Speaking of AAPL's dizzying free fall, we have a few words to say to those of you who took out second mortgages and sold your in-laws into white slavery to buy every share possible at $140. First of all, come in from off that ledge; leaping to your death with Apple stickers plastered all over your naked body is only going to hurt the company's share price even more (probably), and you'd like your Apple shares to be able to cover your funeral expenses at the very least. Besides, things aren't all that dire. Sure, AAPL's dropped from its all-time high of 150 to its lowest point so far in 2000 (it's currently hovering in the low 80s), but that doesn't mean it's not still a sound investment.

There are a bunch of reasons why we think AAPL's been floundering lately. First of all, the whole tech sector got nuked pretty badly by a number of factors-- the looming prospect of a Microsoft breakup, concerns about interest rate hikes, the nagging suspicion that most dotcoms are in fact just thinly-veiled mob tax shelters, etc. Then there's this whole thing about iMac sales flattening out. Related to that is a recent spate of analyst badmouthing; Donald Young at Paine Webber reiterated his "neutral" rating on AAPL and cut his one-year price target to $100, while Dan Niles at Lehman Brothers also jumped on the "neutral" ship, thus sending AAPL lower even as the rest of the techs were rising.

We don't know how much "casual" trading can affect a stock's price, but we've also heard a number of people say they don't want to buy AAPL now because of the impending stock split in three weeks. Their concern is that they will buy, say, ten shares at $80, and since it's after the May 19th "date of record," they won't get their shares split, but will get stuck with the same ten shares at half their value come June 21st. That's not how it works; any shares you buy now include the right to the split. AAPL Investors has a nice article on how that all works, if you're interested. There also may be a lot of people who are waiting for the split just so AAPL's more "affordable"; we can see that. It's just more satisfying to buy twenty shares instead of ten.

For those of you who know we aren't Apple stockholders and are about to draw unfavorable comparisons between the relative locations of our money and our mouth, well, that's valid. But the fact is we've never bought any stock, and if we did, it'd definitely be AAPL-- especially at these bargain basement prices. Sure, it's not like the $13 a share we saw back in the Scary Times, but if you have any faith at all that Apple will continue to build insanely great computing devices, you just have to look at this $80-a-share price and start hearing that "ka-ching!" in the back of your head. So yes, even we are considering getting in while the getting's good. Consider that fair warning, because if we buy, the future of Apple's stock price will then be determined by whichever is stronger: Apple's inventiveness, or our bad luck.