applenomics

Items Inadvertently Left Off Apple’s Shopping List

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers the keynote address at the Apple 2012 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Moscone West on June 11, 2012 in San Francisco, California.
Make it rain, Mr. Cook. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Andrew Ross Sorkin is calling for Apple to spend some of its massive $117 billion cash pile on, among other things, Sprint, RIM, Twitter, and mobile-payment doohickey Square.

That’s all fine and good, but as Sorkin notes, even a spending binge like that would leave Apple CEO Tim Cook about $20 billion to play around with.

Here’s how the tech giant should spend the rest of that money:

$2 million: Create two dozen fake iPhone 5 prototypes, place strategically in bars around Gizmodo’s headquarters just to mess with them

$1 million: Send lifetime supply of gift baskets to Mike Daisey, with notes that say, “Thanks for diverting attention from our supply chain to your habit of making shit up.”

$7 million: Erect digital billboard outside Steve Ballmer’s house showing the market cap differential between Apple and Microsoft

$3 billion: R&D for army of robot lawyers who can work 24-hour days devising new tax-avoidance schemes

$500 million: Global PR campaign to alert world to wage hikes at Foxconn factory

$990 million: Global PR counter-campaign to cover up fact that Foxconn wage hikes will be paid in RIM shares

$1.5 billion: Scrooge McDuck–style employee swimming pool filled with gold doubloons

$1 billion: New iPhone 5 feature that releases 200-volt shock every time owner says YOLO

$10 billion: Buy Greece, turn into austerity-themed amusement park

$2 billion: Find amber-trapped mosquito that bit Steve Jobs in 1998, use DNA remnants to clone him

Apple’s Other Shopping List