Apple has just announced its financial results. It's had a storming quarter - its best-ever - with revenues of $10.17 billion, profits of $1.61bn ($1.78 per diluted share). If you stripped out the GAAP accounting method it uses for iPhone revenue - under which revenues from an iPhone are counted over 8 quarters, rather than at once - then the figures are $11.8bn revenue, $2.3bn profit.
It's Apple's best-ever quarter. Economic meltdown? Seems like everyone was either buying iPhones to tell each other and surf the web, or iPods to drown out the bad news.
And yet, and yet... the graph shows how the Christmas spike has helped iPod sales (the blue lines): from their explosive growth in 2005, the rate of growth seems to be slowing. This year it was up 3% on the year-ago quarter. It's still enormous, though: 22.73m iPods (including iPod Touches, I believe) sold.
Compared to the year-ago quarter, iPhone sales were up 88%, at 4.36m. That's not surprising, given that a year ago there wasn't an iPhone 3G, which has done well. Interesting to note that sales of those seem to have actually fallen compared to the previous quarter - possibly a sign of weakness in the market.
There's a conference call on now, so we'll go on to that as and when.
