Apple - what's in the pie? The shares of any company should seem more and more appealing as their price falls, all else being equal. Yet the opposite generally holds. Apple at $700 a share - back in the halcyon days of September - looked unstoppable. Today, at well under $600, it looks suspect. An imperfect new product or two, a management shake-up, uninspiring margin targets for the upcoming quarter - none of this should matter for a leading company in a growing industry trading at 13 times trailing earnings, and holding $128 a share in net cash. Psychologically, however, the price decline leads inevitably to reflections on what could go wrong. Fine. Let pessimism be indulged if it must. Suppose that, over the next two years, Apple releases no significant new products and its existing portfolio flags. Keeping it simple, say that unit sales of Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads are a fifth lower than in fiscal 2012, the year just ended. Throw in a 10 per cent haircut to unit prices, too. Stipulate only a moderate drop in gross margins (consistent with historical performance at lower unit sales levels), and that Apple cannot quickly bring overhead costs down. Earnings per share under this scenario would drop by about half in 2014, to $22 or so. Looked at one way, this is a very harsh set of assumptions. No new products? No accretive use for all that cash? What is unsettling about it, though, is how very strong the imagined Apple of 2014 looks. It is still selling 100m iPhones a year (a fifth more than it sold in fiscal 2011) for nearly $600 a pop - implying that wireless companies have not tired of subsidising the iPhone heavily. It is still able to sell plenty of laptops for $1,200 and tablet computers for $500 - Moore's law be damned. In short, the worry for Apple investors is that they are overpaying for a company that, a few years hence, may be merely great.