I am no knowledgeable stock analyst, I'm not in that industry at all and I believe you could just as well pick stocks by flipping a coin or letting a parrot pick. And I am in no position to give and stock advice at all and you should just skip this and definitely not listen to it.
That being said, personally for me I do not see AAPL going anywhere but UP in the long run for the simple reason that I take my colleagues and friends for my "guesses" rather than "technical" analysis or nervous traders dropping shares when Mr Jobs says "boo!!". Those peers and subjective impressions were good enough so far when all of a sudden everyone wanted an iPod back in the day before iPhones and sure enough suddenly Apple got all successful and continued to grow.
Now I see the same situation with the iPhone and iPad - I see people here who never heard of Apple some 5 or 10 years ago going crazy over those products and they cross-buy into the Minis and Airs and iMacs and all those other products.
I do understand very well that the stock market is completely unpredictable and very random and good sales numbers can mean nothing but... my bottom line is: all those non-techs and former PC+Windows users jumping on the "ohmygod apple is so awesome!" train for some time now and everybody loves Apple here and they have built an excellent company and generally have a very good and positive public image as an innovator and they do not stop to amaze people with little awesome details and continue to do so in their Apple stores and on top of that I am convinced that they single-handedly CREATED the iPhone-smartphone market and tablet/iPad market[1] and I don't see that changing any time soon. And now with the "Mr Jobs" uncertainty out of the way and his very DNA and spirit woven so closely with that company on ALL levels and him still being on the board, I am not worried the slightest bit and just regret I don't have more money to invest right now.
[1] I realize there were smartphones long time before the iphone and I know there were kinda tablet-thingies before but in my book, Apple created products that simply did not exist before and oh boy did they get it RIGHT and thereby they created two completely new markets and now the masses are buying into it like crazy - none of this existed before. Those are Apple markets and you can see how similar any competitors' products are to Apple's products, no matter how good or bad those "clones" might be. Apple created those markets and they have displayed an excellent and sell-able understanding of both.
I actually wonder if instead, Apple might be peaking.
I remember seeing, in academia, a lot of macbooks appearing around about when Mac OS X 10.1 first came out. This then later seems to have spread.
In a possibly similar way, I now see a lot of grumbling about macs, people going back to windows and linux, and android phones popping up everywhere. Not a guarantee of failure, but I think a lot of people are getting annoyed, particularly by the limitations of the iPad, which feels increasingly crippled the longer you use it (can't just quickly edit a LaTeX file, run LaTeX on it, and then submit it to svn).
This is just one tiny sample, at one university. It will be interesting to see if it spreads, or dies.
I think Apple's plan is to have a stream of new product categories. Already, the iPods make a shrinking contribution to revenue; the iPhone is being overtaken by android; but the iPad is still far, far ahead and growing. What will be next? And can they keep having a "next"? It's tough to keep on creating revolutions (but enormous fun if you can do it).
Going from macs to linux puzzles me, because the mac OS is unix (though not linux) underneath: you have the best of both worlds, usability + power.
The iPad is a simplified product (at present, anyway). Awkward for power users, but great for the huge mainstream who value simplicity over power. Apple is a consumer electronics company these days; a Sony. Geeks are a much smaller and less lucrative market.
While Mac OS X is unix underneath, Apple are not open-source friendly. They have not updated gcc in about 5 years, and even though they now provide clang, they still provide no C++0x support, unlike linux and windows.
The various package managers (brew, ports, fink) seem to often brake, and have packages broken for months.
I'm not a stock advisor, or even a savvy investor. This is just parroting general stuff I've heard elsewhere. Don't take it as investment advice.
You could look at the P/E. It's certainly not the only thing you should look at (a company can boost profits by creative accounting, or by cutting research to make short term gains and boost the CEO's bonus, and there's other factors too), but if you want a back-of-the-envelope way to see whether the price is right, P/E is the obvious choice.
Microsoft is cheap - under 10. People figure it will earn lots of dough, but gradually lose out. If you think Microsoft will reinvigorate itself, and start capturing large and profitable new markets, it may be underpriced.
Apple at ~15 is pricey, but not really high. People figure it will continue to grow (compared to Microsoft), but it's no longer a hot new thing with huge growth potential.
Then there's Dell, which is making money, but with a lower P/E people figure it's likely to be bled dry before Microsoft.
Of course, this is comparing three tech companies. The P/E of all these companies will be hit by broader market factors (which I don't understand). But by comparing similar stocks, you can ask which one the market seems to have been most wrong on. Will Apple go on strongly but not really grow much, while MS limps, and Dell fizzles?
That being said, personally for me I do not see AAPL going anywhere but UP in the long run for the simple reason that I take my colleagues and friends for my "guesses" rather than "technical" analysis or nervous traders dropping shares when Mr Jobs says "boo!!". Those peers and subjective impressions were good enough so far when all of a sudden everyone wanted an iPod back in the day before iPhones and sure enough suddenly Apple got all successful and continued to grow.
Now I see the same situation with the iPhone and iPad - I see people here who never heard of Apple some 5 or 10 years ago going crazy over those products and they cross-buy into the Minis and Airs and iMacs and all those other products.
I do understand very well that the stock market is completely unpredictable and very random and good sales numbers can mean nothing but... my bottom line is: all those non-techs and former PC+Windows users jumping on the "ohmygod apple is so awesome!" train for some time now and everybody loves Apple here and they have built an excellent company and generally have a very good and positive public image as an innovator and they do not stop to amaze people with little awesome details and continue to do so in their Apple stores and on top of that I am convinced that they single-handedly CREATED the iPhone-smartphone market and tablet/iPad market[1] and I don't see that changing any time soon. And now with the "Mr Jobs" uncertainty out of the way and his very DNA and spirit woven so closely with that company on ALL levels and him still being on the board, I am not worried the slightest bit and just regret I don't have more money to invest right now.
[1] I realize there were smartphones long time before the iphone and I know there were kinda tablet-thingies before but in my book, Apple created products that simply did not exist before and oh boy did they get it RIGHT and thereby they created two completely new markets and now the masses are buying into it like crazy - none of this existed before. Those are Apple markets and you can see how similar any competitors' products are to Apple's products, no matter how good or bad those "clones" might be. Apple created those markets and they have displayed an excellent and sell-able understanding of both.