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The theory of relativity certainly applies to Apple these days. Relative to the performance of most other technology companies, Apple’s most recent quarter would have to be considered stellar. Name a company that wouldn’t love to trade financials with Apple.

Relative to Apple’s own past performance– stock price, growth, margins, et al– Apple could easily be considered an anemic company. It’s not, of course, but you’d never know it from the blind leading the blind on Wall Street.

What we’re seeing now is the transition of Apple from a high-flying financial performer tearing into new markets with a vengeance, to a kindler, gentler Apple, a company with less bravado and hubris and with a little more maturity. Steve Jobs said, ‘Stay hungry.’ Is Tim Cook a hungry CEO?

By this fall, when Apple rolls out new products, a new version of iOS and OS X, and a new category buster (hinted at but not divulged), the company will be more Tim Cook than Steve Jobs.

Depending on who’s doing the math, Apple’s iPhone and iPad are losing marketshare to the cheap plastic versions carrying the Android bacteria. CEO Tim Cook said not to expect anything new from Apple until fall, but he did use the word category to apply to a new product line. iWatch? iGlasses? iHelmet?

Apple’s financial guidance, always on the conservative side, has not been this conservative for years, and includes the potential for a drop in revenue, year over year. Apple’s profit is declining, too, down year over year. Why? Margins are also down while expenses are up, so the math is basic.

Apple makes much less money on the hot selling iPad mini vs. the iPhone 5. Still, Apple makes so much money that it has been forced to borrow money to buy back stock, and upped the dividend to shareholders.

I ask this. ‘Why bother?‘

Why even bother with a dividend or a stock buyback if the stock stays buried under the hammer of destructive emotions? Apple is in a transition period, moving away from the company Steve Jobs built to a company more in line with Tim Cook’s image. By this time next year Apple will be completely reshaped by Tim Cook.

So far, I don’t like the shape.

Here’s What The Changing Of The Guard At Apple Really Means.

Apple’s stock price is ridiculously low, especially when compared to the company’s financial results. Shareholders are calling for the company to buy back stock while it’s in a depressed state, and to increase the company’s dividends to shareholders.

I have a better idea. The floating dividend.

Tie the dividend to the stock’s price. For example, instead of issuing a $3 per share dividend, issue a $1 per share dividend when the stock price rises back to $500 a share. Then, add another $1 dividend when the stock reaches $600 a share. And, another $1 when AAPL touches $700 per share.

What if the stock drops below the aforementioned thresholds?

No dividend for you!

Legalities aside, the impact would be immediate, albeit somewhat cyclical in nature. Apple could set a maximum and minimum price on the stock. When the maximum is achieved in a given calendar year, a $1 per share dividend would be issued. If the stock drops below a minimum level, no dividend would be issued.

Should annual profit drop below a specific threshold, no dividend would be issued. Likewise, when cash on hand goes above a specific threshold, the dividend amount could be increased.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer has headed the company for about 10 years and the company’s stock price remains mostly flatlined. Yet, Ballmer’s financials over the same time period are quite similar to those of Apple under Tim Cook.

For Ballmer:

Annual revenue at the company has grown 221 percent, to $73.72 billion, and profit has jumped 80 percent, to $16.98 billion.

For Cook (in less than two years):

Annual revenue has grown 45 percent, to $156.51 billion, while profits have jumped 61 percent, to $41.73 billion.

Shareholders and analysts want a company to jump through arbitrarily high hoops. Why not have the shareholders jump through a few hoops to be rewarded with a dividend?

I worry about modern society. When the internet went public barely a generation ago, it was heralded as the information super highway. Well, it’s not. It’s more like a misinformation super highway. The perfect example of how information moves quickly but gets mangled and distorted in the process is anything that resembles news about Apple.

Here’s the problem. Apple is a big company with hundreds of millions of customers, plenty of money in the bank, a cache of innovative and industry-changing products, and that makes it a target for anyone and everyone willing to distort fact or create a fictional replacement.

Why? The who, what, when, where, and why of facts are boring. Fiction and controversy sells newspapers. Alright, newspapers are dying dinosaurs, but yellow journalism is not. It’s alive and well and prospering on the internet where a clever but false headline can spread like wildfire, sufficient to cause a raging river of emotion to overflow, and a high flying stock to tank for no reason.

That’s what’s happened to Apple.

In just the past two years Apple’s stock has gone from riches to rags; once a darling, now a dumpster. How so? The stock market operates on emotion. Information from the internet seems to operate on emotion, too. Apple’s stock has been pummeled by 18 months of negative headlines, few of which are based in fact, most of which are pure rumor, innuendo, and mostly unsubstantiated.

I have friends, some of them who work on Wall Street, and many who own Macs, iPhones, and iPads, and they ask the same questions.

What can Apple do to survive? When will the company get rid of CEO Tim Cook? How did Apple let Samsung become the innovator?

With customers lining up to buy iDevices, and with $150-billion in the bank, Apple’s financials and prospects are the envy of every competitor, yet pundits and so-called journalists say Apple should be more like Samsung if it wants to prosper.

What evidence is there that Apple is beleaguered? The stock price?

