11 ms·

Their numbers seem utterly unreal to me. How on earth do you sell $205 billion worth of just a single product (iPhone) every year? This is simply the greatest

by spaceman_2020 4y ago

Their numbers seem utterly unreal to me. How on earth do you sell $205 billion worth of just a single product (iPhone) every year? This is simply the greatest business to have ever been created. I can't imagine anything else ever topping it. The margins AND the volume are both insane.

capableweb 4y ago
I don't know if the number comes anywhere near the truth, but if for the sake of the idea imagine that the average iPhone costs $750 USD then $205 billion USD worth of iPhones is around 273,000,000 units. That means there is about 750,000 iPhones sold every day, or 31,250 iPhones sold every hour.
- stereoradonc 4y ago
  Upvoted only for your mathematical skills :-)
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Which is around 8-9 iPhones per second.
- asiachick 4y ago
  Imagine the environmental impact 31250 phones a hour must cause. All the material that went into them had to be mined, transported, smelted, carried to a factory, assembled, then sent to 1000s of locations by 1000s of vehicles. Of course it's the same for all physical products.
duped 4y ago
Almost every adult in the developed world needs a smart phone. They replace these devices about every 2-3 years. Apple makes one of the best in class of these devices, and has successfully designed one such that it's hard to switch to a competitor (rather it's easier to stay in the ecosystem). They've convinced about a billion people on the planet that the iPhone is the best device for them, so if you split that into about 300 million re-ups into the ecosystem each year you're talking about where their revenue is. I say this as a happy iOS user. I replaced my phone of three years about a month ago. Took a day to get it through my carrier and it immediately restored from backup with minimal data loss, despite not having access to the old device. That ease of use and confidence I won't lose data is worth the premium.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  iPhones make money, but services make more. The App Store alone made over 80 billion dollars in estimated revenue last year, just by existing. That's without accounting for Apple One, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade, AppleTV Plus, or iCloud. Apple simply makes $80 billion annually for writing a payment processor everyone else has to use. Services are one thing, but playing both the gatekeeper and competitor to a number of corporations is not a sustainable business model. Apple needs to double-down on their hardware dominance and leave the software distribution to software writers. All their other services can stay, Apple users can drown in AppleTV+ shows for all I care. The App Store is a fundamental de-facto monopoly on software distribution and (as we've seen with Spotify) service development. That quite literally cannot be the status quo going forward.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - prepend 4y ago
    > The App Store is a fundamental de-facto monopoly on software distribution and (as we've seen with Spotify) service development. This would be true if Android didn’t exist. But it does, so apple isn’t. What would be funny is if Google stops developing android, since it’s lot lucrative, so they can sue under antitrust to improve their ad business that apple keeps hampering.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > This would be true if Android didn’t exist. But it does, so apple isn’t. This would be true if iOS and the App Store weren't separate entities. But they are, so it isn't. If Google stops contributing to the AOSP, they would not be able to sue under antitrust because Android still exists.
      - prepend 4y ago
        I don’t think Android would retain much market power, especially in the US and Europe, if Google stopped backing it.
billforsternz 4y ago
> ... I can't imagine anything else ever topping it ... In 2500 (say) this will probably seem like a very funny statement (because some amazing developments we can barely imagine will surely come along and be monetized to an extent we can also barely imagine). Either that or you're right which would be very bad news for humanity (think the great filter).
- billforsternz 4y ago
  For the record, I was very surprised to get a downvote for this. I think it's very common, more or less universal actually, to forget that we are only alive for a tiny slice of human history - and it's basically absurd to imagine that things that happen right now will remain uniquely important for all of future time. Basically this is flawed thinking, like those fallacies that people routinely debunk here. Of course one way that this thinking might not actually be flawed is if it turns out there's not too much future time (for the human race). And my comment covered that too, more elegantly than I'm doing here.
rcpt 4y ago
I feel like oil companies are somehow hiding it. Oil is absolutely everywhere from transportation to shipping to energy to packaging to building materials. I simply can't believe that Apples revenue is larger than some of the biggest oil companies
- jesuscript 4y ago
