Digging in the dirt of Apple’s Q1 results
More informative nuggets from the mothership’s most recent quarterly results have wriggled free, revealing more about where our favorite fruit company is doing well and the areas where the picture is not quite as rosy.
When Apple reported results last week, Tim Cook et al announced the company had sold 4.4 million iPhones in the holiday quarter, which is 88 percent more units than Christmas 2007.
With that number firmly in mind, know that AT&T has just announced (via MarketWatch) that it activated 4.3 million iPhones in the second half of last year and 1.9 million in the final quarter of the year. The insight here being that 2.5 million of last quarter’s Apple handsets were sold outsold the US, which I believe is the first time that’s happened.
“During the past year, we took major steps to improve AT&T’s position for 2009 and beyond. The success of our iPhone 3G launch has driven wireless growth and helped redefine the wireless data space. Our AT&T U-verse TV service continues to ramp. We completed the world’s largest deployment of the fastest Internet backbone technology across our US,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO
And, we know where they got the money for that really big hyperbole network deployment—iPhone users helped push up AT&T’s average monthly billing to $59.59—up 35.7 percent over 2007.
The notebook decade
About four years ago, Steve Jobs declared the “year of the notebook.” Well, the PC side finally caught up in the last quarter of 2008 with notebook sales finally eclipsing desktops. That tells me it is time once again for Apple to reshuffle its product mix or perhaps formalize its transition to computing on the go.
Our friends over at VentureBeat (via The Standard) report that Apple’s fourth quarter computer sales were 71 percent notebook and just 29 percent desktops. Of course, the fact that Apple hasn’t given the iMac anything more than a minor speed bump in over a year doesn’t help.
“Four years ago, sales of desktop machines made up 60 percent of Apple’s computer sales, while notebooks made up 40 percent. Not only have those numbers now reversed, they’ve skyrocketed in the direction of the notebook for Apple,” said MG Siegler with VentureBeat
If you also take into account the Mac mini—children born at the time of the last refresh are now walking and talking—not to mention the Mac Pro (updated at last year’s Macworld), then it becomes quite clear how little attention Apple has given desktops and why unit volume fell last quarter by 16 percent even as computers overall were up 9 percent (portables made up the difference with 32 percent growth).
If analysts and pundits were to take my advice and include iPhone and iPod touch sales—they are after all super competent ultra-portables—then last quarter’s portable / desktop results would have been skewed even further.
That said, is Apple preparing to reduce its desktop line to a single design—the iMac? Hmm, a (dual) quad-core plus nVidia 9600 graphics all-in-one would be a very capable video, graphics, layout, you-name-it workstation.
What’s your take?
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January 30th, 2009
You are using your iPhone fart generator for inspiration again. Apple needs the Mac Pro for professional graphics users who want more flexibility than an iMac offers. And who want to look Professional. You can’t look seriously professional with an iMac. And iMac users fall into the “my mother” category who is on a pension and wants something cheap, and the “me” category who believes that if it is good enough for my mother, it is not good enough for me.
I suspect that the model variations are not as expensive to develop as you think. There really is just one iMac – it has a small screen or a big screen, a tiny choice of graphics controllers, and a choice of disk drive which are interchangeable. Apple has way less product variations on the market than most other vendors (compare Dell for the other extreme.)
The Mac Mini is important, not so much for budget users (who would never buy an apple) but for cashed up Apple customers who want to do science experiments with media, micro-servers, and other arcana. It means these people don’t get pushed into linux on Via.
Reducing it further would seriously disrupt the formula. And it is probably just fine for that purpose as it is.
I believe Apple has done an admirable job of optimizing its product line already. There is a synergy between products in any brand which means that the existence of edge products (such as the Pro and the Mini) is required to sustain the core products (the iMac.)
Committing to Apple is a big deal for an individual, and a huge deal for a company. We all need to know there is room to move either way. Even if Apple never sells a Mini or a Pro, they have to be there so people with buy the iMac.
And finally, because all machines run pretty much the same hardware except for the graphics card, the software cost of the existing product variation is very low.
The really interesting product in the equation is the server. I don’t know how many they would sell outside Apple, but I am thinking single digit numbers, and by digit, I mean finger. On the other hand, it is really just a flattened out Mac Pro, but the tooling for the case alone must make it a dubious prospect. Of course, they could rebadge a third party server and whack a set of Apple ROMs in it. That might make sense. (And maybe they already do it.)
Thank Jobs Apple understands marketing better than you do.
Nice provocative piece though. Keep it up!