10 ms·
Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this, I like to put things in units of aircraft carriers. The US Navy's last finished carrier co
by ykl 12y ago
Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this, I like to put things in units of aircraft carriers. The US Navy's last finished carrier cost $6.2 billion[1], meaning that $74.6 billion[2] is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers, a.k.a. a nuclear carrier fleet larger than that of the US Navy.
Of course this is an inaccurate and very silly comparison[3], but at least for me it does give some sense of scale. That is a preposterous number of iPhones.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_George_H.W._Bush_(CVN-77) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_George_H.W._Bush_(CVN-77)
[2] Yes, I know that number is revenue and not profit. As long as I'm making a silly mental comparison though, why not have more fun by using the bigger number?
[3] Maintaining/staffing carriers is astronomically expensive, $74.6 billion is actually only enough for 12 empty carrier-shaped hunks of steel.
- jacquesm 12y agoBuying aircraft carriers is the easy part. Maintaining and staffing them is the hard part but it's a nice unit to use right next to libraries of congress and stationwagons full of tapes.
- baddox 12y agoI'd say that getting away with building a huge navy would be the hard part.
- jacquesm 12y agoKorea will be happy to supply the steel bits, the rest is going to be a lot harder. Brings the snowcrash world a little closer though. Apple vs Microsoft round #3 would be interesting.
- redler 12y agoPerhaps even Samsung Heavy Industries, until Apple gets around to vertically integrating that part of its supply chain.
- deeviant 12y agoAh, but you forget. An apple super carrier would be extremely user friendly. It could probably be crewed with 10 hipsters and a few Apple geniuses.
- korzun 12y ago> Meaning that $74.6 billion[2] is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers You can't buy a single operational carrier for that price.
- ykl 12y agoOf course you can't actually get an operational navy, you'll just have 12 empty carrier shaped hunks of steel. Hence why I noted that it's a silly comparison.
- korzun 12y agoYou went from a nuclear carrier to carrier shaped hulks of steel really fast.
- Dylan16807 12y agoDo you mean that they're not for sale, which is obvious, or are you saying the true price is different? How different?
- jacquesm 12y agoHe means that money alone won't get you an operational carrier.
- Dylan16807 12y agoAre you sure that's what he means? I'm pretty amused at the contrast between your comment and ykl's, who has elaborated on korzun in terms of money alone.
- ykl 12y agoThat number does not include things like airplanes and people and supplies that you need to actually make a carrier useful.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
- Cookingboy 12y agoEven their profit is enough for 3 Nimitz class super carriers. Then they can REALLY sink their competitions ;)
- bertil 12y agoTheir competition is Samsung. Something tells me the whole large ships argument is lost on Korean chaebols.
- mcphage 12y ago> the whole large ships argument is lost on Korean chaebols Especially when Samsung just built the world's largest: http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-largest-ship-ever-built-first-floating-liquefied-natural-gas-flng-platform-begin-drilling-2017/23119 http://www.industrytap.com/worlds-largest-ship-ever-built-fi... :-)
- numbsafari 12y agoHeh, funny that Apple would be forced to hire Samsung to build their carrier given where they are forced to source their processors.
- sinwave 12y agowait - are they actually building aircraft carriers??
- jsmthrowaway 12y agoI prefer multiples of the Apollo program when discussing Apple's finances. In 1973, NASA reported to Congress that the entire Apollo program cost $25.4 billion ($131.4 billion in 2013). It's useful when quantifying Apple's cash on hand, which is currently > 1x Apollo. With the quarterly revenue, they could probably reenact Apollo 11, since each launch was ~$350 million pre-inflation. If you're only doing one, a lot cheaper.
- avar 12y agoIt's really hard to quantify NASA & military spending though, a lot of that money was already spent by the military on ICBM research, which coincided nicely with trying to send people to space. To get an accurate number you'd have to take the amount that the US was spending on ICBMs, and ever more accurately how much the Third Reich was spending on research for the V2s etc. After all the US military & NASA benefited immensely from Wernher von Braun and other German scientists that delivered Nazi rocket research to them after WWII.
- marvin 12y agoThe argument gets a little shaky once you count effort that far back; after all, almost all of our efficiency today is due to advancements that earlier humans have done. Computers, engineering, technology, economics, science, printing, writing, fire, language.