  It’s hidden in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and UAE.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > I simply can't believe that Apples revenue is larger than some of the biggest oil companies Then this might blow your mind even more: In 2017, at a market cap of more than $2.1 trillion, Apple's market capitalization is larger than 96% of country GDPs, a list that includes Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Russia. In fact, only seven countries in the world have a higher GDP than Apple's market cap.
  - KoftaBob 4y ago
    GDP is essentially the total yearly revenue of a country, so it's not directly comparable to a companies market cap.
    - pembrook 4y ago
      GDP isn’t the total revenue of a country, total tax receipts are. If you think of the German government as a business, they generate roughly 2X the revenue of Apple, but with 5 million employees vs. Apple’s 150k. Of course, the German government doesn’t optimize for growth and expansion like a company does (at least…not yet in this century… nervous laugh)
civilized 4y ago
It turns out that making a great product is hard, even with billions of spare cash and an army of LeetCode experts, I mean, extremely talented engineers. Just look at that Meta VR game thingy. What's it called again?
matwood 4y ago
Toyota volume with Ferrari margins. The iPhone will go down as one of the single greatest products ever.
pb7 4y ago
Because they're exceptionally good products that are beloved by everyone except the average Hacker News user. :-) There is an incredible bubble here that doesn't reflect the world.
- AB1908 4y ago
  The more interesting part to me is that this isn't even the majority of the smartphones sold globally. The smartphone industry is humongous.
- jerojero 4y ago
  I would like to use iPhones, they have really good cameras and very good video-recording capabilities. But sadly a lot of the apps I use are not available in the app store. To me, this is a deal breaker. Hardware-wise the product is good, but I'm not just taking pictures and chatting on snapchat. I do a bit more with my phone. For my mom, however, the phone is great and does everything she expects it to do.
  - roguesherlock 4y ago
    This is interesting cause it’s exactly the opposite for me. I’ve pixel 6a right next to me but my sim is still on my iPhone cause I just can’t find the apps I want on the android :)
    - ece 4y ago
      Apple is free to bring the App Store to Android, while Google can't do the same.
  - criddell 4y ago
    I agree with you - it's all about the software. For example, I bought an iPad for GoodNotes and Procreate. Both are killer apps and I've really grown to love the iPad.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
I find it more depressing than anything else. The amount of those sales that was actually needed instead of upgraded for vanity is quite small. Imagine all the wasted resources and e waste so someone can have a different model number that is one higher for their phone, so they can feel better than their friends and spend more time looking at their phone. Our largest company is based on profiting from human greed and self-esteem issues. Doesn’t speak highly for us.
- soderfoo 4y ago
  Well put, really catches the uneasy sentiment I feel reading consumerism threads like this. It seems large enterprises conveniently downplay the Reduce and Reuse tenets of the 3R reduce, reuse, recycle mantra. All this vanity and waste at such a great cost, for what? IG, tiktok, memes? I'm guilty of it myself at times, but I try to repair and repurpose as much as possible. I think we are better than this. The time and energy of so many brilliant minds (here on HN, present company included) is squandered. A bit off topic, apologies. Hopefully I can direct this energy to being more focused and finding clarity.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Status seeking is a fundamental motivation for people and catering to it has always been a source of wealth. In the past it was gold, silver, gems, ivory, beaver pelts, or purple dye. Now at least it's a device that performs a function.
  - asdff 4y ago
    On the other hand if you had a hunk of gold, in 20 or 200 years that's still a valuable hunk of gold. Buying an iPhone for the status symbol is like buying a hunk of gold, and every six months you chisel off a huge chunk of it and lob it into the ocean to simulate depreciation on technology.
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      It's more like a potlatch thing (an America Indian status ceremony where people destroy or give away things to prove how wealthy they are) Spending money on perishable items is a power move in the status game.
bane 4y ago
Even more interesting, they make this money without even being the majority platform.
_hypx 4y ago
Every new stage of technology development does this. People marveled at the wealth that oil created. Steam engines and coal stunned people by how much stuff they could carrier or quantities of steel they could make. Hell, even hunter-gatherer societies were amazed by the huge populations and cities that agriculture provided. Any future technology will be equally unbelievable, and I daresay even more profitable than what Apple is achieving.
anshumankmr 4y ago
Also, it has AirPods which sell like crazy. It has some hit shows like Ted Lasso so I guess people paid for AppleTV. Also, it has the crazy commission it charges for app purchases, people also like Apple Music. And it probably has a decent chunk of money from ads as well.

