http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21564942

Long term for the company, is what he wants a bit of a bollocks?

What he wants is for Apple to shove a big chunk of money his way for doing feck all. Everything else is just piss and distraction. I fail to see how this can be good for the company.

Will this become something of a test of 'maximising shareholder income'?

This is only about getting higher dividends and nothing more. Most Hedge funds have had an atrocious few years and I think many last year lost significant amounts of money and many closed up because they could not meet investors expectations.

If I buy shares in a company it is for 2 reasons:-

1) I'm hoping the share price goes up
2) If the company does well they pay out a dividend to the shareholders.

All this guy has done is ask for a dividend payout - Apple's excuse that it needs $137bn in cash for future buyouts is just a smokescreen. No company needs that amount of cash lying around doing nothing.

Surely having a huge cash pile will increase the share price? I get you can only benifit from that if you sell the shares.

They are already paying dividends. They will be paying their third dividend this month. What this man wants is even more, which is not unreasonable considering that Apple have probably plateaued in terms of size, so really should be paying a dividend appropriate in terms of a mature company. The creation of preferred shares would offer higher dividends but not as much capital gains, as they are protected investors. The problem for Apple is that in order to pay out a higher dividend they either borrow the money to pay it, or repatriate profits from offshore and pay additional taxes on that.

Apple have had a massive pile of cash for quite some time. Some investors are getting a bit skittish that they aren't doing anything with it.

It's patently obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that is Apple is building up a reserve to deal with what happens when the iDevice bubble bursts (as you'd have to assume it will at some point) - they need enough money to keep the company afloat while they (hopefully for them) find 'the next big thing', which may take several years. It's the kind of long term, prudent thinking the stock markets of the western world have shown themselves largely incapable of in the last decade or so.

I fully agree that they have to think longer term than the stock markets are capable of doing. Also some of that cash is available for potential takeovers or aiding the supply chain. If a supplier needs assistance they can pre pay for a years supply of chips or whatever at a great price which helps the supplier with planning its production for efficiency. While extra dividend payments make a lot of sense especially now that the company is so large, 50% annual growth is going be impossible before too long.

People invest in companies and their "reward" is the dividends that get paid out regularly to reward them.

Over the years, that has changed, people trade shares more often and for some, they just look at the share price. Selling shares, you are cashing in on your investment and giving the rights to the rewards for the investment onto the buyer.

My grandparents had invested for income. With Apple shares, the only way to "live" off of the shares would have been to regularly sell a bunch of them. With the portfolio they had, they could live comfortably off of the dividends.

I agree. The problem is that the tax benefits of capital gains in most countries means that dividends get taxed far more heavily than capital gains. So many companies paid no dividends to maximise growth prospects but minimal income. This has lead to a short term market with sole emphasis on short term capital gains. Years ago dividends were what people wanted and capital gains were a bonus.

Apple paid a dividend of $2.65 per share in January costing them around $2.5Bn so hardly a dent in their $137Bn pile of cash.