When one of the most successful investors of all time says that a company is "probably the best business I know in the world", it probably means something.
And Warren Buffett has been right about Apple.
Yesterday the tech giant produced another staggering set of results, reporting more than $123bn of revenue for a single quarter. That works out to about $1.36bn per day, $57 million an hour or about $945,000 of sales every single minute.
The services side-hustle
About 15% of that revenue came from Apple's Services division — think the App Store, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple TV, the iCloud and more. That business has grown steadily, halting only briefly during the pandemic last year, before resuming its upward march towards ~$20bn of quarterly revenue. For some context on just how big that is, it's more than double what Netflix makes per quarter ($8bn), and about 15x what Twitter makes ($1.3bn).
With people holding onto phones for longer, and with upgrades becoming more incremental (honestly, what else would you want your phone to be able to do?), Apple is unlikely to sell as many iPhones going forward. But it almost doesn't matter as long as Apple keeps people in its "walled garden". With 1.8 billion already active Apple devices, there's a lot of opportunity for Apple's Services business to keep growing.
