It’s important to note that just because Apple’s iPhone sales might surpass the $1 trillion mark, that doesn’t mean Apple’s market capitalization will reach $1 trillion, which is a different metric. Still, selling $1 trillion worth of iPhones is a pretty notable achievement.
The report also mentions that Apple may have sold as many as 1.2 billion iPhone units in the device’s first 10 years of sales — making it the “most successful product of all time,” according to the report.
According to the author of the report, Horace Dediu, who is an analyst at Asymco, if iPhone sales continue on their current path iOS product sales will hit around $980 billion by the middle of this year. Hardware, however, isn’t the only income stream to take into account with iOS — on top of the $980 billion from hardware, Apple has brought in around $100 billion from things like apps, media, and so on — bringing that figure well past the $1 trillion mark.
The report goes into more detail about iPhone use, too. For example, Dediu says that there are approximately 17.5 trillion iPhone sessions every year — which he says come from 600 million active devices that are each unlocked 80 times per day on average.
So what could cause Apple to become a $1 trillion company in actual market capitalization? Analysts suggest that the company needs one more “home run” product. The iPhone was one of those, as was the iPod before it. Some hoped Apple’s Project Titan car would be the next such product, but now there are doubts that the car will ever be released.
