While Apple’s gorgeous hardware certainly catches people’s attention, people often forget to think about the driving force behind it all: The software. Asymco.com recently reported on how the profit from iOS and OS X outpaces the profits Microsoft makes from windows by about 350%!
On the Mac side of things Asymco offers the following:
While a lot of the credit for Apple’s success is rightfully assigned to the iOS franchises, the OS X business has more than quadrupled in five years. This has happened without drastic price fluctuations. Neither holds for the overall PC industry which has seen both volume and sales decline while prices have eroded along with profitability. On top of that, growth has nearly evaporated.
Apple has seen a dramatic increase in the use of the Mac platform in recent years, yet the fact remains that it still only accounts for 20% of Apple’s total profits. The growth of iOS has been even more remarkable, and Apple’s mobile platform now accounts for more than 75% of Apple’s total profits. The combination of the two makes up over 95% of the total profit for Apple.
So, lets forget for a moment that Windows has earned twice as much cash as the Mac earned – OS X and iOS together enabled 3.5 times the profit of Windows. With that kind of success, it’s a little bit easier to keep things in perspective.
