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Uncategorized Wednesday, April 25th 2012 at 2:50 pm

More Things Apple Could Do With Its 110 Billion Dollars and Olympic-Sized Swimming Pools

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You may have heard that Apple has about $110 billion in cash reserves just sitting around. You may also have heard that, if converted to dollar bills, this money could fill about 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools. You may be hankering for some more hastily-calculated, hilariously meta statistics about what else Apple could do with $110 billion and Olympic-sized swimming pools. You want statistics about money and swimming pools? We’ve got your statistics about money and swimming pools.

With its $110 billion in cash reserves, Apple could:

  • Actually construct about 220,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools to put stuff in[1]
  • Fill about 1,950 Olympic-sized swimming pools with pennies[2]
  • Fill about 11 and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools with caviar[3]
  • Fill about 1,096 Olympic-sized swimming pools with actual McIntosh apples[4]
  • Fill about 2,501 Olympic-sized swimming pools with these Scrooge McDuck Plushes[5]
  • Fill about zero Olympic-size swimming pools with Steve Jobs dolls, because no one is allowed to make them

And here is your “Apple’s cash reserves and Olympic-sized swimming pool word problem that none of us could figure out” word problem of the day:

What is the least number of swimming pools Apple could build so that the remaining cash (in dollar bills) fits into them?

  • Assuming Olympic-sized swimming pools cost about $500,000
  • and 2,190,177,157 dollar bills will fit in an Olympic-sized swimming pool

The furthest we could get on this is that this probably involves a quadratic equation, but none of us have taken a math class in years. Anyone who can figure this out will be awarded approximately 3 well-earned propers, one from each of us.

Annotations!

1. Assuming an Olympic-sized pool costs about$500,000 to construct.

2. Given a penny is .02696 cubic inches, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool is 152,064,000 cubic inches

3. Assuming the caviar in question is $100 an ounce, each ounce coming out to 1.598813 cubic inches

4. Assuming the apples cost roughly $2 a pound, come roughly three to a pound, and are roughly the size of a tennis ball

5. Assuming each plush has the volume of a 10 inch tall cylinder with a 1.625 inch radius (when compact)

(image credit Shutterstock)

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  • http://CRZ.net/ CRZ

    I already tweeted you, but I’ll show my work here:

    You say above that each pool can hold 2,190,177,157 bills BUT also, each pool takes 500,000 bills out of your $110B.

    I *believe* that just means you have to solve for x where:

    110000000000 = 2190177157x – 500000x

    or, using a little algebra…

    (2190177157 – 500000) x = 110000000000

    A little MORE algebra says x = 110000000000 / (2190177157 – 500000) = 110000000000 / 2189677157 = 50.2357161…

    …which means Apple would have to build 51 pools, because if they built 50, there would be some money left over not in a pool.

    Finally, I should be working right now.
     

  • http://Geekosystem.com Eric Limer

    That

  • Kent Nelson

    FYI an “olympic sized” swimming pool is 50 meters long, 10 lanes wide ( 7 to 8 foot lanes) and anywhere from 8 to 15 feet deep… costly roughly around 900,000 or more dollars to build… the world mistakes 25 yard pools for “olympic sized”…

  • Anonymous

    The cost of the pool should be added to the amount of cash in the pool ( 110000000000 = 2190177157x + 500000x ) The cost of the pool is really negligible in this problem, however, as this only changes the outcome to 50.2128 which is rounded to the same answer of 51.

  • http://www.facebook.com/briancmckinley Brian C McKinley

    How about moving the manufacturing plant to the United States. 

  • http://CRZ.net/ CRZ

    Yeah, I thought about this some more and you’re right, I should have used a + instead of a -.  Thankfully it didn’t affect the overall answer.  :)

  • Reptile686

    Really, the cost of the original 50 pools for the money is only 25 million dollars, which still means Apple has to store 109.975 billion dollars in their pools. We need to use a more expensive storage system so we can figure out how many gold-plated olympic sized swimming pools it takes, or how many dollar bill-filled Soyuz rockets we would need to store the remaining cash on the moon or something.

  • mcjome

    Not first, but I also came up with 
    50.2357161…etc, the same way. But I’ll go with 51 because 50 pools would have some overflow.  Math is fun!

  • Jamiedle

    My sixth-block College Algebra class just came up with the same answer as rtg3000. The algebra was pretty simple, but it lead to a pretty good discussion about order of magnitude and estimation. They also appreciate the fact that they didn’t have to learn about statistics today and that their homework got cancelled.  

  • Juanita Williams

    Other things Apple could do with their 110 Billion.    Cure world hunger.  Cure AIDS.  Cure Malaria…. Oh wait, Bill Gates is all ready doing that.  Build thousands of homes for those put out by natural disasters….. fund those who invent an artificial pancreas so kids dont have suffer from Type 1 diabetes…..Fund Space exploration….Fund clean air and water research….fund environmental conservation….. fund hospitals for the poor ALL over the world.  No its much more fun to just sit on it and dream of filling pools with it.  Heaven forbid they donate any of it, I know they really need it over there. 

  • http://softddl.com/ Teressa Abney

    We’ve got your statistics about money and swimming pools.

  • Matt

    Or BURN the bills. Ash takes less space.