Apple across all 7 frameworks

Where the frameworks agree

Five of seven pillars are uncontested across all frameworks. The brand moat is acknowledged by Buffett, Munger, and Smith as the strongest consumer-electronics franchise in history; the iPhone customer renewal rate above 90% functions as a recurring-revenue characteristic even though hardware sales are technically transactional. The balance sheet at $160B+ in cash and $100B+ in net cash is the strongest in mega-cap tech. Cash conversion above 95% places AAPL in the top decile of the S&P 500. The services franchise (App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Pay) compounds at a rate fast enough that even a flat iPhone unit business would not impair the long-term earnings trajectory.

R&D commitment and operational excellence (Fisher pillars) are visible in the multi-year transition off Intel chips onto Apple Silicon, the M-series performance gains, and the disciplined release cadence. The behavioral moat (switching costs from iCloud, FaceTime, AirDrop, the ecosystem) is the textbook Munger mental-model edge.

Where the frameworks diverge

The disagreement sits on valuation. Lynch and Greenblatt produce the lowest scores (68 and 70 respectively). Lynch's GARP discipline requires a PEG comfortably below 1.0; AAPL's PEG sits closer to 1.5 against consensus growth, which is on the borderline of Lynch's acceptable range. Greenblatt's Magic Formula ranks stocks by combined earnings yield and ROIC; AAPL has the ROIC (high 50s percent) but the earnings yield (around 3.5%) is no longer in the top decile of the US universe. Magic Formula passes AAPL on quality but the earnings yield has compressed enough that it no longer ranks highly.

Graham's defensive criteria pass (earnings stability, dividend record, debt service) but the multiple expansion over the trailing 5 years makes AAPL borderline on the traditional Graham margin-of-safety test. Buffett-Fit passes but with a valuation pillar score of 52 (the lowest of the five Buffett pillars). Fisher, Munger, and Smith all weight quality much more heavily than valuation and consequently score AAPL higher.

What the disagreement tells you

When the value-leaning frameworks (Graham, Greenblatt, Lynch) score a stock lower than the quality-leaning frameworks (Smith, Fisher, Munger), the stock is a quality-compounder priced fairly to expensively. AAPL fits this pattern: every framework that prioritises business quality scores high; every framework that prioritises starting valuation scores moderately. The consensus pass on AAPL is not the same shape as the consensus pass on, say, BRK.B (which is cheap and high-quality) or COST (where quality dominates the spread the same way it does for AAPL).

The interpretive takeaway: AAPL is a Grade A stock for the multi-decade compounder, not for the margin-of-safety investor. An investor whose framework weights starting valuation above quality should treat the A grade as a B; an investor whose framework weights quality above valuation should treat the A as solid. This is exactly what the cross-framework spread is designed to surface.