Apple’s Quarterly Performance

It seems like I do a whole lot of writing and talking these days — in print, online, even in newsletters — about all the things Apple does that aren’t the Mac. With the iPod an entrenched part of modern tech culture and the iPhone this year’s biggest tech product launch, it’s easy for the Mac to get lost in the shuffle. It’s old news from a company with a whole lot of new news.

Except for one thing: the Mac business has never, ever been better than it is right now. And even people outside our little world — financial analysts and technology pundits alike — seem to be realizing it.

What did it take for this to happen? Try this one on for size: in the past three months (April, May, and June 2007) Apple sold more Macs than it has ever sold in a single financial quarter. Ever. Last quarter Apple sold 1,764,000 new Macs, up 154,000 from the previous high. That’s four straight quarters in which Apple has sold more than $2 billion worth of Macs. To put that in perspective, in early 2005 Apple was selling about a million new Macs per quarter, for a total of about $1.6 billion.
Read Apple’s quarterly earnings report

Leading the Mac’s surge in popularity: laptops. Yes, sales of desktop Macs perked up in the last quarter, bolstered by the arrival of Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite 3. But all in all, desktop sales have been flat for the last three years. Not so with laptops. — in early 2005 Apple was selling less than a half a million Mac laptops per quarter. But in this last three-month period, the company sold 1.1 million MacBooks, the most laptops Apple has ever sold in a single quarter. In the past year 61 percent of all Macs sold have been laptops (back in early 2005, the numbers were reversed — 60 percent of Macs sold in the first quarter of 2005 were desktops).”It’s the absolute best quarter we’ve ever had,” Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook said Wednesday. “We sold more portables than we ever had, we sold more total units than we ever had. It was the best education quarter we ever had. And the pro business had a nice uptick.”

All told, it seems to be a pretty good time to be a Mac user. And it appears that there are a whole lot more of us today than there were just a few years ago.

Source: MacWorld 

http://geoff-caplan.com, email geoffcaplan@comcast.net