Historically, Apple goes through two basic stages of a product’s life. Innovation and iteration. First, a new product hits the streets that is quickly criticized by critics (it’s what they do). Second, customers line up for a few years to buy said products, while Apple iterates each version, carefully polishing and honing the details that make customers love it even more.

The misinformation super highway can be friend or foe, a long stretch of highway where Apple blitzkriegs through an industry, or a parking lot of speed bumps that shakes the Apple vehicle to the core.

Right now, the Apple shine is shaken, but not necessarily stirred. If Tim Cook is a good CEO, he’ll maneuver the company through the speed bumps and back onto the highway. If he doesn’t, Apple will continue to suffer at the hands of those who created the misinformation super highway.

We’ll know which road Apple is on soon enough.

Apple’s stock price has dropped nearly 30-percent the past year which has some Monday morning quarterbacks calling for the head of CEO Tim Cook on a platter. That’s a patently ridiculous notion, of course, because Apple’s financial fundamentals are strong. So strong that any one of Apple’s competitors would be happy to trade their numbers for Cook’s books.

Why does J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz in Barron’s think Apple needs to borrow money?

In our view, we think that Apple could be on the brink of driving a major leveraging up. With the company’s cash pile growing and historically low borrowing rates, we think that investors should start to consider what the expanded cash uses could be if Apple takes on $15 billion, if not $20-25 billion, in unsecured debt in the near to mid term. Given the company’s strong operating profit and cash flow metrics, we would expect Apple’s borrowing rate to be 2.5% to 3.0%, which is much better than paying 25-30% tax on cash repatriation.

That’s a lot of financial gobbledegook for ‘it’s cheaper to borrow money than to pay taxes‘ while trying to repatriate profits.

Recall, 69% of Apple’s cash is held overseas. Overall, we think that a more shareholder-friendly capital allocation program could recast Apple to a wider range of investors… We estimate that the dividend yield in the “New Apple” scenario could increase to 4.0% versus 2.6% currently, and the stock repurchase activity could nearly double from current levels.

The hidden incentive behind the verbiage is ‘stock repurchase’ and hidden behind that is ‘more dividends’ for shareholders.

In other words, Apple has so much money sitting around that shareholders are clamoring to have Apple return some of it, but they recognize the debt penalty that could be incurred, so anticipate that Apple could borrow money to finance operations, and then ‘return money to the shareholders with a smaller penalty.’

There’s an assumption there that Apple must bring home those foreign profits to re-invest, buy stock, return shareholder money, and so on.

How about this? Apple should just sit on it. ‘Return money to the shareholders?‘ Seriously?

It’s not shareholder money. It’s Apple’s money. Shareholders did not give money to Apple. They bought stock in the hopes the stock price would go up. Instead, the past year it’s gone down, hence the growing unrest for Apple to repay shareholders with the company’s profits, even if the company needs to borrow money to do it.

These shareholders are not interested in Apple’s long term well being. They’re interested in a quick return on their investment, and when a stock dives, especially for non-financial reasons, the investment becomes more long term and needs a recovery to eventually reach a gain, and the market just can’t handle the need to be patient.

Maybe Apple should let the stock drop even more and then take the public company private.

Here’s a shocker. Apple needs a low cost iPhone. Here’s another shocker. Apparently, the low cost iPhone is already here and we’re just not paying enough attention to figure it out.

Most of the tech media pundits have been clamoring for Apple to product a lower cost iPhone or cede the bottom of the food and profit chain to Samsung and other Android smartphones. In fact, hardly a day doesn’t go by without a headline about Apple’s upcoming entry-level iPhone.

Does the math really support an iPhone with a lower price tag?

So it would seem if Verizon’s latest smartphone sales numbers are an indication of what’s actually happening in the real world where customers buy products. Verizon sold 4-million iPhones in the most recent quarter, an increase of 25-percent. That’s all well and good, but get this.

The iPhone 5 made up only half of the 4-million units sold, and just over half of all Verizon smartphone sales. That means the other half of the iPhones sold last quarter were iPhone 4, and iPhone 4S– the iPhone models with lower prices. Lower. But not much lower.

An iPhone 5 on Verizon is priced $100 more than an iPhone 4S with a two year contract. The 8GB iPhone 4 model, which is over two years old already, is priced $99 less than an iPhone 4S. As in zero cost.

Spread out over a two year agreement, the iPhone 5 costs just over $8 a month more than the iPhone 4, which, in turn is barely $4 less than the iPhone 4S.

That’s crazy. Apple is selling as many iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S models as iPhone 5 models (on Verizon’s network), though the most recent iPhone is faster, lighter, better in every respect. $8 a month difference between the old model at the low end, and the most recent model at the high end.

That’s barely a trip to Starbucks.

If anything, Verizon’s numbers point out that people either don’t perceive much difference between iPhone models, or even a few dollars a month is a big deal in a bad economy. Judging from those numbers I’m inclined to believe that Apple might game some additional sales with a second tier iPhone.

That seems to work in the U.S. where price is an object. Or, put another way, many smartphone customers would rather have an old iPhone than a new BlackBerry, HTC, Droid, Google, or Samsung smartphone.