Office Hours #Q&A #WWDC #transcript
Recording and transcript of the June 9, 2026 Asymco One Office Hours, recorded the day after Apple's WWDC 2026 keynote. Horace Dediu shares his impressions of the event and takes questions from Asymco One subscribers.
Subscribe to Asymco One to listen to the recording and read the transcript.
Sign up and latest updates at asymco.com/live.
The iPhone maker is trading at 2.5x its ecosystem value and 1.5x its economic impact
Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025, according to a new study by economists at Analysis Group. For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple. Since 2019, the size of the App Store ecosystem has nearly tripled, as the App Store remains the safest and best place for users to discover and download apps. .
Source: Apple
Bill Gates once said you have a platform when other people make more money from it than you do.
In other words, success is if there is more value created on top of it than captured from it.
Few platforms qualify but Apple's certainly does. Apple's ecosystem is shown in the graph below.
Apple's direct payments to developers were about $126.7 billion but, as the Analysis Group report shows, Apple and the developers enabled transactions dwarfing app store transactions. In 2025 Apple captured a tiny fraction of the economic activity it induced on its platforms (about $57 billion out of $1.437 trillion or 4%).
Combining the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store and Apple's direct sales of products and services leads to a total of over $1.8 trillion. I call this the Apple Ecosystem (Apple + App Store.)
But that's not everything. There are lots of economic activities on the platform that do not involve the App Store. Activity on browsing and social media and messaging apps probably add another 50% on top of this, perhaps even 100%. I call this the Apple Economy (Apple + App Store + All other transactions.)
Ultimately, the 1.4 billion Apple users using 2.5 billion devices are likely inducing as much as $3 trillion of economic activity.
It seems to me that we need a way to measure a multiple of this activity as perhaps a fundamental metric of value creation.
At $4.57 trillion current market cap, the value is only 2.5x its ecosystem and 1.5x its economic footprint.
Upgrades keep coming but are they justified?
Bank of America upped its price target on the tech giant, citing a potential boost from agentic artificial intelligence.
Shares rose 0.5% in premarket trading.
“In an agentic world, value accrues to the platform that controls user intent, personal context, app access, permissions, identity, authentication, payments, and trust,” analyst Wamsi Mohan wrote in a note to clients. “Smartphone is the scaled consumer device where these factors already converge. If AI assistants become the new front door to search, apps, commerce, scheduling, payments, and workflow completion, we think Apple should have meaningful leverage over model providers, app developers, merchants, advertisers, and payment networks.”
Mohan raised his price target to $380 from $330 and reiterated his Buy rating on Apple.
Delving deeper, Mohan said that the company's benefit in agentic AI comes from its semiconductors and iOS, as Apple's silicon can dictate what happens on a devices (which is important for latency, reliability, privacy and costs) and iOS will determine how the AI is used by the user. “Our analysis around token usage suggests Apple will need to rely on distributed compute (on device), Private Cloud Compute and third-party compute to deliver a robust AI experience,” Mohan added. “Removing the net cash neutral target, in our opinion, is a reflection of a new period of AI-driven investments to enable this agentic era.”As such, Mohan believes that the coming Siri redesign needs to be integrated into the iPhone and make it an agent that is capable of understanding intent, retrieving context, bringing up apps, and completing workflows. If this were to happen, an agentic version of Siri could boost fiscal 2030 revenue between $15B and $30B, or as much as $40B to $65B if users really became acclimated to it.
Source: Seeking Alpha
NB: Updated price targets with BofA change highlighted.
As you know, as we crossed into 2001, the great crash occurred.
Ben Thompson • 25:05
Yep. And suddenly a job offer from a big phone company sounds pretty great.
Horace Dediu • 25:09
Yeah, but the crash occurred and it impacted my startup because I couldn't raise money anymore. And that's why I'm throwing in the towel. I'll take this idea to Nokia and build it inside of this company. So for the first year, I worked out of the U.S. and then they invited me to come to Finland. And I fell in love with it, not to mention finding someone to fall in love with. Yeah, I'm still here.
So we created an internal venture called media distribution. And it struggled for a couple of years. We partnered with a publishing company here in Finland that is the biggest newspaper and magazine company. And we worked with them. 9-11 happened. We worked with them throughout that period to test this idea of distributing content on phones. That's how I met my wife. She was working for the publishing firm. Remember when Apple News launched? I forget how many years ago it was already. It was five, six years ago. [My wife] texted me during the keynote. She goes, "you realize that's what we were working on together in 2001?"
