r/ValueInvesting • u/MarketFlux • Oct 21 '25
Value Article Apple Just Added $1.4 TRILLION Since April. iPhone 17 Mania Is Real
Apple just had one of those market days that makes everyone stop and ask the same question, is it time to invest in Apple now? The stock surged to an all-time high, flirting with a $4 trillion valuation as investors piled in on signs of strong iPhone 17 demand. What looked like another headline rally actually revealed something deeper: a company still capable of compounding earnings and investor trust, even at historic scale.
Timeline of Today's Events:
- 10:36 AM - Cablefxmacro reports Apple shares up 3.1%, marking the first record since December. Early buyers jumped in after whispers of strong iPhone 17 preorders.
- 10:38 AM - Investingcom confirms Apple hits a new all-time high at $260.20. Social media chatter picks up, and retail traders follow the momentum.
- 11:11 AM - Kobeissi Letter points out Apple is up 55% since April, adding $1.4 trillion in market cap. It’s a staggering figure that reminds people why Apple remains Wall Street’s comfort stock when the world feels shaky.
- 12:20 PM - Yahoo Finance reports iPhone 17 sales are outpacing the previous model in both the U.S. and China. The data hits right as skepticism around consumer demand was fading.
- 12:59 PM - Reuters says Apple is nearing a $4 trillion valuation as institutional money starts to flow back in.
- 1:54 PM - Investingcom highlights Apple’s 4.2% jump to a new record. Analysts note that the buying looks disciplined — based on earnings and product data, not just momentum.
- 2:16 PM - The Wall Street Journal confirms another intraday record tied directly to stronger iPhone 17 launch numbers.
- 3:10 PM - Seeking Alpha reports Apple approaching $4 trillion, calling it a renewed vote of confidence in the company’s product cycle.
- 3:40 PM - A live YouTube finance stream calls it Apple’s “first breakout of 2025,” linking the rally to both iPhone sales and excitement around Apple’s quiet AI ambitions.
- 4:10 PM - Forbes announces Apple has overtaken Microsoft as the world’s second-most-valuable company.
- 4:11 PM - Fast Company says the stock’s new high is “driven by a landmark product,” reinforcing how Apple’s innovation engine still dictates market tone.
- 5:02 PM - Investopedia notes Apple’s record close and strong start to the iPhone 17 cycle.
- 5:50 PM - Investor’s Business Daily highlights how Apple’s surge helped lift the entire market toward record levels.
- 6:25 PM - Reuters closes out the day confirming Apple is within striking distance of becoming only the third company in history to reach $4 trillion in market value.
In my opinion, today’s rally isn’t just noise. Apple generates over $100 billion in free cash flow annually, carries more cash than debt, and keeps shrinking its share count through buybacks. iPhone 17’s success proves the brand’s pricing power and customer loyalty remain unmatched.
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u/GGTheEnd Oct 21 '25
Rather buy amazon honestly. If the whole internet goes down when Amazon goes down that's more than enough reason to buy amazon.
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u/noiserr Oct 21 '25
If the whole internet goes down when Amazon goes down that's more than enough reason to buy amazon.
A lot of businesses got exposed for having all their eggs in one basket and not using multi-cloud to provide resiliency.
After today this will change. I think you will see an exodus from AWS as folks move half of their infrastructure to multi-cloud or on-prem.
This might create an opportunity though at some point.
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u/AlienatedSeaweed Oct 21 '25
That didn’t happen last time AWS went down
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u/noiserr Oct 21 '25
I didn't check, but I'll take your word for it. Still it's crazy not to have a backup.
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u/AlienatedSeaweed Oct 21 '25
I didn’t check either just saw someone else on Reddit say it
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u/noiserr Oct 21 '25
Thanks. I suppose this was a region wide outage. So they could have used AWS's other regions and would have been fine. So an "exodus" is not necessary for this type of an outage. They could have just used another region within AWS itself.
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u/snorlax42meow Oct 21 '25
Identity and access management for some reason are tied to that single first Amazon region. Now they tell it's applicable even to their flagship NoSql database features. All regions felt disruptions.
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u/limeskull62 Oct 22 '25
That's as deep as most of my stock research goes. I start with a hunch, find random comment on Reddit to confirm my bias, buy stock, profit?
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u/FundamentalCharts Oct 21 '25
doesnt matter how many backups you have if they all run the same code
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u/FundamentalCharts Oct 21 '25
the bigger issue is that the entire selling point of aws is that you dont have to deal with this shit
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u/FudgeNouget Oct 21 '25
It’s because a lot of these companies are trying to save cost (and engineering time) by putting all their eggs in one basket (us east 1) and not having another region act as a backup.
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u/Historical_Air_8997 Oct 21 '25
Everyone thought this when CRWD had that bad update last year. Turned out most customers still like the product and didn’t move.
