Tim Cook famously said:
We can put all of our products on the table you’re sitting at. Those products together sell $40 billion per year. No other company can make that claim except perhaps an oil company.
For those of you laughing, that was three years ago. The revenues quadrupled since to a total of $170 for the last four quarters. But the more interesting thought is that the table has not gotten bigger. When Tim spoke the iPad had just been announced but was not yet for sale. So we can’t be sure if he thought it should be on the table or not, but it does not take up that much space.
It would be fun to actually lay out all the Apple products on a table to see how big it would be. The trouble is that there are many things Apple sells which take up no space at all. Things like iTunes content or services and AppleCare.
So rather than trying to imagine a table full of Apple products (some of which are non-phyisical) I thought a more fitting analogy would be to allocate the revenues from these products to a table and thinking about how much space relative to each other the products would take.
To make conversion easier, I picked a rather large table; 10 feet long, big enough to fit a small conference room. What would this table covered in product revenue look like?
My estimate is that it would look like this:
I color coded the product lines as shown in the legend: Greens for iPhone, Browns for iPad, Blues for Mac, Yellow for iPod, Red/Purples for iTunes and Grey for Accessories.
At this categorization the table would allocate the following space to each category:
- iPhone (Greens): 60 inches or about half the table.
Product Inches iPhone 4 4.7 iPhone 4S 11.4 iPhone 5 44.5 - iPad (Browns): 21 inches
iPad 2 1.4 iPad 4 9.6 iPad mini 10.3 - Macs (Blues): 5 inches
Desktops 2.7 Portable 13.6 - iPod (yellows): 2.5 inches
touch 1.8 iPod 0.7 - iTunes (reds), software and services: 15.5 inches
music 4.1 video 1.6 Apps 5.6 Books 0.8 Pro SW 1.4 OS X 0.5 iWork 0.5 iOS Apps 0.2 Serv. 0.9 - Accessories (Greys): 4 inches.
Apple TV 0.3 Acc 3.6
If this colorful table were used to support the actual products, where each product would have to fit within its color band, then the truth of one saying would become apparent: good things come in small packages.