If you had bought AAPL in 2026 with $10,000...

Apple Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, and one of the most valuable public companies in the world. Its revenue is concentrated in hardware - the iPhone above all, alongside Mac, iPad, Watch and AirPods - with a large and faster-growing services business covering the App Store, iCloud, advertising and subscriptions. The shares trade on Nasdaq under AAPL and are a member of both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, which means they appear inside the index scenarios on this site as well as on their own. Apple pays a quarterly dividend, so a price-only comparison like the one here understates the total return an actual shareholder would have received.

Apple was founded in 1976 and went public in December 1980. Its modern history begins with Steve Jobs's return in 1997, followed by the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the App Store in 2008 - the sequence that turned a computer maker into the centre of mobile computing. It became the first US company valued at one trillion dollars in 2018 and passed two trillion in 2020. Two stock splits matter for reading any long-run chart: seven-for-one in June 2014 and four-for-one in August 2020. A pre-2014 price quoted without adjustment is not comparable to today's; the series used here is the provider's, and the methodology page explains what that does and does not account for.

Apple is the default answer to 'which stock should I have bought'. The useful part of running the numbers is not the headline multiple but the comparison with the S&P 500 shown alongside it - it separates the part of the return that was Apple from the part that was simply being invested in the US market at all.