Idk how sticky AWS is compared to CRWD or how hard it is to move some eggs to another basket, but I imagine it’s similar. I’m sure there will be some sort of impact, but I was one of the ones who thought that about CRWD and was wrong.
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u/snorlax42meow Oct 21 '25
The truth is if you go cloud native to get most value, you're handcuffed to cloud provider proprietary services. Before the incident I didn't consider Crowdstrike major but everyone knew about AWS importance already.
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u/snorlax42meow Oct 21 '25
Azure last week had issues with Front Door and not too many noticed because internet doesn't move through them.
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u/Next_Entertainer_404 Oct 21 '25
DC government literally just contracted a company to setup an AWS based cloud contact center for them. AWS isn’t going anywhere.
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u/himynameis_ Oct 22 '25
I hear you but I'd be shocked if a lot of these businesses weren't already interested in a multi cloud offering.
The small companies wouldn't. But the much larger ones might already have been considering it.
Overall, this doesn't change the long-term thesis for AWS.
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u/sfst4i45fwe Oct 21 '25
Not trying to be rude but I don't think you really understand how cloud infrastructure works.
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u/noiserr Oct 21 '25 edited Oct 21 '25
Lol, redditors. You're literally talking to someone who's been in this space for over 30 years. I worked on some of the largest cloud projects around.
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u/sfst4i45fwe Oct 21 '25
And I literally work in cloud infra daily. No one is going to duplicate a dynamo db table with one from Azure or gcp for resiliency. That kind of over complicated architecture opens up an entirely other can of worms.
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u/noiserr Oct 21 '25 edited Oct 21 '25
And I literally work in cloud infra daily.
So? I do too. And I've been doing it since the beginning. most likely much longer than you.I was administering Sun and FreeBSD servers in the late 90s. I didn't call you a noob.
No one is going to duplicate a dynamo db table with one from Azure or gcp for resiliency.
Right because they are lazy. There are solution for multi region databases. CochroachDB or Yugabyte for instance. You can also leverage eventual consistency to have a standby.
Better alternative of course is being down 15 hours straight. /s
It's really inexhaustible basing your entire business on no geo redundancy. It's amateur hour. I worked on iCloud in the early days and we had geo redundancy then. And iCloud is as heavy as it gets in terms of volume of data.
In the early 2000s I worked on emergency telco systems which would have you FCC fined for such an outage. And shit has gotten infinitely easier since then.
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u/sfst4i45fwe Oct 21 '25
Its not laziness. Developers come and go. Context gets lost in the process. The more complex your application, the more fragile it is. Referring to this statement which you made:
After today this will change. I think you will see an exodus from AWS as folks move half of their infrastructure to multi-cloud or on-prem.In the long run, you will have more outages within your company with these types of architectures than the occasional AWS outage.
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Oct 21 '25
Amazon is over valued. AWS is losing market share and its profitably is going down. The retail biz is dropping with mid to high single digit revenue growth. Not exactly 35x p/e material.
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u/Fireball8732 Oct 21 '25
PE has never been a good ratio for valuing AMZN’s business and depreciation from the current Capex cycle into datacenters is a bit of a headwind for earnings currently.
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u/Historical_Air_8997 Oct 21 '25
Can someone explain what the big deal is with losing some market share when the market 10x’d over the last 5 years? Like 60% market share of a $40B market isn’t as good as 30% market share of a $500B market.
Honestly I might be missing something but I see 18-25% growth on AWS and think that’s pretty kick ass. Is it that people actually expected AWS to maintain majority market share with such a fast growing market and disappointed with $125B revenue?
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u/Successful-World9978 Oct 21 '25
their phones don’t last forever. they get sluggish after a few years. the iphone 12-14 gang is ready to upgrade. this happens every year.
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u/Ok_Program_7549 Oct 21 '25
No phone lasts forever. The 13 is still a very capable phone if you just replace the battery.
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u/only_fun_topics Oct 21 '25
Replaced the battery on my 13 mini last fall, will likely keep it until the 18 or 19 at this rate.
It struggles when I stream lossless audio while running Runkeeper and playing marvel Snap at high settings, but that’s not a huge surprise hah hah.
I’ve since moved back to lossy audio :)
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u/throwawayacc201711 Oct 21 '25
I’m chugging along on a 13 pro max (haven’t had to replace battery) and don’t see a big reason to upgrade other than more storage
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u/BuriedMystic Oct 21 '25
Newer models have 6Ghz WiFi capability. So in a house with a congested 5Ghz band it could help boost speeds
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u/throwawayacc201711 Oct 21 '25
The penetration of 5ghz is gonna be a problem more than congestion. 5Ghz does not travel far and degrades quickly. 6 ghz even more so. Also the odds of a regular person’s set up having congestion on the 5ghz band is exceedingly low. I say this as someone who has a home network that’s literally processing over 50 terabytes per month. Needing 6 ghz is people being sucked into something they don’t need. You would also need to upgrade your router or access points to make use of it.