It was called Project Melissa. Project Melissa was this idea of Apple News today. And that was [our project] 20 years earlier. That just goes to show you the story of my life. I was doing search 10 years before Google existed. I was doing e-books 10 years before Amazon launched the Kindle. I was doing smartphones and media distribution on smartphones 20 years before Apple showed how it's done.
So my problem has been that I see things happening or see where things are going, but way too early. And that's why one of the theses I have over time is the idea that the difference between a futurist and a billionaire is knowing when one thing happens. So it's not about knowing what's going to happen. A lot of people are very good at that.
Ben Thompson • 27:31
Including Nokia, to your point.
Horace Dediu • 27:33
Nokia, science fiction writers, Elon Musk, a lot of people predict this. But getting the timing right is where the money is made. And so that was one of those lessons I learned.
Ben Thompson • 27:45
Well, when you talk about the publishing and Nokia and the reading and all those sorts of things, what it makes me think of is when the iPhone comes along in 2007, And I'm very curious to get your perspective on what that was like inside Nokia when the iPhone launches.
Horace Dediu • 27:59
I'll tell you exactly.
Ben Thompson • 28:00
But before I get there, but to this publishing point specifically, the key bit was the Internet was permissionless in terms of producing content. Like, it's great that you met your wife, but the fact that you needed to be in a situation where you could meet your wife was actually the reason why it wasn't going to happen. Because if you have to make a deal to do everything, it's just never going to get there. Whereas if you can just surf the Internet, the real Internet, and no one needs to do anything to adapt to it, suddenly you get it all for free. And then you get the virtual cycle going where they're making stuff for you. And that was sort of the, that's the timing bit is like the, the external structure around what you're doing.
Horace Dediu • 28:41
Yeah, it's, it's, it's complex and it's multi-causal and you're right. It's multiple, the reasons why things happen the way they are. And it's just not foreseeable. The internet was, and by the way, the thing that really caused the project to fail and be abandoned--this media distribution side note-- it was the fixation on DRM.
DRM actually killed a lot of great businesses with content ideas back in the day, whether it was music or video or textual. It was people just obsessed about protecting it before they obsessed about distributing it and making it great. And this is why when iTunes came along, even though there were some circumstances there with being on a Mac and not on the PC, that the publishers finally said, why don't we go ahead with this?
So long story there. But as far as what Nokia was doing, after four years of doing this startup inside of Nokia that did not work out, I got into the job of strategy analysis and competitive analysis. So they asked me to do Microsoft.
Microsoft was the biggest worry for everyone because they had intentions of being in the phone business. They made no secret about it. They had prototypes. They were working with competitors to Nokia. [Intending to] give them the operating system so that [for instance] Samsung running Microsoft [Mobile]. That was the effort.
They were pushing on all fronts. Nokia was holding out and saying "we've got our own operating system" and so on. So they gave me this job because every other competitor was hardware. All the analysts were covering hardware. I was the only guy who was covering a software company.
And in doing that, I was also sort of nibbling at Apple a little bit because the iPod had come out. The iPod was doing amazing, but it wasn't a phone product. And I was kind of looking at it a little bit.
Now Christensen comes back in the picture, because his book had taken off. He had already written the second book, which is The Innovator Solution. And I was like, hang on a second, a lot of stuff that I read in the book, and I remember back from my days at school, applies to Apple here because they're doing a lot of interesting things with being disruptive as the case may be.
Nokia itself had been disruptive in its early years. But I'm focused on Microsoft. And my point was that we can fight this battle and win, but we got to be very careful. And there's a lot of twists and turns there, but I took it upon myself also to understand what's going to happen with this media product from Apple.
And then I began to write a few internal notes because nobody was covering Apple. This is interesting and important. Imagine you have a team of a dozen analysts, you could put them on multiple jobs, assign people to multiple problems. No one thought that Apple was a problem to be looked at, even part time. No, there was nothing interesting about it.
And part of that had to do with the fact that [Nokia perceived that Apple had been] one foot in the grave already in the 90s. And now they were this little toy media company. They didn't really have scale. Phones were on the orders of billions of users already. And this iPod was in the tens of millions, maybe a hundred million. So it was orders of magnitude. There was no real worry there.
