“Blogging for Asymco, industry analyst Horace Dediu has crunched some numbers to figure out what happens if you value Apple on the basis of what people are buying,” Barbara Kollmeyer reports for MarketWatch.
Dediu also presents another chart “that shows the daily revenue per device inclusive of services and other income,” Kollmeyer reports.
“For example,” Kollmeyer reports, “basically a single iPhone earns the company nearly $1 a day, a Mac a few cents less, and so on (and, flipping that around, owning and using a Mac, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, an iPad and Apple TV can presumably be viewed as costing a user between $3.50 and $4 a day).”
Full article here.
“Apple is in business to deliver a product/service mix to loyal customers and to preserve their loyalty through constant improvement and innovation,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “You can see strategic intent in increasing the attach rate per device of services. You can see a strategic intent in building loyalty and the right customer base which is likely to be loyal. You can see strategic intent in the iteration of the product in a way that extends loyalty and expands the solid base but also increases the $/day rate. This analysis correctly informs almost all decisions the company makes.”
“The fact that Apple has just launched a subscription service for the iPhone makes what was clearly their strategy all along plain to see however it has been a strategy in effect for decades,” Dediu writes. “It isn’t a difficult idea to embrace. It always surprises me that it’s not more commonly held. The reason may be that Apple is mis-categorized.”
“Or perhaps the entire categorization of industries and sectors is obsolete in what is a new post-industrial age. Some have figured this out already,” Dediu writes. “Others will take longer.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Less than a daily visit to Starbucks is all it costs to live with high quality products that all interact well together, making you more productive (which saves/earns you more money, no less), with far less stress and frustration than those who waste their money on disparate devices from random companies with inferior or no support that do not interact well or at all and are vastly less secure.
The next time some fool accuses you of being an “Apple fanboy,” thank them for the compliment.
For less than $4 per day, on average:
We can do so much more than those with disparate devices. You want your personal computer, tablet, smartphone, smartwatch, and set-top box to all have one thing in common: the Apple logo. Take advantage of Continuity’s Handoff and iCloud features. No other ecosystem can come close to matching Apple’s seamlessness across devices. — MacDailyNews Take, September 14, 2015
so much for Apple = luxury.
When people tell me macs are expensive I suggest the following consideration: assuming a Mac costs €500 more than a PC (i.e. fully accepting their assumption), that’s 100€ per year, that’s 20 packs of cigarettes or 380 cigarettes a year (in Germany), that’s one cigarette a day. Noboby was ever able to argue that that’s luxury, not even non-smokers.
If purchasing Apple products reduces smoking then consumers could claim buying an Apple product is a health benefit and should receive a substantial health insurance discount? What about those people who smoke and buy Apple products? How do these people fit into your hypothesis?
You clearly didn’t understand what SamLowry wrote.
If Apple product is cheaper than, for example, a single cigarette a day, or a pack of chewing gum a day, or less than a cup of gourmet coffee a day… then calling them luxury is simply idiotic.
The foundation of true research is a sound method of analytics. The author did not describe how he collected, collated, and compared his data. His analysis cannot be replicated by an independent researchers. His article demonstrates no understanding of the principle and practices of good science. His article is not even pseudoscience. I doubt this article was peer reviewed or published in a world renowned journal of economics. However, this article is typical of the lack of sound thinking that pollutes MDN.
You cannot be serious! This is an online article; not a research paper from a scientific journal!
If you doubt the statements in the article, you are welcome to do your own digging and dispute them. To anyone with decent knowledge of the subject matter, though, the numbers presented in it sound very plausible. But feel free to present your own.
That’s my point, DragQueen. This article is intellectual rubbish, brain polluting hogwash, dull, decrepit, and disingenuous. This article doesn’t meet the most minimal standards of science and would never be accepted for publication in any respected journal. It is mental garbage. Thank you for endorsing my thoughts, there may be hope for you after all.
I’m not sure who is this dragQueen you’re talking to, but I’ll respond myself anyway.
It appears that you have recently learned a few interesting new words in English, and are anxious to use them in a sentence. I commend you on a job well done (usage of words in a sentence), but please, practice your middle-school English lessons in a middle-school children’s forum. Here on MDN, adults are trying to actually have a meaningful conversation, and you are disruptive with your English writing practice.
In other words, what you write makes no sense on substance, but at least the language and writing is reasonably proper.
It make no sense to you, DragQueen? I retract my assessment that you have any hope of rational thought.
ignore Fred, she’s off her meds.
You should thank me for attempting to educate your little mind.
If internet bloggers had to meet the “standards of science”, virtually every blogging site in the universe would have to close up shop. Your perspective is idiotic.
Smokers using Apple products simply agree that using Apple products is not a luxury, which is the point.
