I think it follows from basic corporate economics: growing businesses sell shares to raise capital to spend on growing the business. Over-capitalised businesses

I think it follows from basic corporate economics: growing businesses sell shares to raise capital to spend on growing the business. Over-capitalised businesses buy back shares to soak up excess cash and prop up the share price. Apple used to be the former, now is the latter. You can argue that this is because it has succeeded beyond all comparisons and so it has more cash than it would ever need to keep growing the business (and I can see that argument has merit). But that doesn't contradict the point that it doesn't have enough good ideas to use its cash on. That the best use of its cash that it can think of is to shrink the business instead of growing it. That might be (as you say) a sound decision based on the economics of the situation and its relation to Wall St. I still think it's sad, because Apple used to be endlessly inventive. There are still problems it could solve, and markets it could address. But it doesn't want to. It wants to give that cash back to investors for them to invest elsewhere.