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

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

There is a tweet that is circulating saying that if you had bought Apple stock instead of an iPhone every time it was released, you would have hundreds of millions of dollars. The math is wrong (if you had spent $20,000 on Apple stock when the iPhone rumors started, you’d have at best $1.5 million today) but it wouldn’t make sense anyway. as if you were clairvoyant. in 2007, and I knew when Apple would release phones and at what price.

I figured a fairer way to calculate this would be to imagine buying a high-end iPhone every time Apple releases a new iPhone, or spending the same amount on Apple stock. If you had done that, by my calculations, you 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 about $147,000 today, or a profit of about $131,000.

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

The exact figures are below:

Gotta love a good Google Sheet, some ChatGPT and Google Finance. See the original sheet here, if you are that kind of a nerd. Image credits: Haje Kamps.

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