- ido 12y agoAnd a lot of that research Apple will not have to do in this hypothetical situation - how much of that cost was manufacturing and how much was r&d that only needs to be done once?
- mrb 12y ago"Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this..." Personally I like to divide profits and revenues by the number of employees. They have 98 000 employees so they generated revenues of $761 000 and net profits of $184 000 per employee in Q4 2014. Think about this: if you work for Apple, on average you helped the company generate $0.76 million dollars in sales in the last 3 months. Edit: @smackfu: I do not think it is weird to consider these metrics. They show what Apple, as a business entity taking its own decisions, manage to extract from their suppliers (expenses) and customers (revenues).
- smackfu 12y agoIt's a weird metric, because 1 guy at Apple can hire a firm of 100,000 employees at FoxConn in China to do the actual work for Apple. If those employees instead worked for Apple directly, the end result would be the same but the amount per employee would be far less.
- davidiach 12y agoAnd FoxConn can of course hire millions of other people to do the actual work for them (mine the materials needed for the products, prepare them, ship them and so on).
- sosborn 12y agoIf you include FoxConn employees do you also include FoxConn revenue from Apple?
- gutnor 12y agoIsn't that similar to the way the productivity (the economic metric) is measured though ?
- TTPrograms 12y agoThat's surprisingly reasonable. The rule of thumb I've heard is only half of employee expenses is salary, so that gives you an average "effective" salary of $90,000 for Apple employees.
- T-zex 12y agoIt is very impressive when compared to the $9 billion budget of the LHC [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
- downandout 12y agoPicture it this way: Net income of $18 billion over 12 weeks. That's $1.5 billion in net profit per week. $214 million per day. Absolutely mind blowing.
- sokoloff 12y ago13 weeks
- richcuteguy34 12y agoSince we're talking about silly comparisons, if you combined all the iPads into one giant unit it would be quite a bit bigger than Central Park: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november22014/index.html http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november22014/index.html
- rsp1984 12y agoYes, 74.6 billion is their revenue for the quarter but it's also about their profit (extrapolated) for a year! :)
- mchanson 12y agoMore than 1% of the population of Earth bought an iPhone last quarter. 7.125 billion people 74.5 million iphones 74,500,000 / 7,125,000,000 = 1.05%
- Diederich 12y agoAnd consider The Monster: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT+Key+Statistics http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT+Key+Statistics Just shy of half a trillion dollars in yearly revenue, which generated 15.4 billion in profit. That's $1.3B revenue per day, or $55M revenue per hour, $920K/minute. A million dollars of revenue, every minute. Compared to nominal GDP, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is larger than Taiwan, Austria and Thailand. Granted, that's revenue, which is 'easy' compared to profits! How can we not start looking at some of these organizations less as companies, and more as countries?
- mehrdada 12y ago> How can we not start looking at some of these organizations less as companies, and more as countries? Because they are not. Similarities start and end right there.
- Diederich 12y agoYou are, of course, correct, I was obviously getting a bit carried away with hyperbole. My deeper point is one of size. At some point, these companies start doing country-like things, at country-like scales. In this particular example, I'm talking about activities that start to look like something you might called "Intelligence", and "counter-Intelligence", just as an example.
- chiph 12y agoThe Walmart sporting goods department is probably better armed than some countries..
- Jach 12y ago> How can we not start looking at some of these organizations less as companies, and more as countries? How about the reverse? Countries as companies? And why don't we look at how large, complex companies can do so much better financially than governments?
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
- MaysonL 12y agoJust think of it as 9.4 iPhones per second.
- TaylorAlexander 12y agoOr to flip it around, an iPhone every 106 milliSeconds.
- clord 12y agoOk this did it for me. That's incredible. It's almost into the audible spectrum. That means they're churning them out at something like that rate too. And then realize that not too long ago any one of those iphones would have been the most powerful computer on earth. Seems like a waste of effort? Why are we making smartphones with all of those resources? We could be doing something... less repetitious.
