What would you do with $50 billion?

And now for reason #610 for me to hate all things rumor and speculation.  A Macworld editor has decided that he was going to start a rumor about Apple buying Facebook.  The reason for his wild speculation; Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg had lunch and Apple is sitting on 50 billion dollars with no place to spend it.

http://www.macworld.com/article/154995/2010/10/appleearnigns.html

While a wild rumor and speculation like this is nothing new for the internet what bothers me is it's lack of imagination.  Seriously people, Apple is buying Facebook?????  It's an obvious attempt to smash 2 big names into one editorial to bump up a google search.  This editor apparently forgot that Apple is a hardware company.  They leave the internet entrepreneurship to others.  Whenever Apple has gone into "non-hardware" business it's always been to support a hardware product of theirs (itunes was started to support the ipods).

But the concept of Apple sitting on $50 billion and no idea where to spend it did fascinate me.  I'm sure Apple has plenty of good ideas what they can do with that money but in case they don't let me offer up a couple of serious suggestions that relate to your hardware product line.

1. Can you guys buy Hulu.com and work it into Apple TV.  Connecting the Internet to the TV is a great idea and Apple TV is a good piece of hardware to do it but it's lacking good content to draw upon.  Much of the content it can draw from is utter crap (admit it, 95% of all youtube is crap) or subscription based (Netflix and iTunes).  What it needs is real TV content that hulu.com can offer.
2. Buy Skype and integrate it fully to the iPhone.  People are already doing it by unlocking their iPhones so you might as well make it official and make it work.  At the minimum you'd be able to get the iPhone out from under AT&T.
3. Spend it on more R&D.  Apple is always on the leading edge of the tech industry and needs to stay there.  I've always said that if PC uses want to know what they will be using in 2 years they should look at what Mac users are doing now.  I'd love to see all Macs (desktop and laptop) come with touch-screens, get rid of the spinning hard drives and go all solid state flash drives, and a wireless connection between the car stereo and the iPod would be friggin awesome.