But I was really annoyed at this thing. And I started building a model. I remember distinctly opening a spreadsheet, looking at research reports and thinking to myself, let's look at the history of the iPod, how it's growing. And I started to match that to the Razr, which was the most viral product at the time, the Motorola Razr.
Even Nokia was jealous about this thing. At that time, [Motorola] had cumulative sales of 50 million, which was considered way too scary. (And BlackBerry was another one, by the way.) So I'm doing this and I'm like, hang on a second, what if they do a phone and it's a combination of the Razr and the iPod, could that resonate? And I just put it out there. I said, it's possible. And there was a rumor of the iPhone coming out.
Ben Thompson • 33:31
So Apple did do a Motorola Razr with iTunes functionality. Did that actually end up, because that was a flop. And did that actually make people not as like more relaxed?
Horace Dediu • 33:46
Because we knew that it didn't run an operating system. It didn't have a developer API, there was nothing, no hooks in it. It was just an appliance. And as such, it was like a feature phone. And that was not interesting. We had been talking and pounding the table on smartphones already since 2001. Remember, when I joined, we had a communicator. We had Symbian, Series 60. We had the interfaces. We had all picture phones, music, etc.
Ben Thompson • 34:20
I was a user as well.
Horace Dediu • 34:22
And I had done the numbers, and by 2005, people were burned out on smartphones. Because the projection was like this, but it was more like this. It wasn't growing as much as you thought it would. And so a lot of people said, especially the top management was like, "you guys are very enthusiastic about the software stuff, but it's just not working out. We're going to double down on hardware."
So there was a lot of burnout. So, but I kept looking at the phone at Apple and I suggested, hey, what if this thing scaled anyway? Like I said "what if they could sell as many as 50 million?" That was my provocation. And people were like, dude... I was essentially taken aside and told, tone it down. First of all, you're not doing yourself any favors by being so provocative. You're just going to lose credibility. My boss, who's a great guy he just took me aside and said, just don't do that. You know, it's bad for you.
Ben Thompson • 35:22
And this is like 2005, 2006, around then?
Horace Dediu • 35:25
Well, already 2006, because the iPhone was rumored. It wasn't out, but it was like, if you're going to have iPod success and you're going to do this crap phone with Motorola, you're probably thinking, maybe they're going to do something interesting beyond that, because we knew they could, in theory, do something.
We didn't see the touch interface, but we saw maybe like a scroll wheel or something. You know, Tony Fadell was running the thing. So, bottom line is, when it finally came out, it was January 2007. It came out and was not for sale, but it was on stage. And I was so excited. And I said, this is unbelievable.
I remember running into the office the next day. Usually you socialize at lunch hour, sitting in the cafeteria, talking to your friends and asking them what do they think about this? And most people just said, oh, it doesn't look that interesting. aspects of it were copied. There were copies from here and there. There are other people that do touch. You know, a stylus has been around for a long time with BlackBerry also doing amazing things with keyboard and so on and so on.
So there was a lot of cynicism and sort of not really interesting. I said, man, it's running OS X, it was running a full operating system. And I said, this is going to get developers working on it. But again, the other thing, the other head fake from Apple was that Steve Jobs said they're not going to put any apps on this thing unless Apple write them. I was anticipating far more than even was being talked about. And for that reason, it was just super frustrating. Anyway, I left in 2009. But by then, Nokia were still not following Apple.
Ben Thompson • 37:13
How is that possible? Like even two years on, this device is out there.
Horace Dediu • 37:19
Because it still didn't have distribution. And this is the thing that consumed everyone following the iPhone in the beginning. It's like they had one launch partner. It was initially Cingular, became AT&T. Don't forget that the old AT&T had nothing to do with this AT&T. It was just a rebrand of Cingular, which was a crappy, small, not very small, it was maybe second tier [operator.]
Ben Thompson • 37:47
Verizon didn't want to do it. Apple did this again and again. Verizon was number one.
Horace Dediu • 37:50
Verizon was number one. Absolutely. But Verizon was in CDMA. But the thing is that it was a crappy network and they didn't have a lot of points to sale. They didn't have distribution. and everybody said this, you need 500 network operators to saturate the global market, right?
And how fast are you going to be able to obtain distribution was the question. And so they're so cantankerous. You know, Apple is known as being "my way or the highway."