- sliverstorm 12y agoBecause the resource cost of this incredibly powerful computer is lower than ever. That little sliver of silicon has more MFLOPS than 10 entire Cray-1 supercomputers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Mistake_not 12y agoI apologize, I'm going to do that crass thing about high-jacking the top response. >Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath That's the name, but it didn't fit (oh, and Elron loves the Culture, he's actually a SC agent, but I digress). Apple has currently ~$170 billion in cash / structured investments through its hedge fund. This says three things: 1) Apple is very successful 2) Apple has massive tax issues it's trying to dodge 3) Apple has no clue what to do with itself beyond making toys 4) It now has a >>cash<< base that's larger than ~top 20 blue chip companies Unless you're going to pull a Bond Movie[1], there's only one rational outcome to this: When the bubble is that big, and you can't even invest your profits / shareholder dividends / know what to do with it: Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. Apple won the battle of the 20th Century tech fashion: it lost the war in that it didn't know how to evolve. And no, darlings, a shiny building doesn't count. Capitalism, literally, forgot how to invest: even Google threw $10 to Musk. Apple has... done nothing with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEJ8lpCQbyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEJ8lpCQbyw [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_%28film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_%28film%29
- trhway 12y ago>is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers, a.k.a. a nuclear carrier fleet larger than that of the US Navy. this is why i'm sure that even in the case of military conflict between China and US, the container ships will continue bringing iPhones from Foxconn factories in China into US stores :)
- Shivetya 12y agoWhen it comes to realizing what a billion dollars is like, i always fall back on a streamer who recently used notepad to demonstrate a billion dollars. Some not safe for work language but it really explains the sheer immenseness of this value. Let alone the fact there are streamers who have received tens of thousands of dollars. In this case there really is a very rich person in the middle east who has given tens of thousands to streamers. http://youtu.be/0J6BQDKiYyM http://youtu.be/0J6BQDKiYyM
- patrickk 12y agoThat's an exceptional visualisation!
- jsprogrammer 12y agoI think that might be a very misleading way to think about it. Sure, maybe Apple could buy 12 nuclear carriers (Although I think inflation may have changed that number a bit. [Also, your $6.2 billion figure is apparently sourced from Fox News[1][2][3], which (of course) doesn't cite a direct source for that claim, only an author credit to Associated Press[4]]), but assuming they did, all they have is 12 huge hunks of metal that they need to store somewhere. Oh, were you thinking of a fleet of operational carriers that can deploy world-wide dozens of the most highly armed and agile vehicles within 14 days? Maybe you were just thinking of putting those carriers out on display in the southern bay? I don't know, maybe. But, if you were thinking about the (apparent) price paid for what the US actually bought (what your numbers are supposedly based on), you need to include the ongoing costs for operating and maintaining such a fleet. According to your sources (Wikipedia), the US Navy had a $171.x billion budget in 2010[5][6][7][8] (according to the same source, this is now $147.69 billion for 2015). I zoomed around the infographic more and found that Operations & Maintenance run $40.xxx billion this year. Sure, you can drop it down some to get rid of the non-carrier vessel maintenance, but this is the limit of the graphics breakdown of the budget. There's another $3x.xxx billion in there (pan north a bit) for "personnel" costs. We'll be generous and say that[$7x.xxx billion]'s an upper limit on the annual cost to run the carriers as you are likely imaging. If Apple keeps it up, they will be able to pay for the first year's costs before next quarter's earnings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_George_H.W._Bush_(CVN-77)#cite_note-FoxCommissioned-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_George_H.W._Bush_(CVN-77)#c... [2] http://www.webcitation.org/6DBeItQye http://www.webcitation.org/6DBeItQye [3] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/01/10/aircraft-carrier-named-uss-george-hw-bush-commissioned/ http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/01/10/aircraft-carrier-nam... [4] http://www.ap.org http://www.ap.org [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#cite_note-20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#cite... [6] http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/ [7] http://www.timeplots.com/ http://www.timeplots.com/ [8] http://www.timeplots.com/collections/catalog/products/death-and-taxes-poster-2015-preorder http://www.timeplots.com/collections/catalog/products/death-...
- zhte415 12y agoTo get recursive, don't forget to subtract the profit of sales of iPhone chargers now increasingly installed on modern military vessels.
- rgejman 12y agoDid AppleInsider rip off your numbers? http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/28/by-the-numbers-apples-ludicrous-fourth-quarter http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/28/by-the-numbers-app...