Comment by nelsonic

That number is pulled from deep inside somebody's bowels.

The one spare cable per two devices attach rate seems pretty high to me. One, because people won't necessarily buy apple-branded cables when they can buy cheaper third party ones instead. Two, because a lot of the people who are sufficiently deep into the Apple ecosystem that they would buy original cables probably have a bazillion of them lying about anyway, because you get them with the Apple TV, and the Magic Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad, and the airpods, and all your old phones, and probably some other devices I'm not thinking of right now. So the actual revenue from cable sales seems awfully inflated.

Then there's the counterfactual: Whatever revenue they do get from cables, they wouldn't lose it all. If you consider the people who buy Apple-branded Lightning cables instead of third party cables, I'd hazard guessing that most of them would still have bought Apple-branded USB-C cables if the devices used those. Apple sells USB-C charge cables (like the ones that come with the iPad) for the same $19 as the Lightning cables.

Put the two factors together, and I can't see the economics of cable sales being the driver for something as fundamental as the ports on their flagship products.

This is an incredibly naive estimate, and the author couldn't even get the simple math right. (22 billion + 330 million) * $18 = $45.5B.

Most Lightning cables are sold by 3rd parties, Lightning didn't even appear on iPhones/iPads until the iPhone 5 and 4th-gen iPad, etc.

>Apple sold more than 2.2 billion iPhones and more than 360 million iPads before they stopped making numbers public.

>Say for every second iPhone or iPad sold, a user bought just one extra Apple Lightning cable for $19 which probably costs Apple around $1 (if not less) to make.

>That’s give or take $43.5B on Lightning cable sales alone.

I don't follow, `(2.2B + 360M) / 2 * 18` is not 43.5B.

You really think Apple sells $43B worth of Lightning cables?