Verizon said no for years. Nokia was like, this is not going to fly. These guys are, if anything, they're naive. Don't forget, by the way, there's a separate story on how BlackBerry dealt with the iPhone. There's a movie about it, by the way. Everybody should watch it. But basically, everyone had the similar responses: that this is not kosher.
This is not the way things are done in this business. It's all about relationships with operators. It's about getting shelf space. It's about getting salesmen in the store who are bribed effectively with a commission to tell you what to buy, effectively yank the phone out of your hands and give you another one. So this was a very dirty business at the street level.
Ben Thompson • 39:19
So do you know what was the first what was the first article of mine that I think you ever linked to? It was about precisely. No, no, you don't need to know. I know because it was very formative to me. That's what I'm going to tell you. It was basically about talking about this was how distribution worked.
And what Apple changed about the whole thing was that customers actually switched networks for the iPhone. And it was doing just sort of a traditional sort of business school analysis of and pointing out the power shifted to instead of distribution to the buyers. Basically, what I ended up writing about for 13 years now is demand mattering more than sort of the supply bit. But it was the exact same thing. That's why you linked to it. You are you are already on board with it.
Horace Dediu • 40:04
But it was also the thing that resonated for me personally. Not that I knew something about the phone. Mostly I knew how big it could get. I knew that there were billions of people, many more billions than used PCs, which was by far the most dominant influence in technology.
Most people oriented themselves, like even Gruber and others who were Mac first and then all these accessories. But I knew the phone would be a couple of zeros more. That was number one.
Number two, there was this problem of the incumbency, which were all the phone makers, who were so far from understanding what the software dynamics of platforms were. By the way, platform theory was developed by Microsoft. They pretty much invented the whole idea.
A lively discsussion of Apple topics such as:
Contact us at events@asysmco.com if you have any questions.
For most up-to-date information, see
AI boosting Mac sales.
Mac mini and Mac Studio orders are facing unusually long shipping delays, stretching up to 4-5 months. This could hint at an upcoming M5 refresh or supply constraints.
After a few months of delay, Apple refreshed the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup with its new M5 family of chips in late February. The new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips bring a significant uplift in CPU, GPU and AI performance. The Mac Studio and Mac mini are also due for an M5 refresh, but it’s unclear when it will land.
The extended shipping delays of these Macs could be an early sign of that transition. Apple may be winding down inventory of current models ahead of the refresh. Or it could be struggling to keep up with demand. Despite their age, the Mac Studio and Mac mini are great for AI tasks.
In the US, the Apple Store currently shows a one-month delivery time for an M4 Pro Mac mini with 24GB of system memory. The shipping time jumps to a whopping 10-12 weeks if you bump the memory to 48GB.
Source: Cult of Mac
NB: The bias of the shortage toward the high end impli…
Podcast #AI #Apple 50 #Disruption Theory #Nostalgia #Origin Story · 4 comments
Ben Thompson of the Stratechery interviews Horace on the Stratechery Plus Podcast to discuss Horace's journey to become an influential tech analyst: early career in research, business school under Clayton Christensen, and his time at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone.
The conversation further explores Disruption Theory in the context of both smartphones and AI, why Christensen misjudged Apple, and whether AI could challenge today’s tech giants. It also marks the launch of Dediu’s new paid service Asymco One and reflects his continued conviction in Apple Inc. at its 50-year milestone.
Oh the humanity
On Tuesday, Apple announced updates to its Apple Business program
Apple Business isn’t so much a new thing as a consolidation of what used to be two separate products–Apple Business Manager and Apple Business Essentials–into one. The new platform includes device management, company email and calendar at your own domain, an employee directory, and brand management tools across Maps, Mail, Wallet, and Siri.
The device management piece used to cost money and was only available in the U.S. While you still pay if you want to add iCloud storage or AppleCare+ for business, the core business tools are now free. “We’ve unified Apple’s strongest business offerings into one simple, secure platform,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Enterprise and Education Marketing.
There are a number of ways this is a smart play for Apple. The company has been growing its share of small businesses, and having a suite of tools to help those businesses manage devices and software is a big part of that. And it’s even smarter than it might look, because the goal is to make Apple devices the default option at work. Once your company email, device management, and employee directory all run through Apple, leaving gets a lot harder.
