Had You Bought Apple Shares Instead Of Apple Products?

Since the first iPod, Apple’s been on a roll getting consumers hooked onto their products. The latest was the release of iPad 2 last Wednesday. No doubt this will be lapped up by Apple’s eager legions! A square foot of an Apple store generates $5,980 in annual revenue, that’s how profitable they are! Investors love Apple, consumers love Apple! Apple’s in a very envious position!

So I thought I’ll try out a different experiment. What if, instead of buying Apple products, one invested the equivalent price in Apple shares? Apple’s growth since the first iPod launch has been phenomenal! For the experiment, I chose the closing share price as of the launch date of the product without considering taxes for the purchase or commissions for the trade. For iPhone I’m using the price as bought with a contract.

For example:

If you had bought Apple shares instead of the original iPod when it was released in October of 2001, you would be sitting on a return on investment of $16,073.78 on your original $399! That’s a return of 3928.52%.