You're really in love with PEG ratio. I'll tell you why I'm not impressed. Predictions for Apple's growth like any company's growth are affected by investor hype. With Apple and its cult-like investors the hype is insane enough to make these growth predictions wronger than usual. We're also talking about an established company not some midget, you'd have to believe that Apple is going to take over the world to think it still has obscene growth potential.

Tulip mania is the classic example of an economic bubble. Where excessive positive feedback from which optimistic investors can buy with the intention to sell to even more optimistic investors. When you run out of super optimistic investors, the music stops and lots of people are left with an investment that had become unhinged from its intrinsic value. In the 1600's in Holland this happened with tulip bulbs which became somehow valued at many times more than the yearly salary of a working class citizen. Apple's investors are more prone to this because to way too many of them AAPL isn't just another stock. They are fans like you. Pack that kind of optimism into a market's participants and you've got the recipe for a bubble. Even if the shares are only slightly overvalued now, its likely that they eventually will be regardless of the business's actual performance. That's the thing about bubbles is that they don't reveal themselves until they pop--in the meantime people think that 5 years of salary for a tulip bulb is a smoking deal. The dangers of mixing money and emotion is something to think about at least. This is why I never bet on the Packers, its more than an investment to me because I'm always wearing Green and Gold glasses.

I'm not so sure the price will ever come down on any o f it. Since I've had a cellular phone, the price has only gone up. If there was a legit interest in providing the most kickass phones for a lower monthly rate, wouldn't I be able to get a feature phone with GPS/wifi connectivity and the works? I mean that'd be 75% as useful as a phone with a data plan but 50% cheaper. Hope you're right about them going away because right now feature phones have just enough features to be the worst of both worlds. Touch screens are only as good as the software behind them and mine is the worst.

Well even back in the Jaunty days, apt-get could be handled by the synaptic package manager but these days its being slowly changed into "Ubuntu software center" which is essentially a knockoff of the apple app store filled with open source binaries and even some commercial ones. They have a completely new UI packaged with 11.04 instead of classic gnome. Dunno if you'd like it or not but Its certainly evolving much much faster than any other major OS. If it hasn't caught up yet then it will soon and the consumer's choice will boil down to "pay" or "free." The cloud trends that have us doing everything through a browser anyways benefit no OS more than Ubuntu.