“In Apple’s first 40 years it shipped 1,591,092,250 computers,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “This shipment total is higher than any other computer company in its first 40 years. Actually there are no other PC makers that are 40 years old. One computer maker (IBM) is older but they only sold PCs for 24 years and what they still sell they don’t sell in high numbers.”
Dediu writes, “Combining the history of customer creation and customer preservation with the value obtained from each customer implies that the next 40 years will be about creating another large tranche of customers whose willingness to spend on whatever Apple creates will be relatively unchanged.”
“We don’t know the limit,” Dediu writes. “One billion was hard to imagine even one year ago. We might see two billion devices in short order. Perhaps not. Perhaps as we have a multitude of devices about us all day the number will become less meaningful. But if the number of middle class customers grows and as Apple keeps its products within their reach, there is no reason to think that there will be a reversal of the last 40 years in terms of customer acquisition.”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple. The most undervalued company in the history of stock markets?
Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
Steve was justifiably proud of Apple. This is a truly amazing accomplishment and one not likely to be surpassed by any other company, perhaps ever.
Wall Street says, “That’s nice… but what have you done for me lately.”
Apple needs to sell that many iPhones by next year to get any respect from the greedy big investors.
We all know that’s not how Wall St works. It’s not the question of “what have you done for me lately?” But rather “What will you do FOR me later”
That’s a pretty reasonable way to look at a potential investment. If my local butcher asked to invest in his shop, I wouldn’t be so concerned about how many pork chops he sold two years ago. i’d want to know how things will look going forward. How many pork chops will he sell next year? In three years or five years? How could you look at it in any other way? I’m not investing to reward him for his past triumphs. I’d want to the see that the business, and thus my investment, will grow.
The problem is that WallSt can’t predict the future of Apple for beans, thus they value Apple’s future as nil, but that’s not Apple’s fault. Then, when the future becomes the present, and Apple crushes earnings, they never make a correction for their inability to predict what just happened. So, Apple is always being underestimated.
In the markets buyers want it both ways 🙂
They want to find a company that is undervalued, and thus a good investment, but then once they buy in they want the market to wake up and realize that it is undervalued! It’s hard to have it both ways 🙂
You are a troll who does nothing for anyone except yourself.
A very long time ago, in another life, I was working at Apple when we had our first billion-dollar year.
Most of us were skeptical that Apple would grow much larger… so much for prognostication.
I remember in the 90’s walking into my broker’s office wanting to buy AAPL for $4 a share. She tried very hard to talk me out of it. Adjusting for splits that’d be well less than $1 a share today.
(Unfortunately due to the circumstances along the way I had to sell that original purchase 🙁
But, but, but, no one buys Macs, says the IT doofus.
Meaningless statistic. Foxconn has made more electronics than anyone, they just happen to slap on someone else’s label before boxing.
The stats are so selectively skewed as to be meaningless. First, it’s disingenuous to compare the startup years for primary inventors in an immature market (HP) versus the later-arriving cell phone maker that hits its stride in a consolidating mature market. Any what’s with the categorizations? The number of “computers” include all electronic devices regardless of capability or power. That’s absurd.
How many TOTAL electronic devices have the leading companies shipped in the last 20 years? The cell phone makers would dominate, with Nokia, Samsung, and HH all near the lead.
And 8 of them were mine.
I was a fan when I first played with an Apple II during our progression from IMSAI 8080 to (then) current computers in a computer science class. I was a bigger fan when I used a Mac in 1993. Now, as I sit here I am typing on a Mac, with an iPhone on a dock next to me, an iPad in its cubby on my desk, while I wait to go watch something on my Apple TV as my wife listens to my iPod. Technically they are all “computers” of some sort…so that number could be a lot higher.
I have a somewhat peculiar view of the Mac vs. Windows war in the enterprise. My first Apple was a II+. I wrote my own relational data base using Pascal and a word processor using C. I sold my boss, the County Attorney, on the superiority of Apple products, so that’s the way we went while the rest of the county was going with IBM PCs.
In 1985, our office bought the first Apple LaserWriter sold in the Austin metropolitan area. The county had no IT department (apart from one guy who maintained a minicomputer), so I set up a local area network using AppleTalk to link the printer and other network resources to several “Fat Macs” with 128K (yes, kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes) of memory and a single 400K floppy drive.
