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How much stuff did Apple have to sell to make $81 billion in revenue?

All those iPhone, iPad, and Mac sales add up.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

$81.4 billion. That's how much revenue Apple pulled in over the Q3 quarter.

That's $81.4 billion in 90 days.

Over $900 million a day.

Nearly $38 million an hour.

$628,000 a minute.

More than $10,000 a second.

That's a lot of money.

But how much product did Apple have to sell to pull that sort of revenue in?

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Apple doesn't give us information on units sold any more -- which is a shame, but we can make some educated guess.

Let's start with the biggest chunk of revenue -- the iPhone.

Let's assume that the average selling price (ASP) for an iPhone is $700. Given the lineup, the price ranges, and what analysts estimate, it seems like a good number.

On iPhone revenues of $39.57 billion, that means some 56.5 million iPhones sold.

Let's assume for Macs an ASP of $1,300. On revenues of $8.2 billion, that's some 6.3 million Macs, which would be strong sales.

Things get hazy with the iPad since that category is so diverse, but it does lean more towards the lower end of the price spectrum. Let's thrown $600 intothe calculation as the ASP, which would mean some 12 million iPads sold to generate a revenue of $7.3 billion.

The wearables and accessories category is a tough one to break down because there's so much in there, so I'll leave that out, and services -- the second-largest category behind the iPhone -- because it doesn't involve products.

But it's clear that Apple needs to shift a lot of units -- nearly 75 million iPhones, iPads, and Macs -- and manage a huge supply and sales chain in order to keep this sort of revenue flowing in.

From a logistical sense, it's very impressive indeed.

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