What if I had bought Apple stock with every iPhone?

 

My iPhones and my first investment

In July 2010 I paid €629 for an iPhone 4. Suppose I had put another €629 into Apple stock that same day. Today that second €629 would be worth about €28,500.

The last column shows what €629 of Apple stock, bought on the iPhone 4 launch day (89.2 shares), was worth on each later purchase date. Nothing is sold.

iPhone	Dutch launch date	Price (EUR)	Value of first investment (EUR)
iPhone 4 (16 GB)	30 Jul 2010	629*	629
iPhone SE (16 GB)	31 Mar 2016	489	2,135
iPhone 8 (64 GB)	22 Sep 2017	809	2,831
iPhone 12 mini (64 GB)	13 Nov 2020	809	9,003
iPhone 15 Pro (128 GB)	22 Sep 2023	1,229	14,643
Today	11 Nov 2026	–	28,507

The €629 I didn't spend twice

That money bought 89 shares, at about $9 each in today's terms. On 11 November 2026 one share closed at $355.63. That is 45 times my money in sixteen years.

The nice part is what that pot could have paid for. I bought four more iPhones after the iPhone 4: an SE, an 8, a 12 mini and a 15 Pro. Together they cost €3,336. Every time I bought one, the first investment was already worth more than the new phone. By 2023 it could have paid for the iPhone 15 Pro almost twelve times.

So what if I had sold just enough shares to pay for each new phone? Then my €629 would have bought four iPhones for me. And I would still own almost 28 shares, worth about €8,900 today.

I only know this because I look back. In 2010 nobody knew that Apple would become a five-trillion-dollar company. Plenty of companies looked just as strong then and did much worse.

Starting now: the iPhone 18 Pro

What if I start the habit today? The iPhone 18 Pro (256 GB) went on sale in the Netherlands on 18 September 2026 for €1,479. The same amount in Apple stock that day bought about 5 shares at $336.13. On 11 November 2026 those shares are worth about €1,610, roughly 9% up in eight weeks. Nobody can tell me what they will be worth in 2042. A repeat of the last sixteen years (×45) would turn €1,479 into about €66,000. But Apple is now worth over $5 trillion, and 45 times that is more than $230 trillion. So the next sixteen years will almost certainly look different from the last.

Method and sources

Stock prices are daily closes, adjusted for Apple's 7-for-1 split (2014) and 4-for-1 split (2020). Euros are converted with the ECB reference rate of each day. Dividends, fees and taxes are left out. This is a look back, not financial advice.

• Prices: Apple newsroom (iPhone SE), Telecompaper (iPhone 8), TechRadar NL (iPhone 12 mini), EveryMac (iPhone 15 Pro), iPhoned (iPhone 18 Pro), iCulture (iPhone 4 in Europe)
• Stock: Digrin price history, Yahoo Finance, StatMuse (Nov 2020), StockInvest (Sep 2023), Gotrade (Sep 2026), Gotrade (Nov 2026)
• Exchange rates: ECB reference rates, currencyapi ECB history

The Dead Economy Theory - by Owen McGrann - The Palimpsest

Once again a UBI would help a bit but can’t save us. 

The economist Wassily Leontief saw this coming in 1983 when he compared human labor to horses. The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. The horses weren’t retired out of malice. They became uneconomical to keep. Leontief’s point was that there is no economic law preventing the same thing from happening to humans.

From: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

Command line tools to compare PDF files

I recently wanted to compare twp PDF files that seemed to be similar, yet had different file sizes.

After some LLM’ing (is that a word already?) I came to this one-liner that does the trick:

• diff <(pdftotext file1.pdf -) <(pdftotext file2.pdf -)

This gives a text based comparison. 

Alternatively, I can use pdfdiff to make a screenshot of every page and have these compared against each other automatically.

• pdf-diff file1.pdf file2.pdf        

An impression of The Apple Museum in Utrecht.

This is a short photo impression of our recent visit to The Apple Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands 🇳🇱 At €21,50 this isn’t a quick stop but one that you linger over. 🍏 How did Apple get startup capital? The Garage That Changed The World. An Apple || or 2? More apple boxes: I love how cute the Lisa is 😊 I never knew apple made colorful laptops like this, did you? Also didn’t know apple and Bose had crossover products together 🤔. I’m obviously not showing you nearly all the products and experiences on display. Should you fly to Europe to visit this museum? Probably not. Is it worth your money and time while your here anyways? Definitely yes! Museum overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Location: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Price: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (no support for the nationwide “museum jaarkaart” ) unfortunately.

AuRevoir: View and remove notification messages from Apple's "Notification Database"

As recently discussed, even sending messages via Signal won’t stop unwanted snooping because whence messages are received on a Mac, the decrypted messages are stored in the Mac’s memory. 🤯

Yes, that is a crazy stupid design flaw. 

It’s not fixed yet, but this app might help a bit. It allowed you to remove these messages manually: 

AuRevoir: View and remove notification messages from Apple's "Notification Database"

https://github.com/objective-see/AuRevoir

How stupid is your AI of choice?

Just try this little prompt and see how bad/good your AI of choice does:

so i heard there is some question about a car wash that most ai agents get wrong. do you know anything about that? do you do better?

This is what Kagi comes up with: a reasonable sounding but stupid answer:

Yes, I am aware of the "car wash test" that has been challenging for many AI agents. The test typically involves a prompt like: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" 

3

5

Many AI models have struggled with this seemingly simple question, often providing incorrect advice 

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. The core of the problem lies in the AI's difficulty with reasoning about physical scenarios and common sense. While the distance of 50 meters is short enough to walk, some AI models have failed to grasp this implicitly, leading them to suggest driving or providing illogical answers 

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.

This "car wash test" has been used as a benchmark to expose the limitations of current AI in understanding basic logic and real-world contexts 

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. Some tests have shown that only a small percentage of AI models consistently pass this test 

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Regarding whether I do better, I can analyze the situation based on the provided information. Given that the car wash is only 50 meters away, walking is the most logical and practical choice 

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. Driving a car for such a short distance is generally inefficient and unnecessary.

In case future generations who've lost the ability to reason because (due to AI/LLM usage or otherwise) are reading this: the red text is where the mistake is. To wash a car, it needs to be in the car wash. Walking to the car wash makes no sense, no matter how close it is, unless the car is already in the car wash itself. 

Microsoft Free Learning Paths for Top Jobs. Mostly AI related.

The link: 

https://opportunity.linkedin.com/skills-for-in-demand-jobs