Apple paid $10 billion to developers in calendar 2014. Additional statistics for the App store are: $500 million spent on iOS apps in first week of January 2015 Billings for apps increased 50% in 2014 Cumulative developer revenues were $25 billion (making 2014 revenues 40% of all app sales since store opened in 2008) 627,000 jobs … Continue reading “Bigger than Hollywood”
As corporate romances go, IBM and Apple’s must rank among the most unexpected. As I wrote on the date they changed their Facebook status, the two companies were antagonists for the better part of twenty years and their rapprochement was met with a shrug mostly because yet more decades passed since. Nostalgia aside, this new union is profoundly … Continue reading “Biggest news of 2014”
This year’s Thanksgiving and Black Friday data from IBM shows a continuing pattern of growth for mobile devices. As the graph below shows, in the five years since 2010 mobile devices grew from 5% of the online shopping traffic to 50%. Traditional computing (desktop and laptop) made up the difference. The graph also shows that sales value via … Continue reading “Retail in 2020”
I tried to assess the opportunity of Apple Pay but found it to be mostly dependent on how quickly card payments will overtake cash. It seems that as payments move to a digital format they will move to a mobile device. The hurdle isn’t going from a card to a phone but from cash to … Continue reading “Yet another billion dollar business”
Apple has declared that what used to be “Other Music Related Products and Services”1 plus “Software, Service and Other Sales”2 which was formerly known as “iTunes/Software/Services”3 is about to become “Services”. “We’ll also have a category that we refer to as services and this will encompass everything we report under the heading of iTunes software and services today including … Continue reading “How big is iCloud?”
In Q3 2014 Apple’s revenues were 5.3% higher than the upper end of their guidance. This is the highest error in guidance since the new range-bound reporting regime started two years ago. The following graph shows the guidances given since 2005 and the actual revenues. The error (as a percent of upper guidance) is given in the … Continue reading “One billion sold”
The bank robber Willie Sutton did not say, when asked why he robbed banks, “because that’s where the money is.” He did agree with the idea however saying “Go where the money is…and go there often”. Regardless of it being apocryphal, this idea came to be called Sutton’s Law and is often taught to medical students. It’s similar … Continue reading “Going where the money is”
My thanks to Eric Jackson for his thought-out questions on Apple. As published in Forbes, here is his Interview With Horace Dediu: What To Expect When Apples Expecting. A few excerpts: Q: Do you expect to see a sapphire cover on the new iPhone(s)? Is that material significant? I expect Sapphire will become a signature feature … Continue reading “Interview With Horace Dediu: What To Expect When Apple’s Expecting”
Amazon’s recent disputes with publishers (Hachette and Disney) shows a degree of market power that is closer to monopsony than to monopoly but this power is nevertheless real. It may not not be something that requires intervention, regulation or even scrutiny but market power is evident in both how companies operate and in how they … Continue reading “Beleaguered”
There are 80 million Mac users. The last 12 months saw sales of 18 million Macs. As of the end of June there were 886,580,000 iOS devices sold. As of today the total is well over 900 million. One billion sold will happen well before this year is out. Estimates of current iOS users vary … Continue reading “A Dollar a Day”