It’s the non-smokers who say “I don’t smoke anyway”, to which I say: “Is that because 1 cigarette a day is luxury?”
“Less than a daily visit to Starbucks is all it costs to live with high quality products that all interact well together, making you more productive (which saves/earns you more money, no less), with far less stress and frustration ”
Instead of using this to argue how cheap that Apple is, I’d use this to argue how insanely expensive Starbucks is. I do not have the “coffee habit” as I do not like coffee at all, and while I like tea I do not spend several dollars every day drinking it at a tea house or coffee shop. That’s a nutty way to piss away money in my view.
Cost vs Benefit: My Apple devices save me both money and time (time which can not be replaced.)
Hence, I have a net positive impact on my productivity and time spent to get work done.
Fristly, I think the analyst neglected to include the cost of a Hermés watch band in his mathematics. Secondly, it is ridiculous to reduce consumer choice to price alone. Thirdly, the analyst doesn’t include a control group for comparison. This is fanboy analytics – biased, skewed, incomplete – simply devoid of any rational and objective effort.
You don’t seem to understand what the article is talking about (or you may be discussing some other article).
The article clearly, and on purpose, isolates price as the focus of attention. This is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain. There was no setting up some comparison with anything or anyone else; the article isn’t about Microsoft; or Samsung; or Google; or HTC. It is about Apple.
That Apple is the focus of many writers these days should not be all that surprising; after all, it is the company with largest market capitalisation in the world, and the story about how it got there continues to fascinate and perplex both reporters and analysts.
The article approaches an interesting subject (revenue per product per day / cost to consumer per product per day) and reveals some interesting details.
If you are looking for in-depth scientific research on this subject, you may want to look at market research companies (such as NPD, or Gartner), and, if you need more in-depth study, academic institutions. You shouldn’t expect such in-depth scientific scrutiny from an online article.
I will refer you to my previous comment.
However, perhaps you would be so kind to explain what the author has done to prove that his article demstrates that he adhered to the rigorous principles and practices of scientific investigation. Are you capable of doing this? If you don’t I will have to conclude that you are incapable.
I agree, no one should ever be able to write any articles about Apple dealing with the cost of any Apple products unless they also do an exhaustive comparison of every single product that Samsung, Xiaomi, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Huawei, as well as factor in the cost of the top end gold plated, diamond encrusted, custom versions of all Apple products.
Any other type of financial analysis is pure fanboism, even if it comes from the top Apple financial analyst in the whole world.
Agreed.
It’s obvious that the concepts of scientific inquiry, and rational and objective thought is beyond your thinking.
LOL
The more you disparage rational and objective thinking the more you demonstrate your lack of intelligence and veracity. Your total commitment to ignorance is astounding. Now, you and the rest of MDN’s fanboy community, couldn’t care less, that’s obvious, but everyone else sees you for what you are.
I’m not sure that a Macbook or iMac costs that much more than an ordinary PC. My MacBook is 7 years old and still runs the current OS, and it will run El Capitan soon! Sure, it is slower and the hardware does not support all features of the more modern OS, but it works well. Very well.
My first iMac is still running. It is 8+ years old. Alas, it does not run the current OS, but still works well with most software, though some apps don’t like it anymore. Mostly it is used for light photography work, and, of course, to play music using iTunes.
I have never had ordinary PC’s that lasted that long while still working so well. It’s my story though that I am telling. So if you have an old PC still running XP, great, but my XP computers failed years ago.
ONLY $4 a day?….. That’s a $120 a month! That is not an “only”, that is expensive!
It’s all relative, that’s the cost if you are:
“using a Mac, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, an iPad and Apple TV”
That’s 5 different Apple products.
It’s also using the average per user revenue, if you are price sensitive, it’s likely you’d buy the cheaper versions of every product than the average user and your cost would thus be lower.
or you could buy last years apple products for the price of a new win doze fragmantdroid combo, and the apple products would still be functional five years from now, when all that other stuff would be worse than obsolete
Heck why not extend this plan to other Apple devices in addition to the iPhone? Wonder what that would do for sales?
Everybody here seems to be missing the point of the article. It’s not so much about how much it costs the consumer per day to be using Apple devices; it’s about how Wall Street deeply discounts the value of Apple as simply a consumer electronics products vendor that is likely to collapse if the next product isn’t a hit, rather than rightly valuing Apple as a “systems” enterprise who’s combination of hardware products, software, and services combine to form a reliable and growing stream of revenue in which the failure of any one product would have little effect on slowing forward momentum.
“To live an Apple life costs less than $4 a day”-MDN
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Personally when I see anything that claims to be cheap because it’s less than X dollars a day is just marketing psychology to get agreement.. I usually calculate such claims to cost per year and then judge for myself if it’s a luxury.. $4 a day is about $120 a month or about $1440 per year.