This afternoon, Apple announced their earnings for this past quarter, which ended at the end of September. For this quarter, they sold 2.1 million Macs, 10.1 million iPods, and 1.1 million iPhones, and ended with a quarterly profit of $904 million. At the end of this week, Apple will release the latest revision of their operating system Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and pre-orders are already double what they were for the previous version.
Looking back at this year, it's been a long, but very successful year for Apple. It was only in January that Apple introduced the iPhone at MacWorld, and it was last October when the transition to Intel architecture was complete. Apple introduced a bunch of new products, and brought touch-screen to a new generation of products, with the iPhone and the iPod Touch. While I'm not particularly fond of their design for the new iPod nano, the functionality of the device is still enough to put it at the top of many wishlists for the holiday season.
I was listening to the conference call after the earnings announcement, and there was a couple of surprising comments afterwards; the first is that they aren't moving forward with Circuit City, and focusing more on Best Buy, and the second is that Apple estimates that up to 250,000 of the iPhones sold were purchased for the purpose of being unlocked. Japan is still the most challenging market for Apple products, and they are planning a new Apple Store in Beijing next summer.
One of the things I've felt that Apple has really succeeded in is the Apple Store. The Apple Store serves three main purposes: to demonstrate their products, to support their products, and to sell their products. The average Apple Store brings in approximately 6.6 million in revenue this past quarter, which was an increase of 1 million over the results of the previous year for the same quarter. The next quarter ends at December, and Apple has high hopes, as they believe that this is the best product lineup in Apple's history.
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