time. My previous two phones were OnePlus, but they have also gone to shit, and last year's Pixel also didn't get any good reviews. And now I'm planning to buy an Apple Watch for its health features. I'm using Ubuntu on an old HP laptop right now which is working fine for me, but maybe, far off into the future, I will buy one of those Macbooks. I just don't like Apple's software, but as an overall package they're good and I don't see any better options right now, I wish there were better options, like something with Apple's hardware, but with better software.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  I feel this one. I've had an iphone in the past and I didn't like it much. My current phone is a OnePlus which I really like, but their new offerings aren't appealing. Something about Samsung I don't enjoy, possible the ads. Pixel isn't available in my country. I've ordered a Sony phone. The appeal is 3.5mm jack and a bezel instead of a cutout - I've never used the front camera on my phone so it's obtuseness irritates me. The OnePlus had a pop-up, great solution. However, if this one doesn't work out or the next time I need a new one the options are poor I think I'll be compelled to switch.
- grugagag 3y ago
  Can you dual boot into linux on a macbook?
  - bluepizza 3y ago
    Yes. Check out Asahi Linux - major hacking effort, I seriously admire the team behind it.
  - Simulacra 3y ago
    Well OS X is built on Linux, so what you're probably thinking is to boot into a Linux Gui instead of OS X.
hospitalJail 3y ago
I'm so torn on if I should buy APPL. They have a Nike/Coke kind of grip on the market. But that kind of stuff can flip on a dime if Apple begins to be 'not cool'. They have survived releasing bad products(butterfly keyboards and bad antennas). They survived from being the cool thing young adults use and migrated over to the phone your mom uses. I really can't see any obstacles for their domination of the Veblen good tech market. And that market is incredibly profitable, where Asus has significantly tighter margins. I'll probably end up buying some total market ETF since even 100k in a good performing Apple is only ~7-15% per year, 7k-15k... but the risk is insane. Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.
- gmm1990 3y ago
  Might be longer term but I think the new macbook pros don't have the same quality feel as the old ones. I got new airpod pros and the new case feels cheap to me. Very small signal against and longer term. The vision pro could be a new iphone. I still think the valuation is crazy but thats a problem with most tech imo.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    > Might be longer term but I think the new macbook pros don't have the same quality feel as the old ones. “Old ones” being? I used to own a 2015 15” MBP and currently have both a 2017 15” MBP and 16” M1 Max MBP and they feel equally quality to me, with the main difference being that the M1 model has more empty space in its case due to its increased thickness, which is a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make because it allows for cooling that doesn’t struggle.
    - gmm1990 3y ago
      I think the 2017 ones would be the old ones. I'm not sure when the change to the case happened. I'm talking about the current 14" ones with the more rounded corners vs the version that was more folio like.
- 3y ago
rvz 3y ago
A great opportunity to sell some AAPL stock with almost everyone screaming $3TN, AAPL at $200 a share, etc. What is the point of buying at the all time high with stocks like this, when last year almost everyone was scared to buy in 2022 during the layoffs spree? By the time it hits either $3TN market cap or $200 a share, Tim Cook probably would have sold some by then.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  Thought the same thing about tesla and nvidia
baal80spam 3y ago
AAPL, not APPL.
r0fl 3y ago
Lot of people are quick to praise Steve Jobs. Tim Cook became CEO when Apple had a $364.4 billion market cap. Soon that market cap will be 10x! Greatest CEO of our generation.
- lapcat 3y ago
  Most of Apple's revenue still comes from products developed before Cook became CEO: https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/financials-2023-5-4-1-1.png?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/f... Note that "Services" revenue includes App Store and AppleCare, among other various items (I think also Google's search deal with Safari). It's very easy to score if you start running halfway between 3rd base and home plate. The other thing is that "wearables" wouldn't be nearly as successful without the preexisting Apple ecosystem of iPhone and Mac. There's a reason Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhone, and it wasn't "courage", it was "cash". ;-)
- bluedino 3y ago
  It wasn't long after Tim Cook took over that I started liking Macs less and less with every new model.
- oblio 3y ago
  Market cap is overrated. Product-market fit is the real killer deal. Cook didn't really find any major product-market fits, except for Airbuds, and even those I imagine were a longer term vision.
  - r0fl 3y ago
    Apple Watch came out in the Tim Cook era
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  Jobs was a lot more charismatic and had a much more massive presence on the stage and in the public eye, which goes a long way. He was also much more of a product guy, and I think more people can resonate with that better than they can with Cook as a logistics guy.
bangonkeyboard 3y ago
How does an Apple enthusiast site repeatedly refer to AAPL as APPL?
Dudester230602 3y ago
If there are any large funds going long on AAPL due to Vision Pro then it might be wise to short on them.
pavlov 3y ago
Ah, is it once again time to calculate the value of my worst investment ever, a second-generation iPod 10GB... You see, as a student I had a bit of Apple stock bought sometime around 2001. The next year I sold those shares for a tidy 50% profit (so I thought!) and spent all the money on a brand new iPod. Only 500 euros for thousands of songs in your pocket and blazing FireWire upload speeds, amazing! At roughly 600x appreciation accounting for stock splits, looks like those shares would be worth over $300k today.
- oblio 3y ago
  Meh, I had a bunch of Adobe shares bought at $24 and I sold them at $85 (didn't need the money). They were $600 4 years later. Shit happens.
- cptaj 3y ago
  There's a million other opportunities you missed because you can't see into the future. Same for everybody else. Don't worry about it.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Absent the stock sale, how long would it have taken you to afford an iPod with only surplus funds? (i.e. saving $166 euros more, sacrificing nothing else) And what would you value the music listening happiness of that timespan at? Maybe it was a good investment! Music is pretty nice, and the iPod was great.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    I honestly tend to agree. At that time, an hour each day of personally selected music probably made me happier than holding on to some stock whose real upside started many years later. (There was plenty of time for me to buy AAPL again later but I mostly didn't.)
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  And imagine if you bought tons of bitcoin for 0.1$ and sold for 60k... we all have been there, no point torturing yourself. Life has other qualities, and money will only get you so far even these days
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SpacePortKnight 3y ago
There is no other brand on the planet with a consistent and comprehensive product lineup as Apple. Just going to apple.com, one can see everything the company does. On top of that they made $387B in revenue last year. That is more than the GDP of New Zealand, Hong Kong or Finland for example. Their product lineup is so simple compared to competition, that it's often the easiest to recommend their products to tech illiterate population. Almost all android and laptop manufacturers release so many products that the many choices making buying a product frustrating as if they are designed for the sale and not use. iPhones are also really affordable when you factor in that you can sell them later for a decent value.

