[Ti] Market Share: 2.3% -- That's NOT good press, coupled

[b]

>"They've got 4.4 BILLION (that's Billion, with a B) in the bank.
>Somehow, I fail to be able to dredge up anything resembling panic 
>for Apple's future."
>
>"Well, then, at their current burn rate, they'll be out of business 
>in 137 years. I'd better get a PC soon."
>
>"That amounts to a cash total of about $12 per share. Apple could 
>just about buy back all their public shares with the money they have 
>in reserve.
>Put another way, they could take a $250M quarterly hit over four 
>years & *still* be around! "
>
>I'm definitely not worried. Are you?
>Kevin

As I and others have stated for some time now, the cash on hand shows 
that the entire company is being evaluated in the market, in terms of 
orders, capacity, customer loyalty, R&D as a percentage of revenue, 
debt-to-equity ratio [outstanding], advance orders to inventory 
[equally outstanding, almost problematic, ask someone who's waiting 
10 weeks for a new Powerbook...and even that old 'chestnut', 'good 
will', at Slightly Over $2 a share...

meaning the earnings per share that is bandied about is actually 
better by a factor of almost 6 times. Which means it is undervalued 
in relation to the computer industry as a whole, while having beaten 
95% of the industry in terms of return on Investment, in stock, over 
the entire last 5 year period.

On fundamental grounds it's a 'killer' stock. When the market truly 
bottoms and there's a return to fundamentals in terms of pricing of 
companies [via their stock prices] Apple will outperform nearly the 
entire industry, regardless of which 'wonky' market share figures are 
considered the 'conventional' number.

A quick glance at the slash dots and *nix forums shows a marked 
increase in 'switchers' who love the Aqua 'front-end' to the Darwin, 
er, BSD, operating system. With OpenSource elements factored in 
[especially if Apple decides to participate more via incorporating 
and re-publishing their revisions,], along with the possibility of 
next-gen Xservers with the IBM PPC chips already being tested, and 
the MacOS [already exhibited to HP, AMD, etc] on x86 architecture, 
better security [even more so with the Unix underpinning that has a 
history of even fewer 'known' viruses than Apple's], it is hard to 
see anything but upside potential in market share. Market share 
matters most in terms of perception. Higher volumes might allow the 
same R&D to happen, along side lower hardware costs to us, the 
consumers. That would be nice.

~flipper