Apple earns a dollar per customer per day

Inside the new Apple Store Union Square, SF — but these days wherever a customer is is where the store is at

The scale of Apple’s business is astonishing. Take a look at Horace Dediu’s most recent analysis (He’s among the best, in my opinion).

Here’s his latest finding that really should inform how you think about Apple:

Apple Installed Base Related Purchases and Licensing (run rate of $44billion/yr) pic.twitter.com/hKjPKeLfZJ

— Horace Dediu (@asymco) August 15, 2016

Including hardware that’s an average revenue per user of c.$27/month, Dediu states. That’s pretty near a dollar per customer per day.

(It may even be higher than this. “Apple customers deliver an astronomical $40 per month apiece to the company, versus the pennies per month that Facebook and Google collect, and the few dollars a month that Amazon receives,” he told Fast Company this week.)

This achievement isn’t entirely about services, of course not — software upgrades and device replacement are factored into these figures. It is however based on maintaining high degrees of customer satisfaction, transmuting this into consumer trust, and then creating a raft of attractive service-related products consumers might need.

That’s what happens inside Apple’s ecosystem. Enter it and you gain access to everything from iTunes to iCloud, Apple Pay and more. You may also develop interest in other useful products. The logic is as simple as: Love iPhone? Get Apple Watch! Love the Mac? Get an iPad?  In future, maybe, Car… (And to help us earn enough to pay for it all, Apple gives us iWork for free.)

So what’s this then? Four words:
Connected, platform, ecosystem, services.

You have to hand it to Apple’s management here — solely in terms of the Mac sales recovery and the iPod they were on a good growth curve way back in 2006, then, in 2007, they introduced a product that became the most popular single product of all time: The iPhone.

Apple management’s success is that rather than emulate every other corporation on the planet and milk the success of that device for all it was worth, they chose to build a business around it. It is a business built around the rapidly proliferating digital transformation of everything, and will unleash future products even bigger in terms of success than iPhone. You will access everything using an array of connected devices. As I wrote elsewhere, iPhones don’t matter any more, but that certainly isn’t the end of the story.