Yeah. AAPL could have been a huge win for anyone. I actually did pretty well but nothing like the step level function that investing a bit earlier or bigger could have been. And there was also a bit of a drop when a lot of people could have doubled down but got out. But there's a lot of luck involved. (And I've since diversified most of it to money managers and taken the tax benefits.)
In the case of APPL it is fun to think about what the money I spent on a computer that year like a Power Mac G4 could have been worth today if I had invested in the stock instead.
I remember local developer group chats about BTC / ETH in early 2010s. We met weekly next to local restaurant bar. I like to calculate what if I had skipped a meal or a drink one night and instead bought BTC or ETH with the that money what it would be worth today.
I tried to buy 20,000 BTC in 2010 for $20. But this predates exchanges and sellers wouldn't take paypal (because reversals), so you had to use sketchy online pay services. Too much effort/risk.
You know what the reality is though? As soon as those coins were worth $500, $1000, definitely by $5000, I would have sold them all. Really any sane person would have.
When bitcoin was really cheap, purchasing was sketchy. And, as you say, any sane person would have dumped--and hopefully not been ripped off--as soon as the price climbed to a material level. It's not like you could just log onto your Fidelity account and buy and sell bitcoin. I know someone that, as I recall, their initial bitcoin purchase was almost like an in-person drug deal sort of thing.
Some AAPL bets were pretty good ones. BTC seems more like a real gamble. Though obviously back in self-mining days even if it seems not much different from SETI at Home. And your hard disk would probably have crashed at some point. Or you would probably have been ripped off.
Money you almost made hurts equally as much as money you had and then lost. (That's Munger. In my opinion big money you almost made hurts more than big money lost.)
Apple wasn't doing so great in 2000. Its "PC" market share was ~2%. Jobs had just come back a few years earlier and MS made a large investment, but neither the iPod nor OS X had come out yet, so it was quite a turnaround story.
In the earlyish 2000s, Apple started to look interesting as a consumer electronics company even if it wasn't clear they were committed to it. And the whole mobile trend wasn't obvious to a lot of us at that point.
I talked to them as an analyst in that era and they were still spending attention on enterprisey products like Xserve.
And even the initial iPhone in 2007 wasn't clearly a game-changer. It was the 3GS that really made a lot of people take notice.
