The road to Apple's record-smashing annual profit

Yesterday, Apple reported the largest-ever annual profit for any company in history, beating Exxon's annual profit of $42.8 billion in 2008. (Apple's fiscal year ends September 30.)

As this chart from Statista shows, that's 35% growth from last year, 28% growth from its previous record year, and an astonishing 41x growth from a decade ago, when Apple was mainly selling iPods and Macs. (The iPhone came out in 2007, and turned the company into what it is today.)

Analysts keep warning that Apple will run into the "law of large numbers" some day, where it's so massive that the company can't continue growing as it has. But we've been hearing that since at least 2012, and so far Apple has disproven it.

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