19 points by retskrad 3y ago

> Many of Apple's product launches have not moved the stock price, even though it continues to dominate global markets. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/12/history-apple-stock-increases.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/12/history-appl...

Shawnj2 3y ago
The last product launch Apple did that truly would have encouraged a reaction like that would maybe be the M1 macs. Otherwise the iPhone and most of their other products change too little year over year for that to happen

ohgodplsno 3y ago

Apple's valuation is in no way related to its services, or products. That ship has sailed a long time ago. "fair price discovery" is absolute bullshit and at this point, number goes up because number goes up.

rapsey 3y ago
I disagree completely. Tesla, AMD and now nVidia are irrational exuberance stocks. Apple is a money printing machine, with no end of their dominance in sight. They put a lot of that capital into buying back stock, thus making it rise themselves.
- codq 3y ago
  As someone who switch from Android to iPhone just a few years ago, it's insane how quickly I got engulfed in the ecosystem and now have Apple everything in my house. At this point, I don't even know how I'd switch back to Android even if I wanted to (and I don't). Once they've got their claws in, they've got you—and you're happy about it. No wonder their growth and expansion continues.
  - senttoschool 3y ago
    I have 2x big Homepods for my stereo system, Airpods Pros when I work out, Airpods Max for office, iPhone 13 Mini, iPad Pro for when I want to consume, Macbook Pro for work, Apple Watch for hiking, subscribe to iCloud+. All this within the last 2 years. I'm about to buy Macbook Airs as gifts for my family. Heck, I might even buy a Vision Pro when it comes out. Apple is so good at its ecosystem thing. Luckily, I own AAPL.
- oblio 3y ago
  Nvidia isn't irrational. ML and associated technologies will be pervasive ans Nvidia dominates the space. Their chips will be ubiquitous, in your microwave. That doesn't make these ideas good, but mobile apps are frequently a bad idea and everyone still makes one.
  - rapsey 3y ago
    nVidia's lead is likely to get chipped away from all sides. Apple is untouchable.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      By whom? Nobody even competes with Nvidia on the hardware side: https://opendata.blender.org/ https://opendata.blender.org/ In the software side they're virtually untouchable. Apple abandoned their serious attempt at dethroning CUDA, and AMD has let their GPGPU ambitions fester into uselessness. Unless the entire hardware industry develops a more attractive (see: open source) GPGPU library, Nvidia could dominate the market with CUDA alone. It feels like observations like this are made with a certain blindness to non-consumer industries. In robotics, you either buy Nvidia Orin hardware or you don't compete. For AI, you either buy Nvidia hardware or you don't use SOTA. For parallel rendering in wattage-constrained environments, Apple doesn't even show up on the chart. Their 200w desktop chips are still fending off 120w midrange Nvidia laptops from 2020. It really is that bad. Even good hardware manufacturers genuinely struggle to compete with Nvidia when all the winds blow in their favor. I don't like the situation, but I've also been around long enough that I know proprietary APIs can and will dominate certain industries. It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones.
      - ohgodplsno 3y ago
        >It took decades for DirectX to be dethroned as the leading 3D raster graphics library, and even today it isn't technically fully replaced. And that's one of the easier ones. You could easily argue that DirectX still hasn't been dethroned and that D3D12 has been leading the way in pretty much every case. The current Agility SDK has things that Vulkan and Metal could only dream of.
slashdev 3y ago
Stock buybacks create a steady demand that’s price inelastic. I think one side effect of that is it suppresses natural price discovery. Another part of it is passive investing in indices and etfs cause money to flow disproportionality into the biggest stocks by market capitalization. This is a positive feedback cycle for the largest companies in the index. These stocks may well go higher. But they are also at levels right now where you are unlikely to get a good return on them if you invest long term from here. I would neither invest in them nor go short against them.
