This is how much money you'd have made if you bought Apple shares instead of a new iPhone every time it was released

It's no secret that Apple is one of the most successful companies in the world.

Thanks to our devotion to iPhones, iPads, Macs and more, we've helped propel the tech giant to become the first publicly traded company valued at $1 trillion dollars.

That was back in 2018, and in 2020 it whizzed even further ahead to become valued at $2 trillion.

That's a truly staggering amount of money - the kind of numbers it's pretty much impossible for an average Joe to get their head around.

One thing we do know for sure? If you bought up Apple stocks instead of investing in a new iPhone every time it came out, you'd be laughing all the way to the bank right now.

Particularly as upgrading to a new model every year can be seriously expensive - the price of the most recent release, the iPhone 15, started from $799 when it came out in 2023.

If you wanted to know just how much money you could make if you invested in stocks instead of a new iPhone every year, luckily you don't have to do any mental maths yourself - Sumit Behal posts about finance on X (formerly known as Twitter) and he's done all the hard work for us.

This was back in September last year, when the iPhone 15 was released to the world.

According to Behal, buying a new iPhone on the day of launch every year since the first came out in 2007 would set you back a whopping $17,000.

But if you invested that $17,000 in Apple shares, you'd be sitting on $367 million - a pretty wild amount of money.

That was going off Apple's then share price, which he had at $176.39 - which has only increased since then, to where it currently stands at $189.98. That means you'd now have made even more money than the $367 million he calculated - and with Apple's star showing no sign of waning, that number looks like it's only going to climb.

Compare that to less than two decades ago - back in 2007, Apple's stock price was just shy of $6. Things have certainly changed since then.

Behal added in his X post: "Tim Cook will never tell you about this" - and we can see why, as it's good for business if people keep buying the new iPhone every year.