Apple: ‘several billion’ iMessages sent daily, Apple TV raked in $1 billion last year

Apple headquarters (Cupertino, Clifornia, exterior 001)

As expected, Apple held its 2014 shareholders meeting on its Cupertino campus this afternoon. Apple executives were on hand, as were the company’s board of directors, to reassure investors that things are on track for another successful year, and to field shareholder questions.

Most of the meeting was filled with the usual dreck: approving and rejecting proposals, reelecting board members, and so on, but things began to liven up when Tim Cook began dropping numbers. Keep reading for a roundup of some of the most interesting points from the meeting…

  • Apple now handles over ‘several billion’ iMessages per day
  • It facilitates between 15-20 million FaceTime calls per day
  • Tim Cook: Apple bought 23 companies over the past 16 months
  • R&D (Research and Development) spending up 32% year-over-year
  • Apple TV business generated over $1 billion in revenue last year
  • It has sold nearly 30 million ATVs to date, 12 million last year
  • The set-top box is the fastest growing hardware product in Apple’s line-up
  • Cook: it’s a little more difficult to call [the Apple TV] a hobby these days

The Apple TV came up quite a bit, which isn’t surprising given the ongoing rumors that the device has a refresh coming up. Plus the fact that Apple’s living room/set-top box business is now churning out $1 billion per year in revenue is insane, and too much for it to keep calling a ‘hobby.’

And that’s about it for the more interesting stuff. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty shareholder stuff, Bloomberg has a nice overview article of what all went down. Interestingly enough, it had to write it after the fact—apparently you can’t take any kind of gadgets into the meeting.

Update: according to The Wall Street Journal’s Daisuke Wakabayashi, Tim Cook told shareholders that the company processes “several billion” iMessages per day. The 40 billion number was in reference to ‘notifications sent.’ This post has been edited accordingly.