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The Apple $2T Economy
- oblio 3y ago[flagged]
- translucyd 3y ago2% of the world’s GDP? Holy s#!%.
- nine_k 3y agoBut $2T is market capitalization, not yearly sales. This mostly means that AAPL is seen as a safe asset to park large amounts of (fiat) money.
- kyruzic 3y agoAt least read the article before commenting. It's talking about the total transactional value of the app store. Not apples market cap.
- nl 3y agoWhile the comment you are replying to is wrong, this comment is also incorrect. > this data includes payments which are not captured by Apple directly. In the words of the authors, “More than 90% of this figure originated from transactions that did not happen through the App Store, meaning that these amounts accrued solely to developers and other third parties, and that Apple collected no commission on them.”
- tracerbulletx 3y agoThe article is about an estimation of the total volume of transactions going through apps on the app store, both in the app store and outside of the app store direct to the app publisher. It's currently at 1.1 trillion, they're projecting given the growth rate it could be 2 trillion in 2 years. That is the figure being discussed.
- eucjejcjwjf 3y agoMarket cap has absolutely nothing to do with the article and the (fiat) take i ungrounded.
- candiddevmike 3y agoBreak them up, way past the point of too big
- Someone 3y agoFTA: “More than 90% of this figure originated from transactions that did not happen through the App Store, meaning that these amounts accrued solely to developers and other third parties, and that Apple collected no commission on them.”
- nl 3y agoFrom the article: > this data includes payments which are not captured by Apple directly. In the words of the authors, “More than 90% of this figure originated from transactions that did not happen through the App Store, meaning that these amounts accrued solely to developers and other third parties, and that Apple collected no commission on them.”
- _Parfait_ 3y agoReactionary and meaningless. Break it up into what?
- folmar 3y agoPhones, computers, software, consumer electronics, digital services, marketplace.
- HFguy 3y agoWhy this is right? You just responded with a list of their product lines?
- folmar 3y agoEach of those can be reasonably separated. But I do think that it is quite natural and will stop the digital dictator mindset, most importantly splitting of digital services from marketplace and both of those from hardware. Notably they seem to view their product lines quite different, the website lists "Store Mac iPad iPhone Watch Vision AirPods TV & Home Entertainment Accessories".
- creer 3y agoAnd the Visa system US$6.8 trillion in 2014 says wikipedia 9 yrs ago as opposed to yrs from now for Apple, and China's UnionPay still more, etc, etc. Sure these are big numbers and Apple's are not particularly crazy. And like market cap they don't have much to do with much else.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mr_toad 3y agoComparing revenue to GDP is stupid.
- thfuran 3y agoWhy?
- mr_toad 3y agoBecause it’s just bad math. It uses the wrong denominator. You may as well compare it to the bank balance of Bill Gates. If you add up the revenue of every company it will far exceed 100% of GDP, making the comparison meaningless. It’s been pointed out again and again. Any financial analyst should know this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- oflannabhra 3y agoHorace is one of the better thinkers regarding Apple’s business. He consistently ranks relatively high amongst the independent analysts at predicting Apple’s quarterly earnings, although to be honest I don’t put much stock in that. He did a lot of analysis to determine how many active devices Apple had in the world before Apple even started reporting those figures. He was one of the only analysts who understood Apple’s position and scale, as well as some of the internal culture that helped explain a lot of their seemingly abstruse decision making. Recently he got really focused on “micro-mobility” (ie, Bird/Lime scooters, etc) which hasn’t really been as earthshaking as he predicted, but he’s been mostly proven right about Apple. It’s unreal to see the scope of Tim Cook’s Apple (or the iPhone Apple if you prefer).
- brailsafe 3y ago> Recently he got really focused on “micro-mobility” (ie, Bird/Lime scooters, etc) which hasn’t really been as earthshaking as he predicted, but he’s been mostly proven right about Apple. What was his prediction? Seems like that's only increasing in popularity as people realize cars are like the most absurdly wasteful, lazy, and/or excessive methods of transportation imaginable for most daily activities, but it would depend on where you are and what your real requirements are.
