MAX NOBLE

Most companies sell you something once and then go looking for the next stranger. Apple does the opposite. It builds a place you live inside: your photos, your messages, your music, your passwords, the way you pay for coffee. Every new device makes that place a little harder to leave, and the next purchase a little easier to make.

The scale is hard to picture. In its 2025 financial year Apple sold $416.2 billion of products and services. Almost half of that — $209.6 billion — came from a single object in your pocket: the iPhone. No company of this size leans so heavily on one product, and none defends it so well.

But the iPhone is not where the story gets interesting. Look instead at what Apple keeps on what it sells. On physical products — phones, Macs, iPads — it keeps about 37 cents of every dollar. On Services — the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, advertising — it keeps just over 75 cents. Services are now a $109 billion business growing 14% a year — more than twice the pace of the company as a whole.

The hardware earns the relationship. The services earn the profit.

That is the whole business in one idea. The expensive devices exist to enrol you. Once your life is stored across three of them, you are no longer choosing Apple each year — you are simply staying. Apple never locks you in. It makes leaving feel like loss.

It is why Apple can charge more than its rivals and still grow, and why a majority of its sales now come from outside the United States. To judge whether that can continue, we have to look at the two quiet pressures on those margins — tariffs, and Apple's deep reliance on one product in one contested market.

Every figure here is taken directly from Apple’s audited annual report. Read the source →