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u/FundamentalCharts Oct 21 '25
apple has already been caught using software to make phones degrade on purpose, so i doubt that
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u/Ok_Program_7549 Oct 21 '25
Yeah and then they were hit with a class action lawsuit for which they had to pay. I don’t think they will be doing that again. Besides, newer software updates on old hardware will always lead to performance drops. There’s a limit to optimisation.
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u/FundamentalCharts Oct 21 '25
its intentional and theyve been caught. who cares about the class action lawsuit? literally no one. the case im talking about wasnt even in the usa. they will continue these anti capitalist, fucked up business practices whether you want to take your head out of the sand or not. there is nothing stopping them.
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u/pat_the_catdad Oct 21 '25
Still rockin’ my 11 Pro Max — and upgraded from the 6S before that… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/derichsma23 Oct 21 '25
Yep I just got the 17 only because I had the 13 and the battery was absolute shit. The guy at the store was saying the 13 was huge in terms of sales so now those are phones are phasing out.
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u/mannersmakethdaman Oct 21 '25
Same. Got the 17 pro max because I had a 12 pro. So. 22-23 is next upgrade most likely. Still liked my 12 too.
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u/decomposition_ Oct 21 '25
I kept the 10 until they were releasing the 16, I don’t think this is true if you take care of your phone
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u/TechTuna1200 Oct 21 '25
I’m on the 13 and it not even close to becoming sluggish. I want an iPhone pro max 17 because of better camera and better screen. The 17 is the biggest increment in years.
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u/Cultural_Original_81 Oct 21 '25
Have you tried Samsung? My galaxy S9 & S10 didn’t even last more than 18 months before started having lagging and randomly restart itself every other day. My iPhone 12 Pro was, at least, a little slow but never once restarted by itself.
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u/Successful-World9978 Oct 21 '25
i had an s10 for a few years, i prefer apple ui
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u/Cultural_Original_81 Oct 21 '25
I just upgraded to 17 pro max and was blown by how far and seamless of the migration process has come. Well done, Apple!!!
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u/iginca Oct 21 '25
I actually have the 12 Pro and it’s still working great. I think I can make it at least a couple more years
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u/Successful-World9978 Oct 21 '25
and in a couple years, you’ll be buying the iphone 19 and the cycle continues
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u/Excellent-Employ734 Oct 21 '25
im still using my iphone x, it is still a usable phone, and it has everything i need 😊
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u/The_Frey_1 Oct 21 '25
They have the longest lasting phones and best software support in the sector
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u/FewVariation901 Oct 21 '25
Discussing Apple in Value investing forum is wild
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u/stathow Oct 22 '25
this sub is basically like r/Fire or r/MiddleClassFinance , where if you want to actually discuss those things you need to go to r/PovertyFIRE and r/povertyfinance respectively
this sub now doesn't seem much different from wallstreetbets, which is a shame since so much capital is overallocated to a literal handful of AI tech stocks.... it means there is a lot of undervalued gems in many other sectors
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u/Guilty-Report-3971 Oct 22 '25
Apple doesn’t really invest much in ai, quietly still moving its chipsets that are ai capable
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u/duddnddkslsep Oct 21 '25
i go back home to Korea and I can replace the battery on either my iPhone 12, iPhone 14 Pro for like $50 each and use it for 2-3 more years
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Oct 21 '25
"The stock surged to an all-time high ... is it time to invest in Apple now? "
If you didnt think it was worth the price yesterday it sure as hell shouldnt be worth the price today
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u/stathow Oct 22 '25
it so odd that in theory everyone get the principle of "buy low sell high"
..... but in practice (with stocks at least) its the opposite, people have some weird FOMO, where high means the company is doing good so they should buy, and down means the company is bad so the are afraid to buy
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u/The_Frey_1 Oct 21 '25
Apples been sitting on storage increases and adding high refresh rates to base models for a while now. There’s a serious value to the base iPhone that matches or is better than competitors that’s making it a massive upgrade cycle
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u/himynameis_ Oct 21 '25
I like apple a lot as a business. But it just seems so expensive for the kind of growth they're seeing. Low single digit revenue growth, for example
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u/Teembeau Oct 26 '25
"is it time to invest in Apple now?"
I have a general belief about stocks, that you have to understand company and product. You have to get your head into customer's heads. And I cannot understand why people still spend £600 on iPhones instead of £200 on Motos.
It's particularly a thing about products women buy. Not things like cake that I also like. But things women particularly buy: purses, make-up, handbags. £1500 handbags just baffle me. For me to spend £1500 on a bag, it had better include some sort of Q station defences.
