Let’s start with the obvious: the iPhone has been a massive, unequivocal success. Every subsequent release seems to break the records that the last one set before it, and now with the biggest hardware overhaul in the phone’s history rumored to be coming this fall, the books are primed to be rewritten once again. But before any of that happens, Jordan Weissmann of Slate has decided to take a step back and see just how big the iPhone really is (and we’re not talking about the 5.5-inch phablet).
The question Weissmann posed was this: “If Apple’s product lines were their own companies now, which corporations would they stack up against?”
Using this quarter’s earnings, Weissmann discovered that Apple’s iPhone line (easily its most successful product line), with $19.75 billion in sales, is about as big as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola…combined. Also, only slightly smaller than eBay and Google combined and a touch bigger than the biggest name in online shopping, Amazon.
Taking the comparison a step further, Weissmann noted that the iPad, which has seen a slight dip in sales over the last quarter, still raked in $5.9 billion in earnings for Apple. If you stacked Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Groupon and Tesla on top of one another, you’d still come up short of $5.9 billion.
Check out the iPad chart and some other astounding facts from Slate in the source link below.
