Apple quarterly financial results Q1 FY18

Feb 4, 2018

Numbers have their own magic and sometimes they are too big to gasp. Can you give sense to 100,000? Can you to 1million? I can't, they just exceed my ability to visualize them.
On Thursday afternoon, Apple's CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri broke down the company's results for its holiday quarter, usually its biggest. You can find snippets all around the web, but I always prefer to read the great job Jason Snell does at SixColors in transcripting the earnings call. The numbers you can read there are, in fact, mind-blowing: 77.3 million iPhones, 13.2 million iPads... how big are they? I sat down, fired up Numbers and did some math.
Q1 2018 had 13 weeks (1 less than last year), every week has 7 days, every day 24 hours, every hour 60 minutes and every minute 60 seconds. Let's assume Apple sold devices night and day, every single day of the quarter, what does this translate to?

iPhones: Apple sold 9.8 iPhones per second. 9.8 per second. In the time it took you to read the article up to here, Apple has sold about 400 iPhones and since we do know iPhones' Average Selling Price, we know that in this time Apple has generated about 300,000$... numbers begin to slip again.
iPads: it sold 1 M iPads per week, about 1.7 each second;
Macs: 5.1 M Macs, 0,65 each second.

Apple cannot just sell them, it can build them this fast.
And this, my friend, is really just impressive.

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