We were early users of PageMaker, Microsoft Word 1.x, and Multiplan (the predecessor to Excel, which we used from 1.0 on; the first Windows version was 2.0). I used WordBasic (the predecessor to VBA) to program the computers to prepare and print legal documents with minimal human intervention. I did this in my spare time while lawyering for 40-50 hours per week.
In January 1993, my boss moved on to a higher office. The new elected prosecutor announced, and I quote verbatim, “Real lawyers use PCs and WordPerfect.” He forced the staff to retrain with WP for Windows. The IT department that had evolved by then promised him that it could quickly provide “professional software running on professional computers on a professional network” that would greatly exceed the performance of our amateur Mac network for much less money.
The individual beige boxes (from Dell, a local company) were indeed much less expensive, but as the networking project dragged on, the original boxes were replaced twice to meet updated minimum specs while some of the original Macs were still in daily use. After spending a fortune (particularly as compared with my salary) on two or three vendors, the IT department finally got a system comparable to mine up and running in early 1999. Their final system, incidentally, required reconverting the office and six years of documents back to Microsoft Word from WordPerfect.
That elected official was defeated for reelection in 2004. My original boss is still a respected senior judge… and uses a Mac.
Oh how I miss PageMaker. 😩
Usually, the “Fat Mac” had 512K of memory, in between the 128K of the first Mac, and the 1MB of the Mac Plus.
Yes, 512K. I believe our company spent about $3,000 on it. And then another $7,000 for the laser printer. Ouch to be sure, but in that dot-matrix era It was magical.
I forgot to mention one of my best stories: My Apple II+ came with 48K of memory. I wanted an upgrade to 64, so I bought an Apple Language Card that included the extra 16K (among other things) for $495. Today, you can buy 64GB of DDR3 (4 million times more memory) for about the same price. The guy behind the counter who sold me the card was Michael Dell, who had just moved his store from Jester Dorm at UT to a strip mall in North Austin.
TxUser, thanks for sharing that experience.
10 years ago my partner opened her own law firm. I persuaded her to use Macs rather than Windows machines. She reluctantly agreed. For the first few years I heard much moaning about how she should have used Windows instead.
However, as the years passed by, the moaning decreased. Most of the success was due to the ease of using Mac server software for her office. Starting with Tiger Server, everything just worked without the need for expense server licensing from MS and without the need for an expensive IT doofus to maintain the system.
Now, she runs an “old” Mac Pro tower as her server that serves 12 workstations, including some Windows PCs. In fact, she leases space to a couple other attorneys who use Windows workstations and have their files stored on our Mac server. The integration of Windows workstations with a Mac server is seamless.
Plus, remote access to the Mac server is simple and never, ever any viruses even without the overhead of virus protection software.
Now, she never looks back and is proud when talking with other attorneys about how her office is 100% Mac. The attorneys even run Windows 7 using Parallels for some legal archaic legal software that is still Windows only.
Any office that still is restricted to Windows only is living in Stone Age.
Interesting tech sojourn that evolved …
By “computers” are they counting iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches? Computers that third party companies write software for and are more powerful than the Apple II and many of the older Macs.
Taken from the article itself:
First, clearly Apple shifted from being a “computer company”. It has already changed its name to exclude the word “Computer” but that has been interpreted as saying that it sells devices (which happen to also be computers.)
Devices != Computer.
If you count every DEVICE Apple produced it’s not a surprise numbers are so high.
BTW. It’s funny to see how numbers are important for fanboys when they are at Apple’s advantage (Even if tweeked) but absolutely irrelevant when they disadvantage Apple like for example here:
http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_mobiosxtime.htm
The hypocrisy, it burns…
especially when you consider that mdn has a long standing practice of downplaying and denigrating reports of numbers of android devices “shipped” rather than “sold”, but is happy, as in this instance, to triumphantly report on numbers of apple products “shipped”
what is good for the goose is good for the gander. lets just stick to a single standard for everyone, and that standard should be SOLD.
that having been said, WAY TO GO APPLE !!!
Owned about 0,000005% devices of that big number in 28 years.
Mac Classic, Color Classic, iMac Bondi, Powerbook, PowerCD, Quicktakes, Laserwriter to mention a few oldies.
Remarkable products from a remarkable company.
Problem is the stats your counting come from stat counters web based tool which currently is only on 3% of world wide web sites. This is so low as to be laughable, maybe you should do a little research before you post.
with only counting 3% of the worlds web site hits the stats reported are very suspect.