What if I bought Apple stock instead?

This little tool is something I threw together after realising that it was 20 years since I bought my first iPod, it was a 40GB iPod and cost about £300¹ at the time if I recall correctly. The thought occurred to me, “what if I had invested that £300 in shares in Apple instead of buying that iPod?” The result² is this tool:

What if instead of buying that Apple product in 2004 you had bought stock in the company instead? Enter the price you paid in 2004 for the product you bought to see how much money the stock would be worth in 2024:

Cost of product in 2004

Amount of shares you’d have today

Value of those shares today

How is this calculated? Using approximate data from historical stock prices sources such as Yahoo Finance and Digrin.

In October 2004 the cost of 1x Apple share was approximately $60
In October 2024 the cost of 1x Apple share is approximately $231
The cost of the product entered is divided by the 2004 amount to give us a number of shares, this is rounded down to get a whole number of shares for simplicity
The stock split three times between 2004 and 2024, 2:1 in 2005, 7:1 in 2014 and 4:1 in 2020, so the amount of stocks is adjusted based on these splits to get the total amount for today.

This converts to approximately $540USD at the exchange rate of that time, the cost of the 40GB iPod was about $400USD (+ taxes) at that time. ↩︎
The result is this slightly depressing thought exercise! 🤦🏻‍♂️ I’ve used USD at it was easier to get historical share prices in USD, but you get the idea. ↩︎

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