The average knowledge worker will spend 44+ years of their adult life staring at a screen

How effectively is Apple monetizing this time?

A poll of 2,000 adults found that the average reported time spent looking at screens per day was 17.15 hours or 6,259 hours per year. This included time spent on computers, phones, TV and gaming devices. The breakdown by device was as follows:

• Laptop/Computer: 4 hours and 54 minutes

• Phone: 4 hours and 33 minutes

• TV: 4 hours and 30 minutes

• Gaming devices: 3 hours and 12 minutes

The same poll was conducted during Covid-19 lockdown and found an additional 2 hours were spent on screens:

• Laptop/Computer: 5 hours 10 minutes

• TV: 5 hours 9 minutes

• Phone: 5 hours 2 minutes

• Gaming devices: 3 hours 45 minutes

Total time: 19.1 hours or 6,971.5 hours per year.

There are only 8,760 hours in a year (24 X 365). If you assume 7 hours spent in bed then we have 6,205 (17 X 365) hours remaining.

There are at least three things happening that make this data wonky:

1. There is likely double counting going on, for example someone browsing social media while watching TV.

2. Less than half of adults play on gaming devices, and most of those that do don’t spend this amount of time, so this sample is not representative of the population at large.

3. The TV and gaming figures are so high that I’m guessing the poll only averaged non-zero responses. For example, if someone doesn’t use a gaming device or watch TV at all they’re probably not included in the calculation.

I spent about 20 minutes Googling and did find numerous estimates on smartphones specifically that seemed to agree on the following ranges:

1. 4-6 hours for millennials and older

2. 6-8 hours for Gen Z

These estimates are more accurate because companies can actually collect this data straight from the phones of people who opt in to tracking programs.

I also found multiple estimates for total screen time that came in around 11 hours. This is probably accurate for most knowledge workers (6-8 hours on a computer + phone time).

Now let me put this into company specific terms using Apple as an example.

I had to make some inferences based on market share but these are ballpark accurate. By the end of this year Apple will probably have around 1.9 billion active devices with a mix that is something like the following:

1. iPhones: 1.1 billion

2. Apple Watch: 110 million

3. Macs: 310 million

4. iPads: 400 million

I’m going to use the following per-device figures to calculate annual time spent on Apple products:

1. 6 hours for iPhones

2. 5 hours for Macs

3. 15 minutes for Apple Watch

4. 30 minutes for iPads

On a per user per device basis, this gives us the following time spent per year:

1. iPhones: 2,190 hours per year or 35% of total “wake time”

2. Macs: 1,825 hours per year or 29% of total “wake time”

3. Apple Watch: 91 hours or 1.5% of total “wake time”

4. iPads: 182 hours or 3% of total “wake time”

For someone that owns all four devices we’re looking at 4,288 hours or 69% of total waking hours being spent using an Apple product on an annual basis. If this person started using these devices at age 18 and used them until their expected death at 86 (I’m guessing the average person using four Apple devices will have a significantly higher life expectancy than average), we have the following:

1. 291,584 total hours spent; or

2. 33 years (including sleep); or

3. 47 years worth of “wake time”

The breakdown by device assuming the same lifespan would be:

1. iPhone: 148,920 hours; 24 years of “wake time”; 17 years of total time

2. Macs: 124,100 hours; 20 years of “wake time”; 14 years of total time

3. Apple Watch: 6,188 hours; 1 year of “wake time”; .7 years of total time

4. iPad: 12,376 hours; 2 years of “wake time”; 1.41 years of total time

If we want to look at the total hours spent across Apple’s ecosystem on an annual basis we have the following:

1. iPhones: 2,190 hours X 1,100,000,000 = 2,409,000,000,000 (2.4 trillion)

2. Macs: 1,825 hours X 310,000,000 = 565,750,000,000 (565.75 billion)

3. Watch: 91 hours X 110,000,000 = 10,010,000,000 (10.01 billion)

4. iPad: 182 hours X 400,000,000 = 72,800,000,000 (72.8 billion)

Total time spent: 3,057,560,000,000 (3.06 trillion).

The average person lives 700,800 hours - so this 3.06 trillion represents 4,362,957 human lifetimes.

Based on Apple’s current $2.337 trillion valuation this means that when you purchase a share of Apple today you are paying $0.779 per hour of time spent on their devices each year.

Apple dominates time share quality and there isn’t a close second, not even Google.

Google doesn’t make most of the phones that run on Android.

This matters.

No matter what you are doing when you are on your iPhone, you are consciously aware that you are using a device made by Apple.

No one using a Samsung phone is consciously aware that the Android operating system is a Google product.

Apple is expected to make about $390 billion in revenue this year. This means they are monetizing time spent on their devices at a rate of $0.128 cents per hour.

Apple’s profit is expected to come in around 97.5 billion, which equates to profit per hour of $0.032.

If your mind is being blown right now then you are a sane and rational person. These figures are wild and unprecedented. For shits and giggles I went back in time to see if I could make a similar calculation for some giants of yore.

Until the middle of the 1800s, 19 of the 20 largest companies in the United States were banks (the outlier being the American Fur Company). Most of these banks still only did business within a single state or withing a group of adjacent states. Railroads started making the list in the late 1800s.

