AAPL IPO'd in 1980, when there were 1M personal computers in the world. Total.[1] The tech sector was just tiny compared to what it is today, and nobody predicted the WWW or the ubiquity of web-capable devices.

By contrast, when FB IPO'd it had 845M users[2], or 8.3% of the world's population. The two simply aren't comparable. AAPL made niche luxury products, and FB had something close to half the potential market engaged on a daily basis.

[1] http://www.corbinball.com/articles_technology/index.cfm?fuse...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering_of_Face...

Every time one of Apple's products sold it resulted in cash transferring over to Apple. They had a viable, proven business model selling computers to business, consumers, and educational institutions, were leaders of a new industry that everyone agreed had a huge amount of growth ahead of it. Nobody thought that PCs would continue to be a niche product throughout the 1980s.

Facebook owned, and owns, only a tiny slice of the advertising market, despite being so far along in developing their product. Remember, facebook's users and attention is their product. Their customer-base - companies who want to advertise is still underdeveloped.

This is an excellent point. Sure, Facebook has the biggest audience, but somehow I only ever see a few companies in my ad rotation.

But your argument can easily be used against Facebook. When you're IPOing at that late of a stage, all the gains have already gone to the private market investors. Facebook will have to come with drastic new revenue models to justify its valuation, and very few companies have reached a $100 billion valuation, let alone grown from there. And again, even if it does continue to grow financially, most of the gains have already been made. There are VCs who have made this point to lower Sarbox requirements so companies can go public earlier. I believe Ben Horowitz made a blog post on the topic, but I could not quickly find the link.