Stocks · 20-year review

AAPL vs. MSFT: who wins in 20 years?

Two of the most dominant tech companies of the last two decades, one $10,000 starting line. The gap between them is bigger than most people expect.

$10,000 in Apple on August 29, 2006 would have grown to $1,346,510 by August 28, 2026 — a 13,365.1% return. The same $10,000 in Microsoft over the identical 20 years would have grown to $198,735 — a 1,887.4% return. Both are extraordinary outcomes for a single stock, but Apple’s is roughly 6.8 times larger.

	Starting price	Ending price	20-yr return
AAPL	$2.37	$319.70	+13,365.1%
MSFT	$25.84	$513.53	+1,887.4%

(Both starting prices are split-adjusted — Apple has split its stock four times and Microsoft nine times since 2006, so these figures reflect what an equivalent single share was worth at the time, not the sticker price on a brokerage screen back then.)

Two very different 20-year stories

In 2006, Apple was mostly a computer company that had just launched the iPod a few years earlier — the iPhone didn’t exist yet. Its 20-year run was driven by turning that single 2007 product launch into the center of a mobile ecosystem that eventually made it the most valuable company in the world. Microsoft’s path was steadier: a mature, diversified software giant that reinvented itself around cloud computing (Azure) and enterprise software over the same stretch, without a single product moment as dramatic as the iPhone.

Both created enormous wealth for long-term holders. The size of the gap between them mostly comes down to timing: Apple’s transformation from a niche computer maker into a phone company happened to occur right at the start of this 20-year window, so nearly the entire iPhone-era growth curve is captured in this comparison.

Past performance isn’t a preview

Both companies are now among the largest in the world, which makes repeating a 13,000% or even a 1,800% run over the next 20 years mathematically much harder — there’s simply less room left to grow at that scale. A comparison like this says a lot about the past two decades of consumer tech and enterprise software; it says very little about which large tech company will outperform over the next twenty.

Try your own comparison

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Figures shown reflect historical closing prices only and exclude dividends, fees, taxes, and reinvestment. Past performance does not guarantee future results. This article is for educational purposes only and is not personalized financial or investment advice.