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Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

No they're not. They're a different company serving a different, and now global audience. Consider that Apple is more than 5% of America's entire GDP, and 1% of the world's entire GDP. There are ~1 billion people in the Apple ecosystem and that number is an under-estimate. When Apple chooses to add Sapphire as a material to the Apple Watch or iPhone, they affect global prices for the raw material.

People still don't get it. It's not a game of pattern matching with their past. Not only have they and their customers changed, but the world has changed. Computing has changed.

These articles always fail to consider context in favor of the easy, selective, myopic pattern matching.

Don't take this to mean that Apple is above criticism. They're not. But articles like this are lazy.

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> Apple's market capitalization is more than 5% of America's entire GDP.

This compares apples to oranges. In case anyone else is curious:

Apple's worldwide revenue (258 billion) is 1.2% of America's GDP (19.9 trillion) or 0.3% of World GDP (84 trillion).

I'd argue it's not quite as bad as comparing Apples to Oranges.

Apple's value (market cap) is intrinsically tied to the stock market and America's growth.

But thanks for posting the revenue calculations as well. I think those numbers still support my point (because they too, are crazy)

Apple even just 15 years ago was a scrappy company trying to find its footing and had nowhere near the customer base it does today.

Sorry, I was trying to explain why I was providing additional statistics.

It's technically a stock vs flow difference. Not trying to correct, just expand.

I think it was helpful! Thank you for expanding on the numbers.

It blows my mind that 0.3% of the worlds "effort" goes to apple products.

Thanks!

The better comp for market cap would be US capital stock I think. The St Louis Fed puts it at around 60 trillion, which also puts Apple at ~1.6 percent of the economy.

Pet peeve: company market cap cannot and should not be compared to GDP of a country. The best comparable is the "Gross Value Added" GVA = delta in EBITDA + employee compensation, as outlined here by Matt Klein in FT Alphaville:

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2103622/if-apple-were...

Others have recently estimated Apple GVA to be 0.5% of US GDP and 0.15% of world GDP.

There are a ton of ways to slice these numbers, but no matter how you slice them the result is just insane as a percentage of America and the World - which was my point.

I appreciate you pointing out an alternate methodology though.

The magnitude matters a lot, though, and suggesting that Apple is more than 5% of the US GDP is incorrect and vastly overstates their contribution to the US economy.

The 1.2%/1.6% and even 0.5% figures quoted by others in this thread are still high numbers for a single company, but I submit that "more than 5%" would be a very different number (3x-20x, depending on which of the other numbers you believe) and is a gross exaggeration.

> Apple's market capitalization is more than 5% of America's entire GDP.

Ugh. Comparing a dollar number with a dollars/year number is really ugly. It's not even the same unit!!

>Consider that Apple is more than 5% of America's entire GDP, and 1% of the world's entire GDP.

When you put it like that it really does bring Apple's dominance into sharp relief.

It's a bit off, based off 2018 numbers they're a little over 1% of the US GDP and a little over 0.3% of the world's GDP. Could be more off, since I don't know where their products that are both made and sold in other countries are counted. Still insane that they could be close to a whole number percentage though, especially with their (relatively) limited product line.

It's weird to compare unlike things.

(the only attribute of apple that is 5% of US GDP is market cap.)

I think the criticism that a closed ecosystem is myopic and a competitive disadvantage is a fair one, though. Apple used to have a monopolistic stronghold on smartphones, but that is no longer the case. As in the nineties, a walled garden is going to look less appealing if there are cheaper, more open competitors offering as-good or better hardware.

Outside of phones, their MacBooks are teetering on the edge of no longer being competitive. The sole reason I most recently bought a MacBook instead of a different PowerBook with a tablet screen is that Linux support for tablet screens is still lacking, and my desire for POSIX overrode my desire for a touch screen. The next time I buy, I doubt that will be true of Linux. Either Apple will come late to the game with touch screen laptops (rather exemplifying the article's point that their hardware lags the competition), or they won't, and it will make far more sense to get a faster third party tablet book and put a free OS on it. And I doubt the average customer will care as much about POSIX as I do, but again, as in the nineties, serious developers aren't going to take Apple seriously forever if this keeps up.

Thing is, POSIX doesn't matter at all for developers that target Apple platforms.

Our devs on Macs use them for Objective-C, Swift, Java and .NET Core.

Apple still owns most of the profit in smartphones, and they don’t really care about so-called market share that really just applies to the loss leaders.

Just as a datapoint. I'm running Linux on the Surface Pro and outside some initial tweaking it runs great.

There have only ever been two or three quarters in the entire history of the iPhone that Apple was even the number one smartphone maker and it never had more than around 25% market share.

I think Jobs learned from Atari that having an open platform for people to produce all kinds of junk for may not be in your or your customer's best interest.

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