- oflannabhra 3y agoI think he is mostly correct that small, cheap, easy transportation can revolutionize urban centers in a variety of ways. I think he has been relatively bullish on the companies, and they haven’t exactly panned out, from a business perspective.
- brailsafe 3y agoAh, that makes sense. They did have a moment, but seem to have fizzled out.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
- seydor 3y agoPaypal transacted 1.3T in 2022. Paypal's market cap is 69B, apple 2960B
- megablast 3y agoThat is all paypal does. Apple does a couple of other things.
- voz_ 3y agoThis is a non point?
- redleather 3y agoAre you saying the amount of transactions processed should dictate market value?
- seydor 3y agopointing out how little it matters to apple
- adventured 3y agoGiven the context, you would then want to look at value extraction. How much is each entity extracting from the suggested economy in terms of income. PayPal operating income: $4 billion Apple operating income: $114 billion And of course PayPal is a skimmer, somewhat similar to Visa, so their extraction is miniscule compared to the transaction base. Apple carves out a fat profit from their ecosystem by comparison. Maybe PayPal is beaten down here and their stock is relatively cheap as a value play. Or maybe they're about to be destroyed as the US switches to a European style, low cost insta money moving system courtesy of FedNow, and the market is pricing it accordingly. PayPal better diversify in a hurry, the transaction skimming business isn't going to be so nice in the future.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoBut this is a bit of a risk, isn't it? It means that there is a huge margin in anyone who could disintermediate Apple, and an incentive for other parties to encourage that. And clear evidence of some kind of monopoly rent -- how are they sustaining a ~30% margin when PayPal's is a fraction of a percent, unless they have a monopoly that should be subject to antitrust action?
- 0xDEF 3y agoWe Europeans need to wake up. Big tech companies in the US (and soon China) are practically robbing us at this point. The neoliberal dogma that tariffs and trade barriers are bad is economical suicide for Europe.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwaway-blaze 3y agoWhat Europe needs is a reform of whatever it is that is stopping European startups from competing. It took Apple 40+ years to get where they are; they're _were_ European companies competing with them.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoThis assumes a level playing field. Yet Apple was born into a largely monolingual market, with one currency, almost no regulation (for better and worse), a mostly continuous land mass with porous borders (among the states), and grew in a young field with mostly small competitors (IBM and Microsoft being exceptions). And Apple still nearly went bankrupt. With iPhone and Mac they control critical choke points in a crowded market, where all the choke points are now taken by large and powerful incumbents. Europe cannot deregulate it's way into success. In fact I'd say asleep-at-the wheel regulators and anti-trust are what got us into the mess of few real choices and luxury taxes for mediocre offerings.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWith more regulation we'd simply have much worse devices. Apple was born in a country with a lot of free-flowing capital available and incentives to succeed, and they've navigated it extremely well. Of course with big ideas comes the strong chance of failure, but that's why you need to be wary about overtaxing success. If you don't let people succeed when they make something really good, nothing good will get made.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoThe fact that Apple is even allowed to charge more than 100% markup is one of those tell tales signs of "you might be living in a suboptimal society when".
- robertlagrant 3y agoSuboptimal compared to what optimal society?
- lsmeducation 3y agoA spiritual one.
- robertlagrant 3y agoCan you give an example?
- lsmeducation 3y agoSaudi Arabia
- robertlagrant 3y agoSaudi Arabia is a more optimal society? By what measures?
- lsmeducation 3y agoBy Allah’s measure. Jesus Christ, it was a joke. Are you sitting there refreshing for responses?
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Are you sitting there refreshing for responses? No, I just saw it at random. You replied 3 minutes after my response; far sooner than I replied to you.
