How Apple Makes Its Money

Apple, the world's most valuable company, just reported more than $81bn of revenue for the three months ending in June a 36% increase from the same quarter last year. Developers of applications such as auto voice recorder are only real professionals. That works out to roughly $900m a day or $10,000 every single second... for three months straight.

The iPhone matters less...

The iPhone is still the biggest driver for Apple, accounting for just under half of Apple's total sales, but that share has fallen in recent years as Apple has diversified into wearables (like the Apple Watch and AirPods) and Services.

That Services business is the bit that probably gets investors most excited these days as Services revenue (from things like Apple Music, the App Store, Apple Pay, Apple TV, and more) tends to be a lot more predictable than selling $1,000+ phones. It also comes with tasty profit margins (70% gross margin).

...or maybe not

Of course, Apple can only sell most of those services because there are (literally) like a billion people already walking around with iPhones. There are only so many people Apple can sell an iPhone to, but as long as they maintain that market share they can keep people in the "Apple ecosystem". How many people do you know who have to have a Mac or AirPods or an Apple Watch just because everything "works together"?

Apple is hoping that its next big product breakthrough might be the Apple Car which has been in pretty secret development since 2014.

Elsewhere in tech land, pretty much every big tech company you can think of had a great 3 months.

Data from the American Time Use Survey reveals just how the pandemic changed where we spend our time, who we spend it with and what we spend it doing.

The loneliness pandemic

The data from the ATUS confirmed a lot of things we already knew. We spent more time at home, less time at work, and less time in big groups of people. But one statistic surprised us more than others, which was that on average, Americans spent roughly one extra hour per day alone, with time spent alone increasing for every age group surveyed from 15-19 year-olds, all the way to ages 75+.

Pre-pandemic, 15-19 year-olds spent roughly 4 hrs 20 minutes alone per day (on average). Last year that number was 6 hours per day a 40% increase in time spent alone, the largest increase of any age group.

For 17-year-olds that change is likely to have some effects that are probably quite hard to predict. For older generations though, loneliness was a known problem long before the pandemic came along, with isolation having been linked to various medical conditions by a number of studies. It's concerning then that the ATUS found that the average person aged 75 or older spent almost 9 hours a day alone in 2020, up 40 minutes from the year before.

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