Apple recently announced its results for the three months ended June 25. More than $7 billion in net income for the quarter — not bad. I’ve been thinking about the massive scale of our aggregate consumption, though, so a couple of other numbers were more interesting.
The company sold 9.25 million iPad 2’s in the quarter. And 20.34 million iPhones.
The iPad is 0.34 inches thick. So if you stacked up the sales from that single quarter, you would have a 49.64 mile-high column of iPads. NASA awards astronaut wings to those who fly 50 miles up or higher.
The iPhone 4 is 0.37 inches thick, so their stack would climb to an altitude of about 119 miles. Mount Everest tops out at 5.5 miles above sea level.
The lesson? A sliver (in this case, a very sexy, high-tech sliver) of consumption for man is, on the whole, an astronomical use of resources for mankind.
3 Comments
But factor in all those books not printed but read on the ipad, all those miles not travelled because you can video chat on your ipad and download movies instead of going out.
If the ipad takes out the kindle is that more or less resources?
All this mostly tongue firmly in cheek, but the math is hard, no?
You neglected to mention the ethical upside in all the virtually-angered birds and all the digital pigs crushed to death in imaginary collapsing structures, none of which required the harming of actual animals.
Oh, that math is really hard. But point isn’t so much the relative resource burden (shoot, thanks to my droid phone I don’t own a camcorder anymore, don’t need a portable alarm clock, stopwatch, point-and-shoot camera etc, so those are all resource debits, too), but the enormous scale of the demands we put on the planet, period, which we rarely think about and is hard to put in perspective.
Not that consumption is inherently a bad thing, either. But the impacts how we live/what we buy should be in the back of our minds.
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