Apple infamously has high margins on its hardware.
If we were to consider that, the comparison is guaranteed to be dramatically worse (in the favor of Apple).
Shopify, Snapchat and Spotify have yet to earn a single net dollar in profit. They're all still losing money as of their most recent quarters. And their lifetime losses are epic to say the least. Twitter also may still be negative for its lifetime, given its very substantial past losses.
If Apple has even modest 10% margins on the Airpods (it's more likely to be 2x to 3x that), it's at least a billion a year in profit right now. That's probably more than Spotify could earn on its zero margin business even if you gave them $20 billion in sales.
They have high margins on products that retail for multiples of their relevant competition. The same is not true for AirPods. I find it extremely unlikely that their margins are greater than 10%.
Given Apple’s absolute dominance in supply-chain, I find this very unlikely.
The reality is, Apple (either through the Apple brand or through Beats), was the only electronics company that could realistically achieve the economies of scale to sell truly wireless earbuds at this MSRP in 2016, but that doesn’t mean the margins don’t get bigger every single month. It’s true that the margins might be lower for another company, but audio is an insanely high margin industry. Even in retail, the markup between retailer cost and MSRP is often at least 50% — it Is often higher. And if you have the scale and supply chain to own literals every part and churn out a headset, it’s even higher.
