9 January 2007: Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone
At Macworld in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator, then revealed they were all one device. Rival executives scoffed at the price and the lack of a keyboard. Within a few years the iPhone had reshaped the phone industry, crushed incumbents like Nokia and BlackBerry, and turned Apple into the most valuable company in the world. The scoffing aged poorly.
The lesson: Incumbents tend to judge a new product by their old rules, which is exactly how they miss it.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Apple at the start of 2007 → $83,333 today, vs $4,789 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2007, the year it happened. That is 83.3 times the money, and $78,545 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | $3.00 | $83,333 | $4,789 |
| 2008 | $7.00 | $35,714 | $4,626 |
| 2010 | $7.50 | $33,333 | $6,071 |
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
- 24 January 1984: The Macintosh goes on sale
- 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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