What If You Had Invested in Apple 10 Years Ago?

AAPL: all at once or every month?

Take $12,000: all of it on day one, or $1,000 a month for a year. Across every starting month since 1985 (491 of them), the lump sum was ahead after 12 months in 344 (70%). The lump sum usually won, but roughly one start in 3 favored spreading it out. The best case for monthly investing was a start in August 2000, when it finished the year 187% ahead.

Worst drop

AAPL's worst fall in this history was -79.7%, a near wipe-out, from February 1992 to December 1997. Getting back to the old high took until August 1999: 20 months from the bottom and 7.5 years from the peak. $1,000 invested at that peak shrank to about $203 at the low.

Apple dividends

AAPL paid $1.06 per share over the last 12 months, quarterly. At $344.17 that is 0.31%, a small yield; nearly all of the return has come from the price. From 2020 to 2025 the yearly payout grew +5.0% a year, steadily. The yearly total did not fall once in the last ten years. Amounts are adjusted for splits.

Yield = each year’s dividends divided by the price at the end of the year.

AAPL dividend history: last 12 payments

Stock splits

• June 1987: 2-for-1
• June 2000: 2-for-1
• February 2005: 2-for-1
• June 2014: 7-for-1
• August 2020: 4-for-1

One share bought before 1987 is 224 shares today.

About Apple

Apple's stock history is really three stories. The first is the 1980s and 1990s, when it was a struggling computer maker and nearly went under in 1997. The second starts with the iPod and then the iPhone in 2007, which turned it into the most profitable consumer company in the world. The third, since about 2013, is a cash machine returning money through dividends and very large share buybacks.

Because Apple has split its stock five times (2-for-1 in 1987, 2000 and 2005, 7-for-1 in 2014 and 4-for-1 in 2020), one share bought before 1987 is now 224 shares. Old share prices you see quoted online are not comparable to today's without that adjustment. Everything here is split-adjusted.

Apple paid a dividend from 1987 to 1995, stopped, and restarted in 2012. Its yield is small because the share price has grown much faster than the payout, so almost all of Apple's return has come from the price.

Buybacks did a lot of the work

Since 2013 Apple has spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying back its own shares, cutting the number of shares outstanding by more than a third. Each remaining share owns a bigger slice of the company, so earnings per share grew faster than the business itself. That is a large part of why the stock kept rising even in years when iPhone sales were flat.

Where the money comes from

The iPhone still brings in about half of Apple's revenue. The fastest-growing part is services: the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, AppleCare and payments, which carry much higher profit margins than hardware. Investors increasingly value Apple on how well it can keep growing that services business from its installed base of more than two billion active devices.

Questions about AAPL

How much would $10,000 invested in AAPL 20 years ago be worth today?

About $1,255,408 with dividends reinvested, invested at the November 2006 close: 12454.1% in total, or 27.3% a year.

When does AAPL pay dividends?

In the last 12 months the payments went out in February, May, August and November, $1.06 per share in total.

Did AAPL beat the S&P 500?

Yes. Over the last 20 years it was ahead by 16.7 percentage points a year: +27.3% a year for AAPL against +10.6% for SPY, dividends reinvested. It also fell harder at its worst (-79.7% against -50.8% for SPY over the same history).