Sure, the stock market looks shaky now. But Apple looked like a bad bet on July 10, 1997–the day its stock price fell to a low of $12.75 a share. What if you were able to buy 500 shares then and sell them when Apple peaked at $150.38 a share last March? Assuming a 10 percent capital gains tax, you’d end up with a tidy profit in the neighborhood of $61,931.25. What should you do with all that money? Set it aside for a rainy day? Reinvest in another company? Nah–you’d do what we would do: blow it all on Mac stuff.
WHAT DOES $61,931.25 GET YOU THESE DAYS?
Every product that won Macworld’s 15th Annual Editors’ Choice Award: $12,063
A 500MHz Power Mac G4 with an Apple Cinema Display, a Sony DCR-TVR 900 digital video camera, and Final Cut Pro with the Media Cleaner Compression software suite: $11,845
Six iMac DVs (all five flavors plus the graphite Special Edition model) with MacAlly iShock USB gamepads, Harman Kardon iSubs, and Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorers: $9,211.70
All the Best of Show-award winners from the January 2000 Macworld Expo: $5,031.89
A VST 12GB FireWire external hard drive and 72GB FireWire RAID array: $4,219.90
A 500MHz PowerBook with 128MB of SDRAM, an AirPort Base Station, and an AirPort card: $3,897
Copies of QuarkXPress 4.1; Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 9, and InDesign 1.5; Macromedia Flash 4; and MetaCreations Poser 4: $2,904.75
MacGaming.com’s ten best-selling Mac games for the week of May 8: $2,203.90
A Umax PowerLook 1100 scanner: $1,799
One Sony SDM-N50 15-inch monitor: $1,465.95
Three versions of Microsoft Office 98 for the Mac: $1,259.85
Copies of WebObjects, QuickTime Pro, Apple Works 6, and FileMaker Pro 5: $1,047.94
A 2GB internal Iomega Jaz Drive, a Jaz USB adapter, and two three-packs of 2GB Jaz disks: $1,029.80
One Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera: $789.95
An Epson Stylus Color 900G printer and ten ink cartridges: $769.95
A Palm Vx with MacPac, a Palm V travel kit, and 45 replacement styluses: $680.20
Eight AC power adapters: $552
Eight copies of Quake III Arena: $400
A Handspring Visor Deluxe with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf module: $278.95
90 feet of USB cable: $240
A Logitech QuickCam Pro USB video camera: $129.95
A Newton Message Pad 120, an Apple Lisa keyboard with a missing V key, and an Apple Lisa mouse, all bought on eBay at their latest top bids: $90.94
That leaves you with $19 and change–just enough to buy a copy of Gil Amelio’s On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple from Amazon.com. Shipping and handling included, of course.
