Wednesday, 9 April 2025
This seems like a type of puzzles job interviewers typically ask, however there’s a sensible relevance in the mean time: What’s a ballpark estimate for what number of iPhones Apple may need hustled to ship into the US on these 5 freight planes forward of the brand new tariffs? Ryan Jones tackled it in a publish on X:
A whopping 12 days of gross sales. At most.
Math:
• B747 Freighter carries 300,000 lbs
• boxed iPhone is 0.9 lbs
= 350K iPhones per aircraft
I like Jones’s ballpark math right here. Let’s not fear about quantity, simply weight. If we’re fallacious in regards to the quantity, it may possibly solely imply fewer new-in-box iPhones can match per aircraft. There’s no technique to (safely) exceed the load restrict of a aircraft.
Jones additionally estimates that Apple sells about 150,000 new iPhones within the US per day, not less than within the typical April–June quarter — which I concur is an efficient ballpark determine.1 So every aircraft can carry a little bit over two days’ price of US home iPhones. Meaning if the Occasions of India is right that Apple “transported 5 planes filled with iPhones and different merchandise from India to the US in simply three days throughout the closing week of March”, these 5 planes mixed carried, on the most, about 12 days’ price of recent US iPhones.
Now that’s simply from India. And people are simply the 5 planes the Occasions of India heard about. It appears protected to presume Apple may need hustled much more planes out of China and Vietnam. However once more, at most, every aircraft filled with Apple merchandise carries about two days’ price of merchandise. We did our serviette math utilizing iPhones, however “1 full aircraft = 2 days of stock” can’t be far off the mark, it doesn’t matter what the combination of product is in every aircraft’s cargo maintain.
350,000 iPhones packed onto a single aircraft is numerous iPhones. Sending a number of million items throughout a dozen (or extra!) planes is, fairly actually, tons of iPhones. However Apple sells about 50 tons of recent iPhones within the US alone daily. Everyone knows that Apple’s iPhone enterprise is big. However if you begin to think about it in sensible phrases like this it’s simply staggering.
There’s no manner Apple can “beat” these Trump tariffs by having shipped merchandise forward of their taking impact. May they hedge in opposition to two or three weeks of tumult? Possibly a month, tops? Sure, and it looks like perhaps that’s what they did. However regardless of what number of planes they stuffed — or what number of container ships they may have had the foresight to ship a month or two in the past — there are very sensible limits to stock, too. Apple’s warehouses are seemingly designed with one or two weeks of stock in thoughts. You may’t simply hire random warehouse area to carry billions of {dollars} price of iPhones.
From Adam Lashinsky’s 2008 profile of Tim Prepare dinner for Fortune:
Nearly from the time he confirmed up at Apple, Prepare dinner knew he needed to
pull the corporate out of producing. He closed factories and
warehouses around the globe and as a substitute established relationships
with contract producers. Because of this, Apple’s stock,
measured by the period of time it sat on the corporate’s stability
sheet, rapidly fell from months to days. Stock, Prepare dinner has mentioned,
is “basically evil,” and he has been recognized to look at that it
declines in worth by 1% to 2% per week in regular occasions, quicker in
robust occasions like the current.“You sort of wish to handle it such as you’re within the dairy enterprise,”
he has mentioned. “If it will get previous its freshness date, you’ve gotten a
drawback.”
Apple’s total provide chain is rightly heralded as genius, a triumph of every thing from part sourcing to meeting to move. However your entire operation is premised on the continual free circulate of packaged merchandise out of China. Apple by no means holds a lot stock, of something, wherever on this planet.