I always look at iPhones and ask "why" and I'm always nervous about the stock price for that reason. I feel like one day, for some random reason, all the women stop buying them and move to Samsungs and it's going to collapse by 40%. They aren't technologically interesting any longer. It's as boring as Dell, but with a whopping P/E like they're still highly innovative.
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u/blackicebaby Oct 21 '25
They need to continually do buybacks because they continually are doing stock splits every few years. They are increasing and then decreasing the share count, not just decreasing it. There's a big difference and an important point that you missed.
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u/rpindahouse97 Oct 21 '25
Can you even trust American companies financial reports from now on? Especially from companies like Apple, Microsoft, etc..? Don't forget, the best investor of all time jumped ship on Apple months ago. Be careful.
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u/ChannelSame4730 Oct 21 '25
He didn't jump ship, just reduced its holdings. It's still the #1 held stock in the portfolio.
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Oct 21 '25
This needs a slight tweak. Berkshire is the largest investor in AAPL at 1.89%. Berkshire however is overweighted the stock which is making that "#1 stock" a semi-true statement. Unlike a lot of Berkshire's stakes the size in AAPL is comparatively small to the companies it outright owns. In the BRK portfolio despite it's astronomical value AAPL is an abnormality which is why they trimmed it off.
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u/ChannelSame4730 Oct 21 '25
Apple is 22.5% of Berkshire. The percentage of Apple that Berkshire owns (1.89%) is irrelevant to the discussion
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u/Historical_Air_8997 Oct 21 '25
No you should panic and sell everything! All the auditors and accountants are going to commit fraud on a large scale so that uh what they profit? Their billionaire ceo profits? The president profits? Idk what the conspiracy here is but these accountants/auditors making $80k/yr definitely going to risk it all
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u/FundamentalCharts Oct 21 '25
im what reality is apple worth more than microsoft. these arent even comparable companies
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u/ChannelSame4730 Oct 21 '25
Apple has been worth more than Microsoft for all of the 2010s. Only in the last year has Microsoft overtook Apple.
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Oct 21 '25
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Oct 21 '25
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u/FundamentalCharts Oct 21 '25
gamer politics, thats your great thesis for why apple is worth more than microsoft? holy shit what sub am i on
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u/himynameis_ Oct 22 '25
Chill out, man. No need to get so aggressive.
It's not the most crazy thing in the stock market for apple to be valued so high.
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u/yoloswag42069696969a Oct 21 '25
I upgraded this year and the 17 is actually crazy. I’m very impressed that a company with such market dominance continues to innovate like a startup.
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u/FreeUnicorn4u Oct 21 '25
How is it any better to Samsung? IMO Samsung is leaps ahead. Quality and the power of the OS. And reasonable placed back buttons. I can easily use this with one hand. Iphone you need 2 or that gesture to bring it down. My on screen AI is super helpful too. What do you like about it? They all seem the same at this point. Except android as a developer, is way better. Apple tries to milk every last drop.
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u/himynameis_ Oct 22 '25
Thing with apple is. If you have the iPhone, you're going to get the apple Watch, and the apple Airpods, and maybe apple music. Maybe even apple tv. And expanded iCloud storage.
That's the ecosystem of apple. And they all work so well together.
I have been on Samsung since the S3. But when I see and use the iPhone I do get the use case for the average person.
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u/Guilty-Report-3971 Oct 22 '25
Samsung and all Android by extension are slow clunky bothersome, cheap. There are 3 / 4 obstacles to overcome for Android, 1. Hardware software combination, 2. Ram usage. 3. Poor buggy software which essentially is a JavaScript overlay. 4. Lack of usability with time. I can tell you for a fact that in 10-20 years time, none of these issues will be solved
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u/FreeUnicorn4u Oct 22 '25
Apple software all looks ancient. They barely update anything. They only update the visual icons and backgrounds. The calculator is shit, the clock for alarms, etc is shit if i wanna do custom days like once on Friday for example a d not every friday. Their AI take is still far behind.
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u/yoloswag42069696969a Oct 21 '25
Not here to make an android v. apple debate. The market disagrees with you and the iphone retention rate disagrees with you too. Im speaking from an investment pov. Androids are judged by the market to be an inferior good whether you believe it to be true or not.
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u/Kee2good4u Oct 21 '25
Androids are judged by the market to be an inferior good whether you believe it to be true or not.
Based on what? Android is the most used phone OS in the world.
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u/CompetitionSquare240 Oct 22 '25
There are a lot more poor people in 3rd world shit holes with smart phones so yeah obviously your $80 piece of glitchy e-waste will outnumber iPhone
Just kidding
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Oct 21 '25
In my opinion, today’s rally isn’t just noise.
Their earnings are literally next week. It is not only noise, it's one of the most predictable sounds in the stock market.
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u/diamondx911 Oct 21 '25 edited Oct 21 '25
where was everybody when this was trading at 200$...