24 January 1984: The Macintosh goes on sale
Two days after its famous Super Bowl ad, Apple put the Macintosh on sale for $2,495. It brought the mouse and graphical interface to a mass audience, but early sales disappointed, and the next year Steve Jobs was pushed out of the company. Apple spent much of the following decade struggling. The Mac's ideas won the industry; for a long while, Apple's shareholders did not.
The lesson: Inventing the future and profiting from it are two different achievements, often years apart.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Apple at the start of 1990 → $833,333 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 833.3 times the money, and $813,905 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Apple teaches: The best returns often come from companies that looked finished; Apple was a near-bankrupt also-ran in 1997, which is exactly why it was cheap.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.3 | $833,333 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $0.35 | $714,286 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $0.9 | $277,778 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Apple? Every starting year and the full story →
More Apple history
- 2 January 2019: Tim Cook writes a letter nobody wanted to read
- 9 January 2007: Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone
- 27 January 2010: Apple unveils the iPad
- 1 April 1976: Apple is founded, and one co-founder cashes out early
- 11 April 1976: The Apple I goes on sale for $666.66
- 24 April 2015: The Apple Watch arrives
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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