MacLife.com readers are among the most awesome Apple fans on the planet, so we don’t have to tell you how our favorite company has been chewing bubblegum and kicking ass (bonus points to those who can name which movie that line hails from!). But sometimes we just need to see it laid out in one awesome post -- and here it is!
Somewhere up in heaven, Steven Paul Jobs must surely be smiling. The Apple co-founder left this mortal coil at age 56 on October 5, 2011, just as the company was a few days into its most amazing fiscal quarter ever, which just so happened to top off Apple’s best year ever. The folks in Cupertino have kicked so much ass lately that they actually have enough left over to backwash in their own awesome. Here’s a look at six ways they’re most awesome than everyone else -- including themselves.
While the press loves to have a field day proclaiming Google’s Android victor of the smartphone market while Microsoft continues to dominate the desktop with Windows, Apple has been quietly setting them both up for a smackdown -- at least when it comes to who’s worth more than whom.
Apple Inc. is technically worth more than Microsoft and Google combined, thanks to Cupertino’s present market capitalization of $465 billion. Microsoft -- who soared to a high of $642 billion back in late 2000 -- maintains a market cap of $257 billion today, and that’s including everything the company offers: Its market-leading Xbox 360 and yes, MS Office and Windows software, too.
Search giant Google may be drowning in plenty of cash on its own thanks to advertising, but remember, its Android mobile operating system is open source -- meaning HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG and others who use it in their smartphone and tablet offerings aren’t really paying for it, legal fees over patent disputes with Apple aside. Google’s own market cap sits as $197 billion, which means that Cupertino could wipe the floor with them more than twice over and still have enough cash left over to be worth more than the entire coffee industry worldwide, with a current value of $70 billion.
The house that Sam Walton built is generally considered one of the Goliaths of the retail world, and its mighty reach extends around the world, with 5,366 stores in 27 countries other than the United States. But when it comes to sheer profitability, Walmart can’t hold a candle to Apple Inc.
In the final quarter of 2011, Walmart took in $109.5 billion -- more than double Apple’s insanely large revenue haul of $46.33 billion during the same three months. However, Walmart only kept $3.3 billion in profit compared to Apple’s $13.1 billion, nearly four times Walmart’s profit, all while spending three times less on overall operations. Take that, Wally World!
Much has been written about Android’s domination of the smartphone market, much to the chagrin of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, Nokia’s Symbian and sadly, the late, great webOS from HP/Palm. Recent data from The NPD Group finds Android holding a commanding lead of the U.S. market -- 53 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared with 43 percent for Apple’s iPhone.
The big factoid to remember here, of course, is that Apple is duking it out against Android with a mere three models: The current showboat model (iPhone 4S), 2010’s controversial iPhone 4, and perhaps even more amazing, 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which has now become the company’s 99-cent worm that Apple uses to hook budget users onto the iOS juggernaut.
Contrast that with the whopping 87 different models of current Android devices (which admittedly includes 10-15 tablet models). The fact that Apple has managed to maintain a strong foothold in the smartphone market against a veritable tidal wave of Android models is a testament to just how good the iOS platform is. The remaining nine percent of the U.S. smartphone market is made up of everybody else -- RIM, Microsoft and Nokia, once the titans of the very mountain they now find themselves struggling to climb.
Yeah, those two companies don’t traditionally have much to do with each other, but with Apple’s stock price breaking the $500 mark on February 13 -- and staying there by the end of market close -- the company is now worth more than ExxonMobil Corp. by roughly 17 percent.
The seductive stock market dance between AAPL and XOM has been doing some fancy footwork since last summer, with Apple briefly taking the top spot but Exxon quickly beating back the iPhone maker. That changed last week, as Apple’s market capitalization hit $465 billion, eclipsing the energy company’s “mere” $400 billion.
Even better news for Apple: Wall Street analysts say Cupertino’s stock should be worth even more -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $588 per share. Between the forthcoming iPad refresh next month, a new iPhone later this year and a rumored HDTV, Apple may soon be telling ExxonMobil to eat its dust in a big way.
Apple’s share of the global tablet market may have shrunk to 57 percent in the final quarter of 2011 -- down from 64 percent in the prior quarter -- but some of that may actually be the company competing against another one of its own products.
According to recent research from iSuppli, some of that loss comes from customers choosing the iPhone 4S instead of any kind of tablet -- little surprise given the record 37 million iPhones sold during the fourth quarter of 2011. By comparison, the iPad shipped 15.4 million units, up from 11.1 million in the third quarter.
So how did the rest of the tablet makers fare? Amazon’s much-hyped Kindle Fire moved 3.9 million units from its mid-November debut through the end of the year, a respectable number that should have everyone except Apple concerned. By comparison, Barnes and Noble pushed out a mere 1.9 million Nook tablets, while Samsung’s Galaxy Tab series shipped 2.1 million for a total of six million all year long.
Last but not least, look no further than this amazing chart from Asymco if you want to see at a glance how truly awesome Apple Inc. is. This graphic charts the rise of the Mac (and even Apple II) computer over the last 28 years compared with the rise of iOS devices since their introduction in 2007. iOS deftly kicked the Mac OS X platform in less than four years, but even more incredible is that Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 alone -- 156 million -- than all Macintosh computers sold over the last 28 years, which currently stands at a mere 122 million.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Images courtesy of Abrition, Asymco, CNN Money, Gizmodo, The NPD Group)
brandonwalkermedia
February 23, 2012 at 2:43pm
that number (on androids side) includes repeat activations. thus these numbers are not totally correct. Steve Jobs pointed out if we did the same thing, iOS would be unbeatable (especially on new iOS release days when everyone repeats the download about 1-5 times)
