It makes sense to want to save money on entertainment even in the best of times. The concept of “cutting the cord” resulted from all those regular increases in the price of cable and satellite TV. Of course, having 300 channels and nothing to watch was no incentive to continue to pay.

In 2007, when Netflix first offered the option to steam movies and TV shows, things began to change. Even though the early offerings consisted of older product, it wasn’t long before Netflix began to invest in original programming, such as “House of Cards,” and demonstrate it could beat traditional entertainment companies at their own game.

Netflix helped pave the way towards other streaming services, and it wasn’t long before you had Hulu, and even Amazon’s Prime Video, which was offered as a perk for Prime members. There were even streaming versions of HBO and Showtime, and nowadays entrants include Disney+, Apple TV+ and many others.

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I’m writing this on the cusp of Apple’s four-for-one stock price split.It’ll mean, in a practical way,  that you will be able to buy a share of stock for 25% of the former price and thus with 25% of the former value. Practically, it’s main value is to make it more affordable for regular people. After all, how many of you can easily buy a company’s stock at more than $500 a pop?

Now, here’s an official definition for market cap: “Market cap — or market capitalization — refers to the total value of all a company’s shares of stock. It is calculated by multiplying the price of a stock by its total number of outstanding shares. For example, a company with 20 million shares selling at $50 a share would have a market cap of $1 billion.”

As you can see, it’s a very artificial rating, based on the vagaries of the stock market and not on a company’s actual finances, although big companies ought to do better. But there’s also a level of hype involved; it’s based on perceptions as much as reality, so some companies might find themselves valued way behind their worth.

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While Apple makes a huge deal of customer privacy and adherence to environmental standards, it may be, in part, a marketing ploy. After all, Apple is in business to make profits and add value to its stockholders. It is, after all, a mutational corporate powerhouse.

So after CEO Tim Cook delivered testimony to a sometimes-contentious hearing at the U.S. House of Representatives on July 29, developers began to speak out about policies that they felt were restrictive. It didn’t help that some internal email exchanges were revealed that revealed discussions about raising Apple’s cut of App Store revenue from 30% to 40%. A scandal! Or maybe not. After all, where are the emails about discussions on the part of Google and other companies that might have impacted the fees they charge? Did anyone bother to look for them? And if they did, where are they?

Besides, it’s not wrong for a company to look at different financial setups for products or services, even if some seem a little too greedy.

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When you look at the price of mainstream TV sets nowadays, they are remarkably cheap compared to the way things used to be. You see, when I was real young, the family TV was a major purchase.

So I’ve owned far too many TV sets over the years to remember them all. Shortly after I left home to seek my fortune at age 21, my mom bought me a Zenith 21-inch black-and-white set. Although color sets were becoming available in those days, they weren’t worth the extra price, since much TV fare hadn’t switched to color. At least not yet.

Apropos of nothing, that famous super hero show of the 1950s, ‘The Adventures of Superman,” filmed the final group of episodes in color. Evidently someone was clever enough to realize this might mean something someday.

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