The App Store is almost 9 years old. In that time it has generated about $100 billion in revenues, of which about $70 billion has been passed on to developers and $30 billion was kept by Apple. It’s very likely that running the App Store for 9 years did not cost $30 billion so, if … Continue reading “App Story”
Predicting Apple’s yearly revenues has been fairly easy. The following graph shows the relationship between budgeted spending on Machinery, Equipment, Internal-use software, Land & Buildings and the shipment of iOS device revenues. The company conveniently publishes a full-year forecast of these expenditures every fiscal year so by October we know roughly how sales will be during the … Continue reading “Predictably Profitable, Unpredictably Valuable”
The last quarter of 2016 was Apple’s biggest ever. $78.4 billion in revenues. 78.3 million iPhones. Both records. Earnings of $3.361 and cash reached new highs. The growth was modest but Services is now not just the second largest revenue but also the fastest growing, on track to doubling in four years. The reason for … Continue reading “Predicting The Second Quarter”
In its first 10 years, the iPhone will have sold at least 1.2 billion units,1 making it the most successful product of all time. The iPhone also enabled the iOS empire which includes the iPod touch, the iPad, the Apple Watch and Apple TV whose combined total unit sales will reach 1.75 billion units over 10 years. This total … Continue reading “The First Trillion Dollars is Always the Hardest”
At WWDC 2016 Apple offered a set of new data points to illustrate its ecosystem’s robustness. First, the number of registered developers increased by 2 million in the last year to a total of 13 million. That is a growth rate of 18%. To compare this total consider that Oracle claimed in 2014 9 million … Continue reading “State of the Ecosystem”
We consider the landscape that Apple’s purported Titan project will address in a few years time. Horace discusses the pattern of disruption powered by Moore’s law. We turn to the transportation sector and consider the “reimagining” of the car. We further consider scenarios, from sustaining where the current players grow, to new entrant opportunities. … Continue reading “Asymcar #27”
When exactly did enterprises become late adopters of technology? We know that they were some of the first buyers of computers. IBM sold tabulating and later computing machines to businesses starting in the 1910s. During the 1980s it was businesses which bought PCs in significant numbers to augment, and later replace, their centralized computing resources. … Continue reading “Fluid Coupling”
During the last quarterly earnings call, Tim Cook said that Apple has seen the highest switching rate from Android ever. That there is switching isn’t surprising. We’ve seen many surveys which show higher loyalty with iOS than with Android. But it’s been very hard to spot the evidence in the data which is visible publicly. … Continue reading “The new switchers”
At the 2015 WWDC Apple stated that it receives 5 billion requests per week for its maps service. It also said that Apple maps is used 3.5 times more frequently than “the next leading maps app.” These two data points are the total number of data points we have about the global maps market. Neither Google nor … Continue reading “Where are Maps going?”
Unicorns typically are valued on the basis of number of users. While they are not yet monetizing those users, their growth and engagement metrics are expected to be off the charts. As there are no revenues (or profits) the $billion valuation hinges on a nominal value of $/user. That figure is based on comparable companies (e.g. Facebook) which … Continue reading “Unicornia”