All of that is actually helpful context for the new thing Apple announced: ads are coming to Apple Maps this summer in the US and Canada. That means that local businesses with a physical location can claim their listing through Apple Business, upload photos, set a budget, and run a campaign. Apple’s automated system runs an auction and delivers ads, much in the same way ads work on Google or Instagram. Advertisers only pay when someone views or taps their ad.
What’s most notable, however, is how Apple is approaching ads in its Maps app differently from Google Maps. The company says it will only show one ad per search, and won’t allow competitor search targeting, meaning you can’t buy an ad that shows up when someone searches for the coffee shop down the street.
“A user’s location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user’s Apple Account,” Apple said in its announcement. “Personal data stays on a user’s device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties.”
That’s a distinction that means a lot because, generally, consumers aren’t huge fans of ads. Partly that’s because they’re usually just in the way of finding whatever you were actually looking for, and partly because where there are ads, there’s usually data tracking.
Apple’s model is meaningfully different from how Google Maps advertising works. If you’ve opened Google Maps lately and searched for a local business, it’s not uncommon to see several sponsored results for other businesses before you see the one you actually searched for. I get that there’s money there, but it’s an absolutely garbage experience. If I type in the name of a business, there should never be paid results before the thing I asked you to show me.
Source: Inc.
NB: "It’s Apple’s Riskiest Bet Yet" No, it's not.…
Says Neal Stephenson who first coined the term “metaverse”
This revelation came soon after Meta canceled the Metaverse.
My thought was immediately, will Meta rename itself back to Facebook? We'll get to that soon, but first let's look into Neal Stephenson's mea culpa:
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that [Metaverse] was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.
A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.
When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.
Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.
Timing is everything and 20 years is always kicked around as some "infinite time horizon". It's notoriously difficult to predict when a transition happens and too many times we give up because we were certain how long it would take. That's rather the story of my life.
To remedy this, first, I never thought Magic Leap was interesting. Nor did I bother even skimming stories about Google Glass. I went nowhere near anything made by Facebook/Meta. Did not even try to use any one product, did not read specs, reviews or any other commentary.
I knew the products would not be very good being not much more than demos or experiments. To understand the market, you first need to make a marketable product and these were not good enough.
The goodness here was defined in the absence of creepiness. I've always argued that wearables are easily categorized: just look for places on the body where jewelry is placed and you'll know where wearables will be worn.
Jewelry has been developer for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years and it is inextricably connected to our psyche. Glasses do pass for jewelry but only if they conform to high standards of style. Functional objects rarely are granted status as ornament. Finding that balance is the key. It happened with watches and maybe ladies' hats.
Stephenson is right in saying that face ornaments are difficult "given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible."
That does not disqualify face wearables entirely. It simply needs design thinking and that's what was always what I expected from Apple. The Apple Vision Pro was not meant to be used socially. It does not even work outdoors.
It's a productivity product and one aimed at professionals. Apple will release a face wearable only when it conforms to its principles of user-centric design.
That was not the case for Meta because it is not a company concerned with customer satisfaction. Its business model is to sell users to advertisers and was motivated to enter device development only so as to disintermediate the smartphone. Doing so would remove any impediments to harvesting users data. The priority of user affinity and affection was nice to have but it requires a maniacal attention to even have a chance of success at being loved.
Rebranding around a hypothesis like the metaverse was impulsive but Facebook was a dying brand anyway and having diversified well beyond it, deprecating it was no great loss. Slapping on the Meta moniker was a bark up the wrong tree but not much was lost. I doubt there will be another change unless Zuckerberg falls in love with another way to get rid of its distributors.
NB: Apple never chose to use Metaverse branding. What it developed was spatial computing. It approached the problem not as a content but as a platform and user interface. Will we move to spatial computing en masse to the detriment of "rectangles in our pockets". I don't think that the right question. In reflecting on the past of computing, a new platform did not just replace the previous but created new markets altogether.
Each new interface was an order of magnitude more popular than its predecessor. Keyboard, mouse, touch, each added a few zeroes to the number of users. We are now at nearly 1:1 machine to human. I don't think that this is the limit.
We are entering the n:1 machines to human and wearables are the only way we get there. And as I said, where there is jewelry there will be a machine. Spatial interfaces are more natural as far as our perceived reality is concerned. The rest is engineering.
Make no small plans
50 already? It seems only a blink of an eye since I wrote Apple at 40. Let's try copy & paste.
