If you bought Apple stock instead of phones, you would have $147,000

Image credits: Hajj Kambas / Mid-flight

What would happen if you bought the same amount of Apple stock instead of buying the latest iPhone every time Apple releases one?

there A tweet is floating around Saying that if you had bought Apple stock instead of the iPhone every time it went public, you would have hundreds of millions of dollars. The math is off (if you had spent $20,000 on Apple stock when the iPhone rumors first started, you would have $1.5 million today, at best) but anyway — it would only make sense if you were a clairvoyant in 2007, and knew when Apple will release its own phones, and at what price.

I thought the fairest way to calculate this was to imagine buying a top-end iPhone every time Apple releases a new iPhone, or spending the same amount on Apple stock. If I did, by my calculations, I would have spent about $16,000 on iPhones over the years (that’s about $20,000 in today’s dollars). If you had bought Apple stock instead, you would have $147,000 or so today — or a profit of about $131,000.

Apple’s stock price has risen significantly since the launch of the original iPhone. Below is a chart including stock splits. Image credits: Screenshot from MacroTrends.

Exact numbers below:

Gotta love a good Google Sheet, some ChatGPT and Google Finance. be seen The original paper is hereif I were Which Kind of a nerd. Image credits: Hajj Kambas.

And for some actually useful Apple Coverage See all our coverage of the Apple Fall 2023 event!