You might remember that on Monday, AAPL stock had a bit of a bad day before rebounding. It wasn’t just a bad day for Apple stock, though: Fueled by fears of a total collapse of the Chinese stock market, the whole S&P 500 collapsed that day.
In the first 24 hours, only Apple rebounded. It’s proof positive of Apple’s fabled “reality distortion field.”
The amazing image above comes from this fantastic map of the Standard & Poor 500, courtesy of Finviz, a site dedicated to financial data visualizations. As it clearly shows, the entire stock market basically crashed on Monday … but Apple was the first company to claw its way back into the black.
Twitter user Andy Cox puts it best:
Talk about a reality distortion field. (via https://t.co/gdZHx4iKjA) pic.twitter.com/EFPSx1b3gJ
— Andy Cox ️ (@InfoVizard) August 24, 2015
We’re not going to do better than that for a quip.
To be fair, a few more companies are back in the green now, but the entire market is still down. Just goes to show exactly how unique Apple is. If this ever happens again? Buy buy buy!
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
6 responses to “Here’s definitive proof of Apple’s legendary reality distortion field”
Are you serious? This has nothing to do with Apple’s RDF. It has everything to do with Apple’s Tim Cook emailing Jim Cramer saying that sales in China are going just fine. If he lied about that, the investor backlash would be huge. But now Tim will face an SEC investigation. RDF my ass. This all based on information that was shared by an Apple executive. It would be RDF if Tim Cook did not say a thing and the stock increased based on Apple’s mystique. This was based on verifiable information (Apple confirmed Tim sent the email to Cramer).
Tim has nothing to worry about. He didn’t actually give any quantifiable information and he only confirmed what anyone following the industry already knew. It’s not like he told Jim exact sales numbers. Nothing will come of this.
It seems someone forgot Apple was actually above $130 a share at one point and almost none of those other stocks took the drop that Apple took over that period of time. Apple didn’t have any BAD quarters after the time it started dropping from $130. Apple should have rebounded because it carries such a crappy low P/E. Apple’s the only tech company whose P/E has shrunk while all the other companies’ P/Es expanded. Apple’s P/E shrunk considerably during that time which means people simply dumped Apple stock as it seems they don’t particularly like the way Tim Cook is running the company. They have no confidence in him. Even if he makes a statement saying Apple is doing OK, the financial geniuses ignore him and immediately dump Apple. A one day chart represents nothing. It’s not like anything in Apple has changed over the last seven months except the growing of fears. Apple has been falling nonstop since February 2015 because of some future fears that almost no one in China will be buying iPhones.
This article is clueless and misinformed – just as the other commenters have expressed. First, the “reality distortion field” was a power unique to Steve Jobs – not Apple in general. Next, AAPL rebounding on Monday had NOTHING to do with RDF – that’s nonsense – and just because someone tweets that doesn’t mean you, John Brownlee, have to parrot that in an equally foolish way. AAPL’s under-valuation and commentary from Tim Cook that day had the effect of buoying the stock. Try thinking on your own sometime, John.
So to clarify your point, are you saying that the RDF had to do with people blindly believing anything that Apple’s leader told them? As opposed to Apple itself not being able to do any wrong?
If I’m understanding that right then technically Apple’s current leader sent an email with positive information in it (not even actual numbers) and the stock automatically shot up. Seems like the RDF is just as strong with Tim if you look at it that way.
Hey Dave, Tim Cook did not need to distort reality on Monday. He just reported on reality by mostly reiterated what he said on the last conference call re: business in China for Apple is doing great. Steve Jobs was the one who could bedazzled an audience during a new product demo – that’s really what the reality distortion field was about…
From wikipedia: “The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs’ ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible. Jobs could also use the RDF to appropriate other’s ideas as his own, sometimes proposing an idea to its originator after dismissing it the week before.[3]”