Bits: If You Bought Apple Stock Instead of Products

screenshot via Kyle Conroy A chart shows the cost of Apple products versus today’s stock gains.

Let us pretend for a moment that the year is 1997 and you’re in the market for a new laptop computer. You want the top-of-the-line product at the time, so you opt for the newly released Apple Computer PowerBook G3 250 laptop. This revolutionary piece of technology, which comes with a 250-megahertz processor and a whopping 5 gigabytes of storage, will set you back $5,700.

If you held onto that laptop until today you would probably be able to sell it on eBay for about $50.

Now imagine that instead of buying the Apple PowerBook in 1997, you decided to spend $5,700 on Apple stock. You would have done a little better. Indeed, today your Apple stock would be worth $330,563. Probably makes you think twice buying about that laptop.

Kyle Conroy, a computer science student at University of California, Berkeley, has hundreds of other examples on his personal Web site that show what would have happened if you had decided to purchase Apple stock, which is at around $350 a share Thursday, instead of buying the company’s products when they were announced.

Of course some purchases were more fruitful than others. The iPod Shuffle, which was released in 2008, would have netted you only a $40 profit. But if you go back to 2001 and, instead of paying $400 for the first generation iPod with the now-iconic scroll wheel, and instead decided to buy the company stock, you would have made a profit of over $11,500.

You can see the full list of products sold by Apple and a comparison of stock worth today on Mr. Conroy’s blog.

Now if you had spent $3,500 for Hewlett-Packard stock in 1997 instead of an H-P laptop, you’d have shares worth $4,560.

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