“For much of 2012, Apple was the star that everyone wished they owned. It drove the NASDAQ for months since it accounted for about 20% of that index. If you were a large manager of other people’s money you were lagging the averages if you didn’t own it,” Joan Lappin writes for Forbes. “It was an easy place to spend cash because the share price was high. If you bought a 1000 shares, you spent $700,000 at the peak in a simple,easy trade. If you were an Apple devotee who owned an iPod, iPad, iPhone and Mac, then surely you believed its systems were the best ever.”

MacDailyNews Take: We don’t just believe, we know.

“Apple is a serious technology innovator with a series of outstanding products that have changed the computing landscape forever,” Lappin writes. “Think about Dell trying to go private now if you don’t believe me. When Steve Jobs was at the helm, he drove the company’s engineers and designers to bring his visions to life. It’s hard for any company to maintain that momentum when it has grown to be the largest company in the U.S. It simply becomes the law of large numbers.”

Lappin writes, “When a stock becomes a momentum play, it’s not much different than musical chairs… Apple is still selling for only 10 times earnings, a bargain for a company with its record of success. It also pays a dividend now which at 2.4% exceeds the return you can earn on a 10 year Treasury Bond. The same questions remain: what can Apple do as an encore? Can Tim Cook really run the company as a growth company? Does anyone there have the vision thing that was Steve Jobs particular gift?”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: We’ve heard all of the FUD before. Multiple times too many. If only we had nickel for every time we heard, “What can Apple do as an encore?”