Is Apple (AAPL) undervalued? A 5-minute value check (September 2026)

Before price matters at all, check quality. Ten years of Apple's numbers say:

• Return on invested capital: ~58% (FY2025). For every dollar Apple puts to work, it earns 58 cents a year. Great businesses clear 15%; Apple nearly quadruples that.
• Return on assets: ~31%. Same story from another angle.
• Return on equity: ~152%, but read this one carefully: Apple's huge buybacks shrink its equity base, which inflates ROE. That's why you never lean on one metric.
• Growth, 10-year annualized: earnings per share ~12%/yr, revenue ~11%/yr, free cash flow ~8%/yr. Slower than the 2010s, still genuinely strong at this size.

Verdict on quality: this is what a durable competitive advantage looks like in the numbers. On our 0–100 quality score, Apple sits at 87.

One estimate is an opinion; a range is information. Apple's fair value from its FY2025 numbers, then three ways to judge the price:

• Growth-based fair value: ~$163 per share, and a value investor would only buy with a ~50% margin of safety, near $81.
• Owner-earnings yield (would the cash the business throws off pay you 10%?): ~$70.
• Payback-based price (how long until cumulative cash flow returns your purchase price?): ~$97.

The three disagree, which is normal. They are not averaged: a price under any one of them stands on its own, so the buy zone opens at the highest of the three, near $97.

Apple trades at about $327 (September 2026), roughly 35× earnings. That's more than 3× the $97 buy price above.

That does not mean Apple is about to fall. It means that by classic value-investing math, the price already assumes many more years of excellent performance. If those years arrive, today's buyer does fine. If anything wobbles, there's no margin of safety to absorb it. Value investing is mostly about refusing to pay for perfection.

• Wonderful business? Clearly.
• Undervalued? By conservative measures, no, the opposite.
• The useful move: put Apple on a watchlist and wait. The app flags it when the price crosses into its buy zone. Markets occasionally hand you great companies at fair prices. 2020 and 2022 both did. The investors who benefited were the ones already watching.

That's the entire idea behind Wonderfolio: quality scores, fair value and intrinsic value, and a buy / watch / hold / sell zone for every stock you follow, computed for you, on iPhone, iPad & Mac, with an alert when a price finally enters your zone.

New to the method? See how it stacks up against doing it yourself in Wonderfolio vs. your spreadsheet.