Apple buys companies at the same rate you buy groceries

Apple doesn’t always tell the world when it buys another company — but in reality, it’s quietly snapping up startups all the time. This weekend, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that Apple purchases a new company every two to three weeks on average, and has bought between 20 and 25 companies in the last six months alone.

That’s roughly as often as I bought groceries during some... oh, let’s just call them “fresh vegetable adjacent” periods of my life.

You know how human beings never fail to be surprised when they get to the cash register and see how much of their paycheck is about to turn into food? I wonder if Apple ever feels that way. I’d guess not, considering how the company’s reportedly sitting on $225.4 billion dollars of cash on hand alone — enough to settle a historic array of lawsuits with Qualcomm 50 times over, if push came to shove.

A number of Apple’s smaller purchases do make the news, by the way! Here’s a whole bunch of the most recent ones that come to mind.