Visualizing Apple’s Dinner Table Of Products [Chart]

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Screen Shot 2013-08-22 at 8.28.11 AM

Three years ago, Tim Cook very memorably said that although Apple was selling $40 billion worth of products every year (that number has since more than quadrupled), all of Apple’s products could fit on a dining room table. That amazing quote was slightly disingenuous — many of Apple’s products are virtual, and take up no physical space at all — but it still made a point: Apple chooses what it does so carefully that everything has its place. What Cupertino doesn’t do is just as important as what it does.

It’s all interesting food for thought, to be sure, but what if we took Tim Cook’s table metaphor and broke it down? For every foot of table, how much money does Apple make on each product?

Using Tim Cook’s quote above as inspiration, charting maestro Horace Dediu decided to make the table a reality:

…[R]ather than trying to imagine a table full of Apple products (some of which are non-physical) I thought a more fitting analogy would be to allocate the revenues from these products to a table and thinking about how much space relative to each other the products would take.

To make conversion easier, I picked a rather large table; 10 feet long, big enough to fit a small conference room. What would this table covered in product revenue look like?

As you can see above, about six feet of that table is made up of iOS devices, with the iPhone 5 taking the lion’s share of the table. The Mac is responsible for another foot-and-a-half or so, with various iTunes revenues (apps, music and videos) accounting for about the same length of table space. The Apple TV is just a sliver of the table, less than 0.3-inches long. Various accessories make up the remainder of the table, a mere 3.6-inches.

Amazing how much space at the table some of the smallest Apple products take up, isn’t it?

Source: Asymco

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