Gallbaro said:
If you think Apple, a company with a limited product base is worth more than Exxon Mobile, then by all means stay in it.
Exxon is still worth more than Apple, and Exxon's shares have depreciated a lot over the past years, so it's not at its peak, from $93 in April 2008 to $58 last July.
The thing with Apple is that they are in a good position to take huge market shares outside of what they have already done.
It makes sense that such a company would continue to grow considering what we have seen over the past few years, and considering that technology will continue to consolidate.
All they have to do is remain at the center of that consolidation.
Everything will become portable, and everything portable will converge into one device. This is an inevitable evolution, a natural evolution, and nature always finds the easiest way. It's extremely difficult to believe that this consolidation of technologies could happen with multiple players pulling the curtain in their own direction; it would only slow down the process, and there is too much money to be made by establishing partnerships with a company that can be at the center of this consolidation for each of the competitors to manage to pull deals of equal worth for themselves. On top of that, consumers want to throw money at one company they like, otherwise they worry about what to spend their money on and just hold back.
The reason the iPhone and iPad are successes is because people can buy an Apple device without wondering "Is this the right choice? Would I be better off with another company's product?". They find out about what the device can do, they know it's from Apple, so nothing stands in the way except price. And price is just a delaying factor, eventually they buy the thing.
I think Apple is better positioned right now than anyone else to be at the center of this consolidation.
Graphic tablets are going to disappear. Mouses and keyboards will disappear. Modems will disappear. PCs will disappear. Game consoles will disappear. Low-end point & shoot cameras will disappear. Everything is converging to the equivalent of the iPad and the iPhone. And then it won't take long before the iPhone becomes an automatically unfolding flexible-rigid display coming out of the iPad's stylus.
The only thing that will take more time to eliminate are digital cameras, because they have their own conversion to go through first (video + photo cameras will merge first), and because miniaturization in this case is more complicated.
TV and movie content is another market that Apple will try to seize, but this will be more difficult. TVs won't disappear, since miniaturization doesn't make sense in this case (until we can project HD video from a stylus in the air). So Apple will want to do with movies and TV what it did with music with iTunes.
All of the above is more than likely going to be achieved by Apple, not Microsoft, not Google, not Sony (lol).
So it's first and foremost not about how big Apple's market share is, but rather how big are other companies' market share, and how much that will bring for Apple when those are Apple-ified.
The current capitalization is high, it's likely that the share price will fall (and I expect a split soon if the price doesn't go down on its own), but over the long term I think Apple is a sound investment. If you enter now, you can always buy more shares when it falls.
Apple's biggest problem will be monopoly laws.
