Earlier this week, our resident Boy Genius did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about how much money Apple could make with the upcoming Apple Watch, with a particular focus on the high-end 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition. Now well-connected Apple blogger John Gruber has done some estimates of his own and he writes that Apple stands to make $20 billion a year on the Edition version of the Apple Watch if the company manages to sell 1 million copies of it per quarter at an average sales price of $5,000 each.
FROM EARLIER: The most expensive Apple Watch is going to make Apple all the money
“That’s $5 billion in revenue per quarter — just for the gold Edition models,” Gruber writes. “If the ASP is closer to $10,000, which I still think is possible, double that.”
Gruber’s estimate of 1 million Edition watches per quarter is actually a little higher than our own Jonathan Geller’s estimate of 850,000 per quarter with an ASP of $4,200. All the same3.4 million Edition watches a year at an ASP of $4,200 each would be $14.3 billion in revenue per year, just from one high-end version of the device.
Will Apple be able to pull this off? We’ll have no idea until the Apple Watch actually launches but if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past decade, it’s to never bet against Apple making insane sums of money.