- jongjong 3y agoCrazy how big Apple has become. Yet I haven't bought or voluntarily used a single one of their products in the last 5 years. Interestingly though, as a developer, I was forced to use Apple laptops at 2 of the last companies I worked at. I feel it creeping into my personal space. I have some resentment against the company as a result. It's better than Windows but I'm less productive with it than on Linux. It may even have (in a small way) contributed to me losing my job in my last company due to various UX gotchas I could never get used to and lost motivation (I'm a developer so all the small things add up).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoI wouldn't develop for their platform but I do like the products. I have far more concerns about Microsoft (products developed for the enterprise and government) and Google (services developed for the advertiser) than Apple. My only concern is whether their push into services ends up corrupting the core products. If so I'll deal with that when it happens.
- galenmarchetti 3y agoCrazy to think when they started, their product was a chipboard. You had to put the video monitor on yourself. What has gotten them huge, and sustained them throughout the years, was a series of products that really look nothing like their first. Or their second. Just a continual evolution against a vision, which I think has been pretty consistent. Worth putting modern, small startups today in that context...you never know what they'll evolve to become beyond their first, second, even third products
- MatthiasPortzel 3y agoThe original report reads like it was heavily influenced by Apple's marketing team. There are asides that are just ad copy for Apple's other products, for example, > Users can find thousands of apps on the App Store to help them adopt healthier lifestyles. Many of these apps take advantage of Apple’s HealthKit API, which allows the use of sophisticated sensors on iPhone and Apple Watch, while ensuring that user data is safe according to Apple’s rigorous privacy and data security protocols. The actual 1.1T number comes mostly (81%) from goods and services purchases (mostly retail) made in mobile apps on Apple devices. The methodology? > We estimate the share of each app category’s sales that occur via mobile apps, within each geography, using information collected from marketing surveys or data on usage patterns. Finally, we apportion usage to Apple platforms based on the overall iOS share market share. So it's an estimate; not hard data. I don't want to discount the conclusion, because it's always difficult to understand Apple from outside the company, and the point really is just that people make a lot of purchases on Apple devices. (Conflict of interest: I'm an Apple shareholder.)
- ksec 3y ago>The original report reads like it was heavily influenced by Apple's marketing team. When you read enough over Apple's marketing and PR over the years. You can easily detect them. Not saying all marketing are bad, but I would be cautious simply because of that.
- EPWN3D 3y agoI hate to break it to you, but virtually everything at this scale is an estimate based on models and not direct data. We don't e.g. get more reliable GDP numbers because we get hard data; we get it by creating new models that recognize and/or emphasize variables which were previously being ignored. The reason to be skeptical here is not because "it's an estimate"; it's because it's one group's model, studying a very nascent space for which there's been very little academic research. What this estimate shows is that this is a clearly very large economy that isn't being rigorously modeled or studied right now. And we should probably devote some resources to that since what happens in this economy will meaningfully contribute to employment and national GDPs.
- smfugit 3y agoAnd Apple has basically said the 150-200 billion in cash that has accumulated, parked in tax havens, selling their veblen goods, they cant find a single thing on the planet worth investing it in. So its just growing like a nice fat pointless tumor. Think about that for 2 seconds. What does it mean? It shows us in 2023, corporate robots can design a highly optimized runaway process of cash extraction from the chimp troupe, for no reason other than it being possible. There is no purpose to these processes. When a corporate robot finds a scaling rule it keeps scaling. Scale always needs purpose. Otherwise we end up like Apple. And only fools think the Apple story of mindless scaling is going well or going to end well.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoApple and their dragons horde of cash was a prime subject in what I thought was a really excellent article, Intellectual Property and the Fissured Economy. Horded IP had created insurmountable moats around these titans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37169236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37169236 https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/05/intellectual-property-and-the-fissured-economy/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/05/intellectual-prop...
- unmole 3y ago> Think about that for 2 seconds. What does it mean? Apple makes stuff that people want and are willing to pay for.
- hardware2win 3y ago>It’s nice to think that Apple could soon be about 2% of the world Id say thats scary
- firecall 3y agoYes, I’m not sure nice is the word I’d use. I’m just glad it’s Apple and not some other company…. I guess :-/