capableweb 4y ago

I don't know if the number comes anywhere near the truth, but if for the sake of the idea imagine that the average iPhone costs $750 USD then $205 billion USD worth of iPhones is around 273,000,000 units. That means there is about 750,000 iPhones sold every day, or 31,250 iPhones sold every hour.

stereoradonc 4y ago
Upvoted only for your mathematical skills :-)
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Which is around 8-9 iPhones per second.
asiachick 4y ago
Imagine the environmental impact 31250 phones a hour must cause. All the material that went into them had to be mined, transported, smelted, carried to a factory, assembled, then sent to 1000s of locations by 1000s of vehicles. Of course it's the same for all physical products.

duped 4y ago

Almost every adult in the developed world needs a smart phone. They replace these devices about every 2-3 years. Apple makes one of the best in class of these devices, and has successfully designed one such that it's hard to switch to a competitor (rather it's easier to stay in the ecosystem). They've convinced about a billion people on the planet that the iPhone is the best device for them, so if you split that into about 300 million re-ups into the ecosystem each year you're talking about where their revenue is. I say this as a happy iOS user. I replaced my phone of three years about a month ago. Took a day to get it through my carrier and it immediately restored from backup with minimal data loss, despite not having access to the old device. That ease of use and confidence I won't lose data is worth the premium.

smoldesu 4y ago
iPhones make money, but services make more. The App Store alone made over 80 billion dollars in estimated revenue last year, just by existing. That's without accounting for Apple One, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade, AppleTV Plus, or iCloud. Apple simply makes $80 billion annually for writing a payment processor everyone else has to use. Services are one thing, but playing both the gatekeeper and competitor to a number of corporations is not a sustainable business model. Apple needs to double-down on their hardware dominance and leave the software distribution to software writers. All their other services can stay, Apple users can drown in AppleTV+ shows for all I care. The App Store is a fundamental de-facto monopoly on software distribution and (as we've seen with Spotify) service development. That quite literally cannot be the status quo going forward.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- prepend 4y ago
  > The App Store is a fundamental de-facto monopoly on software distribution and (as we've seen with Spotify) service development. This would be true if Android didn’t exist. But it does, so apple isn’t. What would be funny is if Google stops developing android, since it’s lot lucrative, so they can sue under antitrust to improve their ad business that apple keeps hampering.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > This would be true if Android didn’t exist. But it does, so apple isn’t. This would be true if iOS and the App Store weren't separate entities. But they are, so it isn't. If Google stops contributing to the AOSP, they would not be able to sue under antitrust because Android still exists.
    - prepend 4y ago
      I don’t think Android would retain much market power, especially in the US and Europe, if Google stopped backing it.

billforsternz 4y ago

> ... I can't imagine anything else ever topping it ... In 2500 (say) this will probably seem like a very funny statement (because some amazing developments we can barely imagine will surely come along and be monetized to an extent we can also barely imagine). Either that or you're right which would be very bad news for humanity (think the great filter).

billforsternz 4y ago
For the record, I was very surprised to get a downvote for this. I think it's very common, more or less universal actually, to forget that we are only alive for a tiny slice of human history - and it's basically absurd to imagine that things that happen right now will remain uniquely important for all of future time. Basically this is flawed thinking, like those fallacies that people routinely debunk here. Of course one way that this thinking might not actually be flawed is if it turns out there's not too much future time (for the human race). And my comment covered that too, more elegantly than I'm doing here.