- gen220 3y ago
  Buybacks don’t necessarily “suppress” price discovery, they’re just another mechanism for imputing per-share price, like revenue, margin, etc. If you wish, it’s trivial to filter out the effect of buybacks. Look at market cap over time instead of price over time. Look at market cap divided by revenue over time, instead of market cap divided by share price over time. Buybacks are not always the best use of capital, but with BRK as a key shareholder, you feel that it must make sense in their circumstance. The same money Apple invested in buybacks, its competitors have invested in dubious hiring sprees and unchecked R&D. I wouldn’t add to my apple position, but I wouldn’t consider selling any time soon. The folks at BRK know better than me!
  - slashdev 3y ago
    I think you misunderstand me. What I’m saying is that price inelastic demand for the stock through buybacks puts upward pressure on the stock price, no matter the current price, preventing the normal market process of price discovery from working well. This then is amplified by passive investment. I think that’s what makes buybacks so effective. I’m not saying anything about it making it harder to determine the intrinsic value of a stock, which I think is what you’re talking about.
Mechanical9 3y ago
I'd say the valuation is related to its services in that Apple's good reputation is based on consistent services. But it's certainly not proportional. Number goes up because everyone who sells demands to make a profit, just like with houses.
lapcat 3y ago
Apple generated $95 billion in sales and $24 billion in net income just last quarter. What more do you want?

abhaynayar 3y ago

When I was planning to buy a phone last year, it could have gone either way, iOS or Android. After a lot of analysis, I settled on iOS for my needs, and while I like Android UX more, there just weren't any good options at the time. My previous two phones were OnePlus, but they have also gone to shit, and last year's Pixel also didn't get any good reviews. And now I'm planning to buy an Apple Watch for its health features. I'm using Ubuntu on an old HP laptop right now which is working fine for me, but maybe, far off into the future, I will buy one of those Macbooks. I just don't like Apple's software, but as an overall package they're good and I don't see any better options right now, I wish there were better options, like something with Apple's hardware, but with better software.

jemmyw 3y ago
I feel this one. I've had an iphone in the past and I didn't like it much. My current phone is a OnePlus which I really like, but their new offerings aren't appealing. Something about Samsung I don't enjoy, possible the ads. Pixel isn't available in my country. I've ordered a Sony phone. The appeal is 3.5mm jack and a bezel instead of a cutout - I've never used the front camera on my phone so it's obtuseness irritates me. The OnePlus had a pop-up, great solution. However, if this one doesn't work out or the next time I need a new one the options are poor I think I'll be compelled to switch.
grugagag 3y ago
Can you dual boot into linux on a macbook?
- bluepizza 3y ago
  Yes. Check out Asahi Linux - major hacking effort, I seriously admire the team behind it.
- Simulacra 3y ago
  Well OS X is built on Linux, so what you're probably thinking is to boot into a Linux Gui instead of OS X.

hospitalJail 3y ago

I'm so torn on if I should buy APPL. They have a Nike/Coke kind of grip on the market. But that kind of stuff can flip on a dime if Apple begins to be 'not cool'. They have survived releasing bad products(butterfly keyboards and bad antennas). They survived from being the cool thing young adults use and migrated over to the phone your mom uses. I really can't see any obstacles for their domination of the Veblen good tech market. And that market is incredibly profitable, where Asus has significantly tighter margins. I'll probably end up buying some total market ETF since even 100k in a good performing Apple is only ~7-15% per year, 7k-15k... but the risk is insane. Even when I bought Google after the Bard PR flop, I still only made a 10% return in 2 months, and I probably had heart palpitations doing it.

