Naysayers and Apple skeptics were wrong. They claimed back in May, when Apple’s stock was sinking, that the Apple era was over. The iPhone Age was going to give way to the Pixel Period. The death of Steve Jobs, they said, heralded the slow death of the world’s biggest tech company.
Wrong. Apple shares are up 47 percent, reaching an all-time high of more than $134.
Fast Company writes, “Meanwhile, Apple’s services business is gaining steam. Apple has a billion iOS devices in the wild, and each of them is a vending machine for Apple services, like music, video, apps, and cloud service. The services business brought in $7.2 billion in revenue in last year’s December-ending quarter. That represents a growth of 18% from the same quarter the year before.”
America’s most admired investor, Warren Buffett, bet big on the tech company, making Berkshire Hathaway $400 million richer. The Oracle of Omaha, known for avoiding tech stocks in previous decades, bet big on Apple, and it paid off. Fortune Magazine writes, “Berkshire, which has traditionally avoided technology stocks, started to amass a holding in Apple in the first quarter of 2016, when it bought just over 9.8 million shares. Berkshire then added 5.4 million more to its portfolio in the second quarter. At that time, taking on a bigger stake in Apple seemed like a potential misstep: The company’s stock had been swooning amid three straight quarters of profit and revenue declines due to decreases in iPhone sales.”