This week, Apple announced that it made a net profit of $18 billion (£11.8bn) between October and the end of December last year, the biggest quarterly profit ever recorded by a public company.
Apple is also the richest company in the world, and one with a long and interesting history. Here are 13 facts that you might not know about the Silicon Valley company's finances.
1. Apple came from humble beginnings - in fact, to raise enough capital to start the company, Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen Camper Van for $1,500, and Steve Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator for $500.
2. The Financial Times estimates Apple's economic output for 2014 at $87bn - this is larger than the GDP of Oman ($81bn), Azerbaijan ($78bn) and Belarus ($77bn). It means the company would rank 64th on the global GDP ranking, with 130 countries below it.
3. In the last three months of 2014, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones globally. This equates to more than one device per person in the United Kingdom, which has a population of 64.1m.
4. Apple sold more iPhones in the last three months of 2014 than it did during its entire 2011 fiscal year.
5. In 2010 Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable technology company. One year later, Apple made its way past Exxon, the oil company, to become the most valuable public company in the world.
6. Since its first day on the stock market, Apple's share price has risen 23,100%.
7. The Apollo Space Programme cost the United States an estimated $160bn (inflation adjusted). Apple is worth $700bn, which is the cost of four Apollo missions with change left over.
8. Apple is now bigger than the entire US stock market in 1977.
9. Apple employees became instant millionaires when it made its initial public offering on December 12, 1980. Its stock sold out in minutes, and it became the largest IPO since Ford Motor Company went public in 1956.
10. Perhaps prophetically, the first graphical image ever displayed on a Mac was a picture of Scrooge McDuck sitting on bags of money.
11. Apple is bigger than the following companies combined: Google, Samsung, HTC, Blackberry, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Sony.
12. During the last quarter, Apple on average sold over 34,000 iPhones every hour! Since the handset's introduction, over 1 billion iOS devices have been shipped.
13. Apple makes a profit of £1,528 every second. This means it earns the average UK salary of £26,500 in just 17 seconds.
