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> they can't rest on their laurels simply because they're Apple.

No, but they can because they have something like $200 billion cash on hand. Which means if they really care about their stock price they can do a buy back if they want. Or if they are worried about employee compensation due to lagging stock price they can give bonuses, etc.




No, but they can because they have something like $200 billion cash on hand.

That's technically true, but getting that money to a place where they can use it to buy back stock or to pay bonuses to their engineering staff would be incredibly expensive. There's a reason why they've not repatriated it yet.


Even if it costs them 50 cents on the dollar to use that money, that's still a good chunk of money to fall back on, isn't it?

I can imagine that you wouldn't actively take risks with money that's expensive to use, but if they were already in a death spiral, wouldn't they use it to avoid going down the drain entirely?

It seems absurd to me to sit on $200 billion if you can't use at least a good fraction of it - but I don't even begin to understand the legal and accounting issues with handling that sort of money.




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