gmm1990 3y ago
Might be longer term but I think the new macbook pros don't have the same quality feel as the old ones. I got new airpod pros and the new case feels cheap to me. Very small signal against and longer term. The vision pro could be a new iphone. I still think the valuation is crazy but thats a problem with most tech imo.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > Might be longer term but I think the new macbook pros don't have the same quality feel as the old ones. “Old ones” being? I used to own a 2015 15” MBP and currently have both a 2017 15” MBP and 16” M1 Max MBP and they feel equally quality to me, with the main difference being that the M1 model has more empty space in its case due to its increased thickness, which is a tradeoff I’m more than happy to make because it allows for cooling that doesn’t struggle.
  - gmm1990 3y ago
    I think the 2017 ones would be the old ones. I'm not sure when the change to the case happened. I'm talking about the current 14" ones with the more rounded corners vs the version that was more folio like.
3y ago

rvz 3y ago

A great opportunity to sell some AAPL stock with almost everyone screaming $3TN, AAPL at $200 a share, etc. What is the point of buying at the all time high with stocks like this, when last year almost everyone was scared to buy in 2022 during the layoffs spree? By the time it hits either $3TN market cap or $200 a share, Tim Cook probably would have sold some by then.

moneywoes 3y ago
Thought the same thing about tesla and nvidia

baal80spam 3y ago

AAPL, not APPL.

r0fl 3y ago

Lot of people are quick to praise Steve Jobs. Tim Cook became CEO when Apple had a $364.4 billion market cap. Soon that market cap will be 10x! Greatest CEO of our generation.

lapcat 3y ago
Most of Apple's revenue still comes from products developed before Cook became CEO: https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/financials-2023-5-4-1-1.png?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/f... Note that "Services" revenue includes App Store and AppleCare, among other various items (I think also Google's search deal with Safari). It's very easy to score if you start running halfway between 3rd base and home plate. The other thing is that "wearables" wouldn't be nearly as successful without the preexisting Apple ecosystem of iPhone and Mac. There's a reason Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhone, and it wasn't "courage", it was "cash". ;-)
bluedino 3y ago
It wasn't long after Tim Cook took over that I started liking Macs less and less with every new model.
oblio 3y ago
Market cap is overrated. Product-market fit is the real killer deal. Cook didn't really find any major product-market fits, except for Airbuds, and even those I imagine were a longer term vision.
- r0fl 3y ago
  Apple Watch came out in the Tim Cook era
kitsunesoba 3y ago
Jobs was a lot more charismatic and had a much more massive presence on the stage and in the public eye, which goes a long way. He was also much more of a product guy, and I think more people can resonate with that better than they can with Cook as a logistics guy.

bangonkeyboard 3y ago

How does an Apple enthusiast site repeatedly refer to AAPL as APPL?

Dudester230602 3y ago

If there are any large funds going long on AAPL due to Vision Pro then it might be wise to short on them.

pavlov 3y ago

Ah, is it once again time to calculate the value of my worst investment ever, a second-generation iPod 10GB... You see, as a student I had a bit of Apple stock bought sometime around 2001. The next year I sold those shares for a tidy 50% profit (so I thought!) and spent all the money on a brand new iPod. Only 500 euros for thousands of songs in your pocket and blazing FireWire upload speeds, amazing! At roughly 600x appreciation accounting for stock splits, looks like those shares would be worth over $300k today.

oblio 3y ago
Meh, I had a bunch of Adobe shares bought at $24 and I sold them at $85 (didn't need the money). They were $600 4 years later. Shit happens.
cptaj 3y ago
There's a million other opportunities you missed because you can't see into the future. Same for everybody else. Don't worry about it.
ethbr0 3y ago
Absent the stock sale, how long would it have taken you to afford an iPod with only surplus funds? (i.e. saving $166 euros more, sacrificing nothing else) And what would you value the music listening happiness of that timespan at? Maybe it was a good investment! Music is pretty nice, and the iPod was great.
- pavlov 3y ago
  I honestly tend to agree. At that time, an hour each day of personally selected music probably made me happier than holding on to some stock whose real upside started many years later. (There was plenty of time for me to buy AAPL again later but I mostly didn't.)
saiya-jin 3y ago
And imagine if you bought tons of bitcoin for 0.1$ and sold for 60k... we all have been there, no point torturing yourself. Life has other qualities, and money will only get you so far even these days

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SpacePortKnight 3y ago

There is no other brand on the planet with a consistent and comprehensive product lineup as Apple. Just going to apple.com, one can see everything the company does. On top of that they made $387B in revenue last year. That is more than the GDP of New Zealand, Hong Kong or Finland for example. Their product lineup is so simple compared to competition, that it's often the easiest to recommend their products to tech illiterate population. Almost all android and laptop manufacturers release so many products that the many choices making buying a product frustrating as if they are designed for the sale and not use. iPhones are also really affordable when you factor in that you can sell them later for a decent value.