Apple profit surges 95 percent on iPod sales

Yahoo News ^ | 01/18/2006

[Panerai]

Apple Computer reported a 95 percent rise in quarterly profits on exploding sales of its iPod music players, and notched more than one billion dollars in sales through its retail stores. ADVERTISEMENT

Apple s stock, though, fell in after-hours trading because Apple offered a forecast that fell short of Wall Street estimates.

Apple reported net income of 565 million dollars, or 65 cents a share, for the first fiscal quarter to December 31, up from 295 million a year earlier. The report beat analyst forecasts of a profit of 55 cents per share.

Sales rose 64 percent to 5.75 billion dollars. Chief executive Steve Jobs disclosed Apple's quarterly revenue result January 10 at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.

Consumers snapped up 14 million iPod devices during the holiday quarter, and Apple has now sold more than 40 million since late 2001. The groundbreaking product has transformed Apple from a niche PC maker into the leading purveyor of digital media.

Apple also sold 1.25 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, a figure that was up 20 percent from the year-earlier figure. Apple is in the process of transitioning its Mac line to Intel rocessors, and it expects to have all of its PCs running on Intel chips by the end of this year.

"We are thrilled to report the best quarter in Apple's history," said Jobs.

[Terpfen]

He was being sarcastic...

[RayChuang88]

They didn't do it with Quicktime, and no one complains about THAT program (at least, not its interface.)

Mind you, given the simple functionality of the playback controls in the Quicktime player, Apple didn't need to drastically change to look and feel to accommodate Windows users.

[Terpfen]

And given iTunes' amazing simplicity, they didn't need to change it, either.

[rwfromkansas]

Are Apple processor speeds generally faster than an Intel in a PC? I have always wondered that since the processor speeds for the cheaper machines are not as fast as those in PC's, at least based on the number alone.

[sarasota]

Thanks for the reality check.

[sarasota]

I don't think Apple wants it to be "familiar" to Windows users. Their strategy might be to move the consumer to Macs.

[antiRepublicrat]

Are Apple processor speeds generally faster than an Intel in a PC?

They've leap-frogged over the years. But as with AMD processors, the G4 and G5 processors are faster per megahertz than an Intel Pentium.

[antiRepublicrat]

I wonder if the Mac's price will come down.

Latest analysis says that the Intel Macs are probably more expensive for Apple to produce than the PowerPC Macs. But since the amount of monetary incentives Intel has given to Apple is secret, we don't exactly know their production cost.

I also wonder if the Mac will operate as well with Intel.

The core of Apple's OS, BSD and Mach, have been available for the PC for a very long time. Apple also recently admitted that for the last several years they've been secretly keeping an x86 (Intel) version of their OS alongside the public PowerPC version. It works well.

[Muzzle_em]

I agree.
I worked for years using a Mac and LOVED it!
Never could afford one of my own.
I have had several PCs and long for the days of using a Mac.