Currently, over 200 million iDevices are active and are used daily by hundreds of millions of people around the world. In addition to iDevice owners, there are also 54 million Mac owners and Horace Dediu from Asymco made a simple calculation to see how much an iDevice/Mac owner is worth to Apple. Estimating that there are 180 million iDevice owners and 200 million active terminals sold in 4 years, Dediu claims that the lifespan of an iDevice is 3.5 years and on average each iDevice owner generated revenues of $150 annually for Apple.
During the last WWDC Apple revealed that there were 54 million active Mac users. If we look at the history of the product we can see that it took about 5.5 years to sell 54 million Macs. If we therefore assume that the average lifetime of a Mac is 5.5 years and knowing that Mac sales generated revenues of about $73.8 billion then we can estimate the average revenues/year/mac user: $250.
Repeating the exercise with 180 million current iOS users who purchased about 200 million iOS devices and assuming a life span of 3.5 years gives the average revenue/year/iOS user of about $150.
Applying the same logic to the 54 million Macs with a lifespan of 5.5 years, Dediu claims that each Mac owner generates revenues of $250 annually for Apple. Of course, we are talking about recurring figures, but Dediu claims that loyalty is very important and if these figures will increase, then in a few years Apple will end up generating revenues of 100 billion dollars a year only from the users of these 2 products. Probably in another 4 years there will be 500 million owners of iDevices and 100 million owners of Macs and Apple will approach a stock market capitalization of 500 billion dollars.