In Apple’s first 40 50 years it shipped 1,591,092,250 5,126,211,000 computers[1].
This shipment total is higher than any other computer company in its first 40 50 years. Actually there are no other PC makers that are 40 50 years old. One computer maker (IBM) is older but they only sold PCs for 24 years and what they still sell they don’t sell in high numbers.
That does not make Apple the top seller in a given year. Looking at only the Mac, Apple’s traditional form factor personal computer, Apple is fifth fourth in market share. If including the iPad, it was the top computer vendor in 2011 and, including the iPhone, it was first in 2009.
The following graph shows the top computer makers by units sold since 1975, a year before Apple was founded. (Click on the graph to see a higher resolution.)
Note that the graph is log scale and in multiples of 1000. Following the yellow Apple line we can see how it started with fewer than 1000 units shipped in its first year to today when it is shipping more than 1 million computers every day[2]. It's also quite remarkable to count how many other companies have come and gone in this top five list and imagine how many came and went in the "other" category.
Who remembers Atari, Commodore, Packard Bell, Compaq? Few said that they were doomed while they were in the running. Going back to Apple at 40,
After having a 40 50 year run and after selling more computers than all American and Japanese computer companies put together, how should we think about the next 40 50 years?
First, clearly Apple shifted from being a “computer company”. It has already changed its name to exclude the word “Computer.” That [came to mean that] it sells devices (which happen to also include computers.) We don't use computers to compute anyway. We use them to make decisions, keep track of things, speed things up and to communicate and to entertain.
After convincing the world that it's a not just a computer company, the next challenge has been to convince the world that it's also not just a product company. It did so by launching Services as a group (formerly known as iTunes Software and Services) and then separating the financial reporting so that Services can be measured with its own gross margin. Year after year management emphasized Services growth in its commentary. Services has grown into the second largest segment, 26% of total revenues ($112.8 billion out of 435.6 billion in calendar 2025.)
Services, if it stood alone, would be number 40 in the Fortune 500 list of largest companies by sales. It has been impossible to ignore it. Considering how much customers actually spend on Apps, Content and Services, the total is even bigger at $240 billion last year[3]. As a result, some, perhaps most, recognize Apple as a Products & Services company.
The App store alone attracts $169 billion in spending per year (2025) and that is now 5x what theatrical movie sales bring in world-wide.[4]
So if Apple is today at least a bundle of Products and Services then what will Apple be 50 years from now?
Again from Apple 40:
My simple proposal is to think of Apple as a customer creator. It creates and maintains customers. The more it creates, the more it prospers. The more customers it preserves the more it’s likely to persevere. This measure of performance for a company is not easy to obtain. It’s not a line item in any financial report.
The closest figure we have is that today Apple has one 2.5 billion active devices in use. It has around 1.1 billion users [5]. Using the devices as a proxy, we can say that this audience has more than doubled in the last decade.
So we know that at least Apple has created a large number of customers. Knowing total devices sold and number in use means that we can be sure that 63% of all the computers Apple sold are still in use. This means that most customers are recent customers. Are they going to come back?
If we then factor in the size and persistence of Apple’s audience (customer base) we might conclude that there are factors which will allow it to grow rather than shrink. My analysis based on public data shows that the customer base has been increasing steadily.
And here is a graph showing the size of device base and implications for subscriptions. services and comparisons with other consumer aggregators. Note the forward looking nature of a linear extrapolation of the historical data.
10 years ago, I continued:
Combining the history of customer creation and customer preservation with the value obtained from each customer implies that the next 40 years will be about creating another large tranche of customers whose willingness to spend on whatever Apple creates will be relatively unchanged.
We don’t know the limit. One billion was hard to imagine even one year ago. We might see two billion devices in short order. Perhaps not. Perhaps as we have a multitude of devices about us all day the number will become less meaningful. But if the number of middle class customers grows and as Apple keeps its products within their reach, there is no reason to think that there will be a reversal of the last 40 years in terms of customer acquisition.
This analysis contradicts the current perception of the company as reflected by its stock price. That price assumes the audience will wither ((With a P/E ratio of 11, without a change in revenue per user, the only justification would be the audience shrinking by more than 90% over the next 20 years.)) That is not insanity. It is what we could expect if Apple were unexceptional.
We did see 2 billion. We actually saw 2.5 billion. The assumption of a company in distress as reflected by the P/E ratio of 11 is gone. It's safe to say that Apple is exceptional.
