Oh, would you look at that. With blockbuster iPhone sales and more than $20 billion revenue in the last quarter, you would expect Apple to be happy about its latest product line. But the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad to represent 60 percent of Apple’s sales?
As Horace Dediu of Asymco noticed, 60 percent of Apple’s sales come from products that did not exist three years ago. I guess that’s a good definition of “reinventing a company”.
At yesterday’s earnings call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a 5-minute epic rant about Google and Android as a platform competing with iOS and the App Store. In his own words, “open” vs. “close” is more “integrated” vs. “fragmented”. Jobs is not buying Google’s openness claims, and he’s got the numbers to back up his theory. Read more
In case you missed it, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at today’s Apple Q4 earnings call. What he had to say about 7-inch tablets, Android, Nokia, RIM and Apple’s philosophy is all over the internet. You can read a full transcript here.
Reading between the lines, what strikes me is the focus Steve put on the word “integrated”. The iOS platform is integrated, Android is fragmented. With the iPhone, you get an integrated device. You don’t have to mess with hundreds of different devices running multiple versions and variations of the Android OS. But that’s not really the point, we get Steve’s thoughts on Android. Tweetdeck’s developers get them even more.
What interests me is the use of the term “integrated” as a new way of defining iOS, and thus the devices is runs on, against competitors. By definition, to integrate means to “combine two or more elements so that they become a whole”. So it’s clear that, in Jobs’ mind, Apple deeply integrated the hardware with the software to create a new, reliable, user-friendly experience. Read more
This one pretty much sums it all up:
Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at Apple’s Q4 earnings call and went on a 5-minutes long rant about Google’s “closed” Android platform, tablet competitors, Apple’s own strategy focused on developing products that “just work”.
For those who missed the text version, here’s the audio embedded in a Youtube video. Must-listen. Read more
Apple will offer a preview of the next major iteration of Mac OS X at its “Back to the Mac” event on Wednesday, October 20th. Thanks to a reliable source familiar with the matter, we’ve managed to grab some exclusive details about what’s coming in 10.7, dubbed “Lion”. Read more
So here’s what happened: at the Q4 earnings call Steve Jobs grabbed the mic and started talking. No one expected Steve Jobs to be available at the conference, because Steve Jobs doesn’t usually attend earnings calls.
But it happened, and he went on a 10-minute long “rant” where he set the record straight about overly discussed arguments such as Google’s openness, Android’s sales numbers, Apple’s App Store and closed system and the rumored 7-inch iPad form factor. He’s still taking questions at the moment of writing this. Read more
Once again, Apple’s quarterly fiscal results broke any record: $20.43 million revenue, 14.1 million iPhone sold (despite the whole Antennagate “thing”), 3.89 million Macs and 4.19 million iPads.
Looking at the numbers reported above, it appears that analysts this time almost got the whole situation right: they predicted 4 million Macs, 13 million iPhones and…6 million iPads. So is Apple low on iPad sales, with “just” 4.19 million units out from the shelves in Q4? Not really: of all the analysts Fortune contacted, only one placed his expectations above 5.95 million units sold. Nine of them went for a 4.00 - 5.00 million range. Not exactly “low sales”, but perhaps many expected record sales as the iPhone 4.
We have to look at the big picture, and not just the raw numbers. In two quarters, the iPad is already outselling the Mac. 7.46 million iPads are out in the wild, 5 months after its release date.
I think those are the numbers worth to be considered.
