Apple’s latest numbers make for interesting reading.
Apple announce its fiscal 2008 second quarter ended March 29, 2008. As impressive as these are you have to wonder how “must have” their products are in the current “credit crunch” climate.
Apple shipped 2,289,000 Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing 51 percent unit growth and 54 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter.
This is really positive 51% growth by unit. The number in relative terms is still tiny compared to a HP or Dell but growth is growth.
The Company sold 10,644,000 iPods during the quarter, representing one percent unit growth and eight percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter.
Now this is interesting only 1% growth in iPod unit sales. The 8% in revenue can be explained by having more expensive products in the line like the 32gb iPod Touch.
The 1% unit growth is a problem however, I guess anyone who wants an iPod must have one.
Obviously the iPhone is taking some of the iPod business but clearly this part of the business has reached a saturation point. So now what are they going to do?
Quarterly iPhone™ sales were 1,703,000.
I imagine the iPhone sales will also trail off but stay steady once the people who want one have one. 1.7m units is pretty good for a new product in a well established market.
Apple are in great shape and innovating some fantastic products however the first thing to go when things are tight financially are luxury products.
Link: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/04/23results.html?sr=hotnews?sr=hotnews.rss
Office2007 User Interface
April 25th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Wow, 10 million zombies out there buying ipods in the last 3 months. Shall I tell them there’re a dozen other brands of mp3 players or shall you? Cheaper ones, ones with more storage, ones with more features, etc. Ipods are good products, I’m not disagreeing with that, but it’s a big market place with lots of choice.
mp3 player != ipod
April 25th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Hi Gary
My eyes sometimes wander to other types of players but I am so locked in by DRM and the ease of Podcast subscriptions in iTunes.
The older I get the less music I listen to, its all audio books and podcasts these days.
Colin
April 26th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Luckily the DRM war is moving in our (consumers) favour. Several big commercial downloads sites are offering DRM-free tracks which are slowly setting a trend for other record companies to follow their rivals.
DRM isn’t a major hurdle if your mp3 player doesn’t support it. My car has a USB port and can read mp3s but not DRM stuff. This is obvious and well documented, but just burn your freshly downloaded DRM tracks to CD then rip them back to your hard drive and they’ll be DRM-free.
Getting older - yeah, good point. I’m listening more to talk radio than music in the car.