Set the revenue against the valuation and the past fifteen years read as a repricing at least as much as a growth run. Revenue roughly quadrupled to $416 billion [3], which puts the base near $104 billion when Cook took the chair [2], while the market value went from $350 billion [1] to $4.8 trillion [2]. That is about 3.4 times sales then and about 11.5 times now [4][3]. Revenue contributed a factor of four, the multiple contributed a factor of 3.4, and multiplied together they produce the roughly 13.7 times move in the price [5]. Whoever runs Apple next is running the second of those two factors as much as the first.
Spread $416 billion across 2.5 billion active devices [5] and you get about $166 of revenue per device per year [7], of which roughly $44 is services [8]; iPhone and services together are $320 billion, or about 77% of the company [6]. The mix lever has a measurable stub: Pro went from 37% of shipments in 2020 to 65% last year, on JPMorgan's numbers [9], which is 28 points in five years, about 5.6 points a year [9], and at that pace the remaining runway is roughly six years [12]. The more interesting version of that ceiling is that it binds only if the top of the ladder stays put, and a foldable iPhone Ultra sitting above the Pro Max [8] is how the mix trick keeps working after the ratio is exhausted, because it raises the highest price in the range instead of moving buyers to an existing one.
What the published record does not carry is Ternus. His own words here amount to one line of a September 1 staff memo about a huge launch [10]; the premium-only fall lineup is JPMorgan's forecast rather than an announced plan [8]; and nothing in the material describes what he ran before Wednesday [13]. Cook's background was legible in advance, coming out of the COO job and the supply chain he built [4], and a thesis about hardware cadence versus procurement discipline needs that kind of track record to stand on.
Apple could show a cheaper non-Pro tier on Wednesday, in which case there is no premium-only lineup to model [8]. Prices inside the Pro tier could come down to buy the mix, which would mean the 28 points of share [9] were bought rather than earned. Or services could outgrow the device base, which itself went from 1 billion to 2.5 billion, about 9.6% a year [5][11], making the per-device annuity the growth line while the ladder holds its place. On the evidence, the mix arithmetic is closer to its limit than the installed base is, so the figure that decides the next two years is the price of the cheapest new iPhone in the fall range, because with no base model that price is the floor under the average and the foldable's headline number only moves the tail.