Banks at the time were mostly focused on commerce and development, and railroads were mostly used for transporting people and goods over longer distances (between cities as opposed to within cities). Most people didn’t have bank accounts and most people didn’t use trains. Neither of these businesses would have been used by the vast majority of the population on a daily or even weekly basis.

It wasn’t until Standard Oil came along that the United States had its first true “National Company”.

Through the early 1900s Standard Oil’s products were used primarily as lubricants and for fuel to light lamps and cook. Kerosene was the largest product. The average family would have been able to afford kerosene for lighting and cooking, though they would not have been wealthy enough to use it carelessly. I found one estimate that an hour of light cost around $5 at the turn of the last century in 2017 dollars (around $6 today).

Let’s assume that lamps were used three hours per day by an average family, mostly in the early mornings and at night.

According to the 1900 census there were 76.3 million people in the US, and about 75% of these people would have been teenagers or older. That gives us 76.3 X .75 = 57 million people. If each of these people used lamps for three hours per day (I’m counting a family of four sitting in a living room with lamps for an hour as 4 hours) outside of work then we come to 171 million hours per day of usage.

We also have to include hours of lamp usage during work. Employment data from 1910 shows the following distribution of professions as of 1910:

• Manufacturing: 32.4% (8,230,000)

• Wholesale and retail trade: 13.3% (3,370,000)

• Transportation and public utilities: 12.6% (3,190,000)

• Construction 9.1% (2,300,000)

• Domestic service: 8.5% (2,150,000)

• Personal service: 6% (1,520,000)

• Mining: 4.1% (1,050,000)

• Educational service: 3.5% (900,000)

• Other professional service: 3% (770,000)

• Other unclassified: 2.3% (600,000)

• Government unclassified: 2.1% (540,000)

• Finance and real estate: 2% (520,000)

• Forestry and fisheries: 1% (250,000)

Note that self employed farmers are not on the list, but neither would they have been using lamps during the day.

From the above list, let’s assume the following professions required 8 hours of lighting per day: manufacturing; wholesale and retail trade; transportation; mining; educational service; other professional service; both unclassified categories; finance and real estate.

This gives us a total of: 19,170,000 X 8 hours = 153,360,000 hours.

At its peak, Standard Oil controlled 90% of American refineries. This means that across the country Standard Oil’s products were probably used around:

[153.36m + 171m] X .9 = 292,924,000 hours per day and 109,500,000,000 (109.5 billion) hours pear year from lamps alone.

Did most people have any awareness (or care) where their kerosene came from? Absolutely not. People purchased their kerosene from businesses who bought it from distributors. So, while people were using Standard Oil’s products at least 300 million hours per day, there was no direct connection between Standard Oil and its end users. No one lit a lamp and then had the name “Standard Oil” pop into their conscious (or sub-conscious) brain.

Jumping forward to 1929 I did the same calculation for General Motors - the largest company by revenue at the time (Standard Oil would have been bigger if you included all the bits and pieces that got broken up).

In order to figure out time spent we need to make some educated guesses.

First, I’m going to assume that the same percentage of people were employed as drivers in 1929 as today, which is about 3.6% of the labor force.

Second, I’m going to assume that like today, 30% of jobs required driving during the work day.

Third, I’m going to assume that the average commute was 1 hour per day.

We can now estimate the total time spent driving GM cars per day assuming that owners of GM cars were evenly distributed across the labor force.

• 3.6% of 9 million vehicles were employed as drivers = 324,000 people. Let’s call a workday 8 hours, so this group in total accounts for 2,592,000 hours per day.

• Let’s assume that the 30% of jobs which required driving add 3 hours per day. We have to subtract the 3.6% we already counted, so that leaves us with 26.4% of the 9 million cars being used 2 hours per day, or 7,128,000 hours per day.

• Everyone had to commute, so we’ll multiple the entire 9 million GM cars by 1 hour to get our final allotment of 9 million hours per day.

In total we have 18,720,000 hours of time spent per day using a GM product. This equates to 6,832,800,000 (6.8 billion) per year.

General Motors remained among the top 10 companies by revenue until the great financial crisis in 2008-2009. Not a bad run. Let’s compare the monetization of each company. GM was at it’s peak in 1929, and Apple is at its peak today (I am NOT saying it is at THE peak, just at the highest point it has yet achieved).

From above for Apple we had:

Apple is expected to make about $390 billion in revenue this year. This means they are monetizing time spent on their devices at a rate of $0.128 cents per hour.

Apple’s profit is expected to come in around 97.5 billion, which equates to profit per hour of $0.032.

In 1929 General Motors reported $1.5 billion in revenue and $248.3 million in profit (an impressive 16.55% net margin, but still lower than Apple’s current 25%).

This means General Motors was monetizing time spent at $0.22 per hour (revenue) and earning a profit of $0.036 per hour.

Funny how close the profit figure is isn’t it? I take it as yet more proof we’re living in a simulation…

I’m doing more research on this - I have a feeling there will be lots of interesting takeaways especially once I’ve put together some figures comparing the giants of today (both qualitatively and quantitatively). That said I’m trying to get posts out more frequently, so I decided to go ahead and send this out since it was already around 2,000 words and seemed interesting enough on its own.

Stay tuned…