Apple Joins The Dividend Club - Finally!

Well, it's official. Apple, stock ticker AAPL, will begin paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share. Although many expected a higher dividend, such as myself, beggars can't be choosers, right? As you can tell from my two prior Apple posts (AAPL - Apple, It's time to pay a dividend & Apple iPhone 4s, iCloud and Siri - It's dividend time!), I thought Apple should spend a large percentage of their cash on hand in the form of dividend payments to their loyal shareholders. With that 90 plus billion dollars in the bank I felt Apple should have paid a gigantic one time dividend. At least $50.00 to $100.00 per share would have been nice and then a quarterly dividend of 3% to 5% ($17.00 to $29.95). It just makes sense!
Apple has doubled 5 times over the last decade and is regularly closing in on $600.00. Apple used to sell for $8.78 back in 1987, $13.53 back in May of 2004, just think if you got in on this puppy back then! Don't beat yourself up too much. AAPL still has plenty of room left to grow and could very well perform a stock split. I do not believe in pumping stocks so their share prices become unrealistic, but AAPL could hit $1,000 per share over the next 3-5 years if they continue to product innovative, useful products.
Feel free to watch these hand picked videos below from YouTube which discuss this very topic. Long live Apple!