But note that we are only 10 years into that 40 year forecast from a decade ago. Do we still feel confident that the company can last 30 more years given what we've seen so far? If one company could get through the next 30 I would say it is Apple. And if it is so then I think it will get through the next 50.
One more Thing
So, the plan is to make more of the same. It's more than enough.
Asymco Bulletin is a digest of all the work we have published for the week ending Mar 22, 2026.
Executive exodus explicated.
In December, the company lost AI chief John Giannandrea, its top lawyer and a key design executive in a single week. Other recent headlines: “Apple faces unprecedented executive exodus”, “Apple rocked by executive departures, with chip chief at risk of leaving next.” “Apple home devices executive leaves for Finland’s Oura” “Lisa Jackson is set to retire late January 2026, while Kate Adams will retire in late 2026”. That’s just the names we hear about. They represent senior executives. But the harsh truth is that Apple lost tens of thousands of talented developers, marketers and mangers last year.
What's wrong with this analysis? →
Remembering the PC market.
Almost 10 years ago I said “Managing the Mac product line must be one of the most challenging problems at Apple. That may not be obvious given the product’s success.” I pointed out that although the company grew the Mac into a redeemed and prosperous platform, “The big change in computing has not been a growing Mac vs. declining PC. It has been a huge surge in mobile device use vs. a decline in PC use overall.” It’s time to revisit this observation. First, a status update: The Mac is in its 42nd year...
How to read the history of the Mac and how to look at market share gains potential. Also: why the Mac has always been a cheaper alternative for buyers. →
Apple’s China smartphone sales jump 23% as overall market fell 4% to start 2026 → Apple defied market trends with a striking 23% iPhone sales surge in China, outpacing competitors despite broader smartphone shipment declines. →
Running a data-center AI model on a MacBook → The article discusses how Apple's MacBook Pro, with its unique Apple silicon architecture, could revolutionize personal AI by enabling powerful AI models to run locally without relying on cloud data centers, potentially shifting the competitive landscape in Apple's favor despite current perceptions of lagging behind in AI advancements. →
Tim Cook: Apple just had best launch week ever for first-time Mac customers → Apple's MacBook Neo reportedly had its strongest launch week for attracting first-time Mac buyers, hinting at successful customer transitions from Windows. →
Apple, Samsung Dominate 2025 List of Highest-shipping Models Across Regions → In 2025, Apple dominated premium smartphone markets across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, while Samsung excelled in entry- to mid-tier segments in Latin America and the Middle East and Africa. →
Apple Is Way Behind in AI—and Still Making a Fortune From It: WSJ → "Apple's billion-dollar AI distribution play highlights its retail prowess but pales against its trillion-dollar ambitions." →
Lobster Boil → "OpenClaw, a revolutionary open-source AI agent by Peter Steinberger, transforms personal computing by autonomously managing tasks across platforms, sparking a Mac Mini craze and hinting at a future where AI agents are integral to daily life." →
‘No Near-Term Catalyst,’ KeyBanc on Apple Stock → Near-term catalysts may not sway long-term investors, but if Apple's valuation seems steep, critique the pricing, not its promising 14% revenue growth forecast. →
Tim Cook squashes retirement rumors, says he ‘can’t imagine life without Apple’ → Tim Cook dismisses rumors of stepping down, emphasizing his enduring passion for Apple and suggesting stability through potential political changes. →
NVIDIA’s Language Processing Units Shipments Swell 10x+ vs Previous Yr (but how do they compare to Apple Silicon volumes?) → NVIDIA's Groq investment boosts LPU forecasts to 4-5 million, yet Apple's 500 million AI chips dwarf this, hinting at centralized intelligence reminiscent of '1984.' →
Harmful chemicals found in popular headphones → Apple's AirPods Pro 2 and JBL's Tune 720BT topped the safety charts, while budget brands like Temu raised red flags for hazardous chemical exposure. →
When does Apple split its stock? → Apple's stock split history shows a pattern of adjusting high share prices to maintain accessibility, with splits occurring around $100-$650 thresholds, potentially hinting at a $300 minimum for future splits. →
Asymco One gives you full access to our research, analysis, and commentary. Subscribe with code BULLETIN for a discount.
Feedback: Have questions or comments? Reach out to us at contact@asymco.com. We’d love to hear from you.
