Apple captures 50% of consumer revenue of the top half of the S&P 500

zdw 67 points 50 comments November 01, 2026
asymco.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (8 comments)

torben-friis

The page doesn't load at the moment and yet this is getting 5 upvotes every refresh. Is it bot-raised or are people voting based on just the title?

AnotherGoodName

This makes no sense at all Amazon $716.92 billion revenue 2025 Apple $416.16 billion revenue 2025 That's just one company that has more let alone the whole index combined dwarfing Apple. Where does that graph that shows apple as a 100x outlier on consumer revenue even come from? It's not at all correct and doesn't pass the most basic smell test. Yet this is an entire article about this hallucinated fact?

criemen

> A large number of companies offer 0% consumer exposure: Nvidia I thought they're still selling gaming GPUs? What did I miss?

AndrewKemendo

I stopped thinking about Apple as a technology company when I realized they ACTIVELY fast follow instead of being pioneers in fundamental technology. I don’t think that’s an insult or bad, if anything it makes them more reliable as a company because they ride the wave of technological advancement rather than on the leading edge. That’s a really great position as long as you have no ego about being the first - and they repeat over and and over that are THE BEST not the first. Being third for 100 years beats being first for 40 years and Apple has the Middle Kingdom strategy

andsoitis

The author appears to be comparing Apple's revenue against a measure closer to retailers' gross margins rather than their total consumer sales.

thingfyi

> When looking at other large companies today, I noted that most of them are focused on selling to institutions rather than consumers. This really shows that one that owns the consumer devices has a big leverage to play even in the age of AI - the entry to almost everything.

mrDmrTmrJ

Claiming that Meta's revenue is 0% consumer is something... (Why do advertisers pay Meta???) Showing Alphabet's revenue by % of total revenue, as opposed to bar charts breaking out revenue by division, is chart crime. I like apple and Asymco. But this is post 'How to lie with statistics 101.' Meaningfully lowers my opinion of Asymco

prewett

The author doesn't understand Berkshire Hathaway. They have lots of consumer companies, GEICO being a large one, also a manufactured home manufacturer, See's Candies (not large by revenue, though), a furniture retailer, etc. A fair amount of Berkshire's revenue also comes from dividends from consumer companies, like Coca-Cola and Apple. Buffett's investing principle was to only purchase companies with predictable revenue streams, which has a certain mature consumer-company nature to it.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
11,391 stories · 107,783 chunks indexed