Why you should have bought Apple stock, not products, seven years ago

What if, in 2001, you had saved the money you spent on a brand new $3,499 Apple Power Macintosh G4 733 and instead invested in stock for its Cupertino, Calif.-based maker?

Engineer and University of California Berkeley student Kyle Conroy set out to answer that very question.

Using prices from EveryMac, Conroy assembled a complete list of every Apple product, along with purchase price and corresponding share value.

With Apple’s stock at an all time high, the possibilities were tantalizing.

“A share today is worth over 40 times its value seven years ago,” Conroy writes.

So how much would you have today if you purchased stock instead of an Apple product?

Here’s a peek at a few popular choices:

• 2006 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro “Core Duo” 2.16 GHz:
  $2,799 retail; $11,207 stock value today
• 1998 Apple iMac G3/233:
  $1,299 retail; $46,413 stock value today
• 1997 Apple PowerBook G3 250:
  $5,700 retail; $330,563 stock value today

The answer to the question at the beginning of this post, by the way? You would be sitting on a cool $110,190.

Check out the exhaustive list on his personal website.