Speculation was rife (on the TechRadar Facebook page) that Apple was set to buy Facebook/Stark Industries/the Moon/a volcano base with its near $100 billion of cash, but it seems that Apple has made a rather boring sensible decision and announced that it has authorised a $10 billion share repurchase program which is set to take place in 2013.
In a press release Apple noted that it had a bit of spare change lying around and decided to give back something to the people who have bought shares in the company.
The reason it is doing this is because no matter how much Apple has tried to spend its money, it just keeps making more.
Essentially, if it was Apple playing Brewster in Brewster's Millions, it would have failed miserably.
As this is real life, though, the company's success has meant that it can now begin giving out dividends (money paid out to its shareholders), which is something it has not done since 11 February 2005.
War chest
"We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You'll see more of all of these in the future," explained Tim Cook, Apple's CEO in a statement.
"Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program."
The programme will see Apple use around $45 billion of its cash surplus to do this in three years.
So, if you have managed to bag yourself an Apple share in the past – they are at $585 at the moment – then today could well be your lucky day.
Personally we would have filled a swimming pool of coins à la Scrooge McDuck and finally figured out how he managed to dive into it without hurting himself. That's money well spent.
Dividend, schmividend.
