3 charts for you today:
Apple, the world's most valuable company, just reported more than $81bn of revenue for the three months ending in June — a 36% increase on the same quarter last year. That works out to roughly $900m a day or $10,000 every single second... for three months straight.
The iPhone matters less...
The iPhone is still the biggest driver for Apple, accounting for just under half of Apple's total sales, but that share has fallen in recent years as Apple has diversified into wearables (like the Apple Watch and AirPods) and Services.
That Services business is the bit that probably gets investors most excited these days as Services revenue (from things like Apple Music, the App Store, Apple Pay, Apple TV and more) tends to be a lot more predictable than selling $1,000+ phones. It also comes with tasty profit margins (70% gross margin)
....or maybe not
Of course Apple can only sell most of those services because there are (literally) like a billion people already walking around with iPhones. There are only so many people Apple can sell an iPhone to, but as long as they maintain that market share they can keep people in the "Apple ecosystem". How many people do you know who have to have a Mac or AirPods or an Apple Watch just because everything "works together"?
Apple is hoping that its next big product breakthrough might be the Apple Car — which has been in pretty secret development since 2014.
Elsewhere in tech land, pretty much every big tech company you can think of had a great 3 months. Microsoft, Tesla, Google etc.
Data from the American Time Use Survey reveals just how the pandemic changed where we spend our time, who we spend it with and what we spend it doing.
The loneliness pandemic
The data from the ATUS confirmed a lot of things we already knew. We spent more time at home, less time at work and less time in big groups of people. But one statistic surprised us more than others, which was that on average, Americans spent roughly one extra hour per day alone, with time spent alone increasing for every age group surveyed from 15-19 year-olds, all the way to ages 75+.
Pre-pandemic, 15-19 year-olds spent roughly 4 hrs 20 minutes alone per day (on average). Last year that number was 6 hours per day — a 40% increase in time spent alone, the largest increase of any age group.
For 17 year-olds that change is likely to have some effects that are probably quite hard to predict. For older generations though, loneliness was a known problem long before the pandemic came along, with isolation having been linked to various medical conditions by a number of studies. It's concerning then that the ATUS found that the average person aged 75 or older spent almost 9 hours a day alone in 2020, up 40 minutes on the year before.
YouTube and Netflix are quite similar in many ways. Both provide video content. Both have become global giants in the last 20 years. Both made about $7bn in revenue last quarter. Both have nice red logos.
The difference, of course, is that Netflix has to produce or buy their content, at eye-watering expense, while YouTube's is uploaded completely for free by its users. Social media platforms might be hard to get off the ground, but once that advertising model starts to take off, user generated content is a literal gold mine.
1) What's a gold medal worth? A lifetime of glory, a great mantelpiece decoration, the realization of a childhood dream — and $37,500if you live in the USA.
2) Pfizer announced that it sold $7.8bn worth of COVID-19 shots in the second quarter of this year, with more than a billion doses of its Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine having now been administered globally.
3) Interesting data on how dominant Simone Biles has been in gymnastics, after her withdrawal from the individual all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympics.
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5) Scientists have detected water vapor in the thin atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.
6) Professional football (soccer) players in England could be limited to 10 "high force" headers in training, as concern about the long-term damage of headers grows.
**This is sponsored content.
