“The first number that Tim Cook mentioned in the fourth quarter investor conference call was the number of active Apple devices. The 1.3 billion monthly active devices is the most important measure of the health of Apple’s business,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “It’s the primary way the company chooses to measure itself and it’s the best instrument available to understand the company’s strategy.”
“This is only the second time this number was revealed. The previous figure, given in January 2016, was 1 billion active devices,” Dediu writes. “Thus, while Apple sold 586,744,000 devices the number of active devices increased by 300,000,000.”
“The number of active devices speaks of the future of the company and should be carefully scrutinized while the number of devices sold speaks of the past and should be cursorily glanced at,” Dediu writes. “The ratio between purchases and active devices… remains remarkably constant. It’s currently about 64%. It’s so constant that perhaps we can invent a rule of thumb which says that two out of every three devices ever sold by Apple is still in use. And that this rule is always true.”
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MacDailyNews Take:
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. – Steve Jobs