rcpt 4y ago

I feel like oil companies are somehow hiding it. Oil is absolutely everywhere from transportation to shipping to energy to packaging to building materials. I simply can't believe that Apples revenue is larger than some of the biggest oil companies

jesuscript 4y ago
It’s hidden in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and UAE.
andsoitis 4y ago
> I simply can't believe that Apples revenue is larger than some of the biggest oil companies Then this might blow your mind even more: In 2017, at a market cap of more than $2.1 trillion, Apple's market capitalization is larger than 96% of country GDPs, a list that includes Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Russia. In fact, only seven countries in the world have a higher GDP than Apple's market cap.
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  GDP is essentially the total yearly revenue of a country, so it's not directly comparable to a companies market cap.
  - pembrook 4y ago
    GDP isn’t the total revenue of a country, total tax receipts are. If you think of the German government as a business, they generate roughly 2X the revenue of Apple, but with 5 million employees vs. Apple’s 150k. Of course, the German government doesn’t optimize for growth and expansion like a company does (at least…not yet in this century… nervous laugh)

civilized 4y ago

It turns out that making a great product is hard, even with billions of spare cash and an army of LeetCode experts, I mean, extremely talented engineers. Just look at that Meta VR game thingy. What's it called again?

matwood 4y ago

Toyota volume with Ferrari margins. The iPhone will go down as one of the single greatest products ever.

pb7 4y ago

Because they're exceptionally good products that are beloved by everyone except the average Hacker News user. :-) There is an incredible bubble here that doesn't reflect the world.

AB1908 4y ago
The more interesting part to me is that this isn't even the majority of the smartphones sold globally. The smartphone industry is humongous.
jerojero 4y ago
I would like to use iPhones, they have really good cameras and very good video-recording capabilities. But sadly a lot of the apps I use are not available in the app store. To me, this is a deal breaker. Hardware-wise the product is good, but I'm not just taking pictures and chatting on snapchat. I do a bit more with my phone. For my mom, however, the phone is great and does everything she expects it to do.
- roguesherlock 4y ago
  This is interesting cause it’s exactly the opposite for me. I’ve pixel 6a right next to me but my sim is still on my iPhone cause I just can’t find the apps I want on the android :)
  - ece 4y ago
    Apple is free to bring the App Store to Android, while Google can't do the same.
- criddell 4y ago
  I agree with you - it's all about the software. For example, I bought an iPad for GoodNotes and Procreate. Both are killer apps and I've really grown to love the iPad.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

I find it more depressing than anything else. The amount of those sales that was actually needed instead of upgraded for vanity is quite small. Imagine all the wasted resources and e waste so someone can have a different model number that is one higher for their phone, so they can feel better than their friends and spend more time looking at their phone. Our largest company is based on profiting from human greed and self-esteem issues. Doesn’t speak highly for us.

soderfoo 4y ago
Well put, really catches the uneasy sentiment I feel reading consumerism threads like this. It seems large enterprises conveniently downplay the Reduce and Reuse tenets of the 3R reduce, reuse, recycle mantra. All this vanity and waste at such a great cost, for what? IG, tiktok, memes? I'm guilty of it myself at times, but I try to repair and repurpose as much as possible. I think we are better than this. The time and energy of so many brilliant minds (here on HN, present company included) is squandered. A bit off topic, apologies. Hopefully I can direct this energy to being more focused and finding clarity.
seti0Cha 4y ago
Status seeking is a fundamental motivation for people and catering to it has always been a source of wealth. In the past it was gold, silver, gems, ivory, beaver pelts, or purple dye. Now at least it's a device that performs a function.
- asdff 4y ago
  On the other hand if you had a hunk of gold, in 20 or 200 years that's still a valuable hunk of gold. Buying an iPhone for the status symbol is like buying a hunk of gold, and every six months you chisel off a huge chunk of it and lob it into the ocean to simulate depreciation on technology.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    It's more like a potlatch thing (an America Indian status ceremony where people destroy or give away things to prove how wealthy they are) Spending money on perishable items is a power move in the status game.

bane 4y ago

Even more interesting, they make this money without even being the majority platform.

_hypx 4y ago

Every new stage of technology development does this. People marveled at the wealth that oil created. Steam engines and coal stunned people by how much stuff they could carrier or quantities of steel they could make. Hell, even hunter-gatherer societies were amazed by the huge populations and cities that agriculture provided. Any future technology will be equally unbelievable, and I daresay even more profitable than what Apple is achieving.

anshumankmr 4y ago

Also, it has AirPods which sell like crazy. It has some hit shows like Ted Lasso so I guess people paid for AppleTV. Also, it has the crazy commission it charges for app purchases, people also like Apple Music. And it probably has a decent chunk of money from ads as well.