Apple Is Almost a $4 Trillion Company—Now What?

It’s official: Apple could soon be the world’s first $4T company.

Apple has long been among the most valuable publicly traded companies, but this milestone represents unprecedented levels of perceived worth.

Key Takeaways

• From humble beginnings in the mid-1970s, Apple has grown to become one of the largest and most influential companies in the world.
• The computer and smartphone maker now commands a market capitalization approaching $4 trillion.
• Led by charismatic CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs until his death, the company has been headed by Tim Cook since 2011.

How Did Apple Do It? The Halo Effect

Though they have been sometimes criticized for not being innovative enough, Apple has forged its business—and its reputation—on superior technological innovation and products, superior user experience, and the ability to integrate those products into our lives seamlessly. This has created a halo effect, with all units of the business buoying other parts of the business.

Over the years, this has landed Apple in a virtuous cycle, in which one success begets another: great innovation and great products leads to higher demand, which leads to pricing power, higher profit margins, and improved cash flow. It drives the stock price higher, which returns capital to shareholders and allows Apple to reinvest still more capital in its innovation and products, thereby beginning the cycle again.

We’ve seen this time and again, from Macs to iPods to iPhones—the most notable and successful of Apple’s products.

What’s Next?

So Apple is almost a $4 trillion company. This is no small feat. But what now, and what’s next?

As we look ahead at the tech behemoth’s future, we can expect to see more of the same: more innovation, more competition, and for the foreseeable future, higher profit margins, a higher stock price, and a higher valuation. Here’s a more in-depth look at this future.

Innovation: Peak Screen 

In a piece in his column “State of the Art,” entitled “We Have Reached Peak Screen. Now Revolution Is in the Air,” technology writer Farhad Manjoo highlighted one of the chief concerns for a company that pulls in the lion’s share of its profits from smartphone sales: “pretty much anyone who can afford one already has one, and increasingly there are questions about whether we are using our phones too much and too mindlessly.”

So, tech giants are moving away from screens and building something else: “a less insistently visual tech world…that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches, and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes.”

Though Apple hasn’t talked much about a future like this, it would appear, from some of their newest products—Airpods and the AppleWatch—that the company is interested in a future where users can use Apple technology more and more while looking at their screens less and less.

Apple has made great progress with both its headphones and its wearables. The only missing piece for the company is a top-notch voice assistant. If they were able to improve on Siri, Apple could combine these technologies “to make something new: a mobile computer that is not tied to a huge screen, that lets you get stuff done on the go without the danger of being sucked in.” This could also include Apple’s Homepod. 

The only thing is, it’s not the only one preparing for this future. So are all of it’s peers—Amazon and Google in particular.

Competition

Though we think of Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, and Google (FAANG stocks) as distinct tech firms with distinct core competencies and areas of expertise, more and more, we are seeing areas of overlap, which means we are seeing areas of competition. For Apple, this means seeing other companies make inroads into the tech hardware market.

Amazon and Google (i.e., Android) are the big names in voice recognition and home assistants, not Apple. Google, with its Pixel phone (to some extent), has taken some of Apple’s market share in the tech hardware space.

Although we consider Apple the predominant name in tech hardware, particularly smartphones, the company faces significant challenges and competition. By the end of 2023, Apple had become the largest smartphone seller in the world, finally beating out Samsung, who has held the position since 2010. The top spot was short-lived; Apple dropped back to number two in Q1 2024 and has maintained that position since.

In the Meantime…

For all the attention, scrutiny, concern, and consternation that centers on and around Big Tech, the financial performances of these firms recently has gone, for the most part, undisturbed. In another piece in his column, entitled “Stumbles? What Stumbles? Big Tech Is as Strong as Ever,” Manjoo points out as much. Amazon has frequently recorded record profits, and both Amazon and Apple have often beaten Wall Street projections.

All of this should make one thing clear: Despite the public outcry, the five are all expanding their foothold on our lives, and the forces arrayed against them, which range from regulation to apathy, aren’t having a substantial impact.” Manjoo further identifies three forces that might be consolidating these companies’ market shares and economic dominance. 

• One such factor might be the fact that regulation hasn’t had much of an impact on the industry, and it doesn’t appear as though it will in the near future. Though hefty fines have been leveled at Meta (Facebook) and Google, both have moved along, unperturbed by the sanctions, and posting impressive profits despite them. There is a chance that regulations will make compliance costs expensive for most tech startups, but a minor cost for companies as big as Amazon or Apple, thereby weighing smaller competitors down.
• Second, he says, “software really is eating the world.” Most of these companies have sizable and impressive software businesses, which—though they are not for—are fast-growing and highly profitable ventures. For Apple, “…software services—things like sales of apps, music subscriptions, cloud storage, and Apple Pay—are the fastest-growing parts of its business.” In both Q1 and Q2 of 2017 (when Manjoo wrote the NYT piece), Apple had brought in upwards of $7 billion through sales of its software services. Apple was aiming to double its revenue from software services by 2025, as well.
• Finally, this is just one of several ways these companies can make money. Though the core competencies of most of these companies have seen a slowdown in growth, these companies are so large and so innovative that it is unlikely that a slowdown in any one or two areas of growth would spell demise or a retreat from industry dominance for any of these companies, Apple included. 

According to one analyst, the thing that sets these companies apart from other mega-cap companies “is that they’re not afraid to reinvent themselves…and they’re not afraid to destroy something that’s working today to make the longer-term work even better for them.” At the moment, that means investing “in tech that will be the future”—in:

• Artificial intelligence
• Machine learning
• Automation
• Self-driving cars
• In-home assistants
• Voice recognition
• Wireless headphones
• Facial recognition
• Virtual and augmented reality
• Wearable tech 

That may be part of the reason that in 2018 Warren Buffett was singing the company’s praises on CNBC: “I clearly like Apple. We buy them to hold…We bought about 5 percent of the company. I’d love to own 100 percent of it…We like very much the economics of their activities. We like very much the management and the way they think.”

When Was Apple Computer Founded?

Apple Computer was founded in Los Altos, California in 1976 by college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

What Was AAPL’s IPO Price?

Apple stock (AAPL) IPO’d on Dec. 12, 1980, at $22.00 per share. Since then, the stock has split five times, so the IPO share price was $0.10 on a split-adjusted basis.

How Many Times Has AAPL Stock Split?

Five times so far: The stock split on a 4-for-1 basis on Aug. 28, 2020, a 7-for-1 basis on June 9, 2014, and a 2-for-1 basis on Feb. 28, 2005, June 21, 2000, and June 16, 1987.

Does Apple Issue Preferred Shares?

According to its website, Apple does not have any preferred shares outstanding as of December 2024.

The Bottom Line

With its ample resources and inclination to innovate, reinvent, and invest in the future, Apple looks well-positioned for a $4 trillion valuation. But it also looks like it has some significant challenges ahead, most notably from key competitors and perhaps regulation. This has been a way of saying that, though there are certainly challenges ahead, it’s very possible that $4T is just another of many peaks ahead for the tech giant.