12 Facts About Apple's Business That Will Blow Your Mind

Seth Fiegerman

Jul 26, 2012, 3:07 AM

Photo: Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Apple’s third quarter earnings may have disappointed Wall Street, but Apple’s business is as impressive as ever.As analyst Michael Gartenberg put it on Twitter, “Only $35B in revenue and 8.8b in profit. Yes, only in the US could this be called a bad quarter but Wall St. is Wall St.”

Business Insider went through the company’s latest earnings numbers to find the most awe-inspiring facts about Apple’s business.

Apple's 'disappointing' quarterly revenue of $35 billion was still more than the combined revenue of Microsoft, Google, RIM and Netflix this quarter.

Apple's pile of cash increased to $117 billion last quarter. That's enough to buy Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest and still have $30 billion leftover.

Facebook's current market cap is about $60 billion and LinkedIn's market cap is about $10.5 billion. Twitter is valued at around $10 billion and the most generous estimates for Pinterest value it around $7 billion. That leaves roughly another $30 billion leftover, which would be enough to buy up Dell. Or you know, it could just hold on to that extra money.

In fact, Apple's cash pile increased by $7.045 billion last quarter, which is more than Nokia's current market cap of ~6.8 billion.

Source: Asymco

Apple sold 17 million iPads in the third quarter, which is an 84% increase year-over-year and a new record for a single quarter.

Apple has now shipped more than 84 million iPads since the product launched in 2010.

It took Apple twice as long to sell that many iPods and a third longer to sell that many iPhones, according to Tim Cook. It just shows how quickly the demand for the iPad is accelerating.

To put this number in perspective, there were about 18 million tablets shipped worldwide by all companies in 2010 and 68.7 million tablets shipped in 2011, according to data from IDC. Put that all together and it's only a couple million more than the total number of iPads Apple has shipped to date.

For all the talk about sluggish iPhone sales, Apple generated $16.2 billion in revenue from iPhones, which is $4 billion higher than Google's entire revenue last quarter.

Apple sold 1.3 million Apple TVs last quarter, while Microsoft sold 1.1 million Xbox 360s worldwide during the same period, according to Geekwire. Not bad for a product that Apple's CEO Tim Cook referred to as a 'hobby.'

Each Apple store generates an average of $11.1 million in revenue and receives 17,000 visitors per week.

410,000,000: That's how many iOS devices Apple has sold to date.

It sold 45 million iOS devices just in the last quarter.

All of that has helped Apple pay out a whopping $5.5 billion to developers so far.

As TheNextWeb points out, that means Apple now makes about $18.5 from app sales per device and pays out $13 to developers. Good luck competing with that, Android.