“Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2011 second quarter ended March 26, 2011. The Company posted record second quarter revenue of $24.67 billion and record second quarter net profit of $5.99 billion, or $6.40 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.4 percent compared to 41.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 59 percent of the quarter’s revenue.”
I have been following Apple for years, since 1980 infact. I was buying h/w from them back in the early to mid 90’s when they were dying. I have always hoped Apple would come back, just as some hope Amiga or BeOS would / will…
I think an important thing to zoom in on is this:
Contrary to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Mac side of the business is still very important to the organisation.
…but not for Jobs. He only cares about the iPad at this point. The Mac, iPod, and even iPhone are history to him.
Well, if he want an Apple ecosystem, he need them and he know it. It’s like Apple TV, not really his cup of tea (he looked almost tired every time he talked about them since the introduction, remember that was not a “one more thing” product, it was “we will sell something like that at some point in the future, look, it have many connector in the back, more details in about 6 months, ‘stay tuned’ ” and then “the main selling point of this is that the remote have about 5% the number of buttons of the Xbox and WinXP mediacenter edition”).
Yet, he didn’t cancelled the project because it was important. Same for the mac, it’s here for a long time, it is profitable and prevent market domination from Microsoft to happen again. The worldwide share of Apple is low, but it’s up to 20% in the most important countries (for Apple, USA, Western europe) and they try to also take over the asian powers too. Both iPhones, iPads and Macs need to sell great to gain a foothold on those markets. As long as Apple push technology forward and release the products for affordable prices, I am happy with the grow and the profit they make from it. Microsoft is stagnating the whole industry and still make like 70% of their profit the same way they did 20 years ago, this number is less than 20% for Apple compared to 10 years ago. Like them or hate them, they do good thing for the OS front and general consumer electronic.
Thats said, I hope they put some love in OSX, the Window manager is totally broken (mac-tab anyone?), the finder is terrible and the browser intolerable. I prefer Linux and Windows by far over it…
C’mon dude, go back to the iMac and iTunes introduction videos, Jobs laid his vision out back then. iTunes running on a Mac at the center of your universe. The iPad,iPhone, iPod are complimentary devices which is why you still need pc’s/mac’s to update software, etc. OS 10.7, Lion, dude, they still want people buying Macs for years to come. the focus on the iPad is to dominate that market segment, just as with the iPod back in 2001. From a business POV, guess what has higher margins an iPad or a MacPro, iMac, MBP? Thom, you are so much smarter than this…aren’t you?
Or, you actually read what I’m saying INCLUDING what I was replying to to actually UNDERSTAND what I’m saying.
Spoiler: Jobs’ interests do not necessarily reflect Apple’s business interests.
Sounds like my famous plan to be a billionaire. All I need to do is sell a single hot dog for 1 Billion dollars! With such high margins, I can’t fail!
Any one hungry?
Hello… I’m an Android. I was designed to make ‘sauce’ out of Apple’s market, but as you can see I’ve fallen short of my expected goals.
Now I will ‘crash’ and hope that my parts can be donated to an ailing cell phone, a web cam or a remote control to an old television set. I don’t believe in reincarnation, so that’s out of the question. Although I gave a life a shot, I will forever be remembered as the underdog. The David that took on Goliath… or not.