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Apple Sold More iOS Devices in 2011 Than It Sold Macs in Almost 30 Years

To those mentioning price difference...

OK, so there's an order of magnitude price difference between an iPod and a high-end laptop or workstation. What matters here is the inflection of the curve.

Look at the Mac curve, paying attention to 20-10 years ago, then 10-5 years ago, then 5-present. The curve is bending upwards. This is the ultimate halo effect - and as you said, there is an order of magnitude price difference. So when Apple can get the WORLD buying their high-end laptops and workstations, their profits (given their ability to maintain margins) should be a whole new "sleeper" story.
 
Now dig up the loyalty statistics: % of iOS users who plan iOS for their next device, vs. % of other mobile OS users who plan to stay with that. iOS has only begun to grow!

The introduction of the first iPhone really seems like a bigger milestone in the history of computing than the first Mac was (and that was no small thing).
 
Now that Apple is a mass market gadget maker, it's simply no surprise to me.

Consumer electronics in the form of relatively inexpensive stuff is the backbone of Apple. So easy not even a dummies book is required, there's nothing to be excited about unless you are easily impressed.

It's nothing more than entertainment at this point.
 
Where to now?

My immediate thought is "What will those curves do next?
If they continue up at anything like the current trajectory, it's going to be astounding (it already is). The other alternative is that they suddenly flatten. That would be a pretty big problem for Apple, though not catastrophic. Really I can't image how this could possibly happen. So I really think they will continue at roughly their current trajectory, with some flattening. The ramifications of this are amazing for Apple's future sales, profits and market dominance. The future holds more history-making times for Apple, I think. Can't wait for it all to unfold!

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ixodes said:
Now that Apple is a mass market gadget maker, it's simply no surprise to me.

Consumer electronics in the form of relatively inexpensive stuff is the backbone of Apple. So easy not even a dummies book is required, there's nothing to be excited about unless you are easily impressed.

It's nothing more than entertainment at this point.
Click to expand...

...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ........ ha.
Oh deary, deary me! that's great!
 
PlaceofDis said:
well it does help that there is a big price difference between the Mac and iOS devices but this is just astounding really.
Click to expand...
What I would love to see would be someone put together a graph of profits from the respective categories over time... but I am a bit of a graph junkie...

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Macintosh-HD said:
This is perhaps another nail in the coffin for their desktops, especially the Mac Pro I hate to say... :(
Click to expand...

as long as you've got anyone who cares about having a reliable machine to do their graphics/multimedia work on, like me... I'd say they don't have to worry about much in that area.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I want to see a graph numbers of Starbucks coffee shops beside it...
 
Munnichs said:
Same for me, I will always choose Mac above IOS:apple:
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Not if Apple has anything to do about it.
Mountain Lion dropped the Mac from OS X because in the next couple of years Apple will be releasing iOS for the Mac. Who wants to bet that Adobe is on board for the Mac App store this summer for the release of ML? After that, it's just a matter of time before we see Photoshop on iOS and iOS on the Mac.
 
Margins

Mad-B-One said:
Price is one thing - margin another. I bet selling iOS devices also makes way more money that the expensive Mac line - and the risk is lower since you can steer production easier (just on demand) and scale it according to demand - of course within its limits.
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From what I could find online, the iPhone 4 has a 75% profit margin. The Mac has a 28% profit margin. And while it's true the selling price of an iPhone is lower, it isn't THAT much lower. Remember, most users (in the United States, anyhow) only pay a small portion of the cost of their iPhone when they buy one from their carrier. The rest of it is paid off over time as part of their monthly bill.

Apple, however, gets the full $700 or whatever the actual price of the iPhone is the moment you buy that phone from your carrier. The carrier makes up the difference between the $300 you paid upfront and the $700 retail price of the phone. Apple also gets a cut of the monthly bill you pay on top of that!

The end result is that Apple probably makes only $700 off of a $2,500 Mac Pro, but they make a whopping $525 off a single iPhone 4S. And the iPhone 4S is a much easier sell, which users are likely to replace in just two years, for another $525 worth of margin...

This is why I just can't see Apple staying in the traditional computer business much longer. They're gonna migrate as many users to mobile devices as they can, as quickly as they can. The margins are enormous, people replace them far more frequently, and the technology is advancing much, much more quickly than it is with desktops and laptops. Those technological advances in the mobile space are happening largely because Apple is driving that innovation, whereas in the Wintel world Intel and Microsloth are actively retarding innovation with their entrenched monopoly and general cluelessless (the inertia of the morbid enterprise space isn't helping things).
 
I think it's more likely that we'll see both iOS and OS X running on future iPads and eventually iPhones.

That doesn't mean that you'll be running OS X on those little displays: the smaller devices will pair with larger displays as well as mice and keyboards.

Having said that, the desktop OS as we know it is overkill for what most people want to do with a computer most of the time, hence these statistics.

griz said:
Not if Apple has anything to do about it.
Mountain Lion dropped the Mac from OS X because in the next couple of years Apple will be releasing iOS for the Mac. Who wants to bet that Adobe is on board for the Mac App store this summer for the release of ML? After that, it's just a matter of time before we see Photoshop on iOS and iOS on the Mac.
Click to expand...
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Munnichs said:
MasterHowl said:
Wow. Just wow!

I can see the appeal of an iOS device to your standard person, whether it be an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad... but I'd chose my Mac over all of those things any day.
Click to expand...

Same for me, I will always choose Mac above IOS:apple:

But this graph,,, makes me wonder when IOS devices hit the 1bil sold:apple:
Click to expand...

I would go for BOTH mac and iOS anyday :apple:
 
Yes, iOS devices are cheaper than Macs. Not a big surprise.

Does anyone else find Horace Dediu to be incredibly pretentious? Just listen to his appearance in Mac Power Users #65. He's insufferable.
 
wordoflife said:
Not to mention the price of Macs 30 years ago.
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You've got that right. I paid over $10,000 for my Mac II fx almost 20 years ago. They didn't even list my Apple III's that cost almost $9,000 a kick.

Graphs can be used to distort most everything. The more you distort and sensationalize, the better your chances of getting published with it. (Media 101)
 
Macintosh-HD said:
This is perhaps another nail in the coffin for their desktops, especially the Mac Pro I hate to say... :(
Click to expand...

You've got to be kidding! Look at the green Mac line on the graph. It sure doesn't look like iminent death to me. The Mac Pro desktop (or underdesk) gets updated every 18 months instead of every 12. Yes, many are switching to iMacs and MacBooks, but it's far from dead. It's up for grabs as to how things will shift around in sales once Thunderbolt is available on every Mac.
 
This is nonsense. A lot of things changed in the past (30) years.

- We have now faster WLAN, 3G and 4G networks
- iDevices are really usable/useful
- Political systems changed -> new markets
- iDevices are cheap, if compared to Macs
- ...and so on.

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confucious said:
I'm sure there is an app that can answer that...
Click to expand...
Yeah, Siri.

;-)
 
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