Apple’s digital model produced record profits with explosive growth rates

Evidence

It is easy to forget just how dramatic Apple’s hack really was. The company’s profits soared largely on the strength of its iPod/iTunes/iPhone sales. Bloomberg Businessweek described Wall Street analysts as “befuddled” by this mysterious Apple “miracle.” As one gushed, “We can’t even model out some of the possibilities.… It’s like a religion.” Even today the figures are staggering: three days after the launch of the Windows-compatible iTunes platform in October 2003, listeners downloaded a million copies of the free iTunes software and paid for a million songs, prompting Steve Jobs to announce, “In less than one week we’ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world.” Within a month there were five million downloads, then ten million three months later, then twenty-five million three months after that. Four and a half years later, in January 2007, that number rose to two billion, and six years later, in 2013, it was 25 billion. In 2008 Apple surpassed Walmart as the world’s largest music retailer. iPod sales were similarly spectacular, exploding from 1 million units per month after the music store’s launch to 100 million less than four years later, when Apple subsumed the iPod’s functions in its revolutionary iPhone, which drove another step-function of growth. A 2017 study of stock market returns concluded that Apple had generated more profit for investors than any other US company in the previous century. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 88

Categorization

• CANDY: iTunes downloads doubling from 2 billion to 25 billion in six years, and Apple surpassing Walmart as largest music retailer, are striking standalone figures.