Apple revealed its latest financial results last night (webcast here) and pretty much hit analyst's expectations by making $4.37 billion in revenue, shifting 8.1 million iPods and 1.3 million Macs (75% of which were Intel-based) along the way.
Music products - that's the iPod, iTMS and accessories - now account for almost half of all the company's revenue. Interestingly, though, sales of iPod were down from 8.5 million quarter-on-quarter, or roughly 5%. Looking back briefly over the history of iPod, that's only happened once before (sales dropped from 219,000 to just 80,000 in 2003 as people waited for the second generation model). That was very early on in its life.
Now, of course, I'm not claiming "death of the iPod" or anything silly. This was Apple's second-best quarter ever. But it's clear from studying the product's history that leaps in sales are brought by hardware evolution - just look at the effect that the mini, nano and shuffle had. And since last year's nano/5G launches we've really seen nothing new from Cupertino.
Now, undoubtedly Apple are working on something new - but we're going to have to see that product hit the market in the next few months if they are to go up another notch.
What will it be? Steve Jobs simply said he was excited about "products in the pipeline" and the company's bean counter-in-chief, Peter Oppenheimer, gave little apart from a little phone speculation. "We do not think that the phones that are available today make the best music player. We think the iPod is," he said. "But over time, that is likely to change, and we are not sitting around doing nothing."
Does that mean that the much-vaunted Apple phone is on the way? Although the Mac fansites are likely to take it as confirmation of their speculation, I don't think so. Given Apple's previous history, I'd imagine Oppenheimer is really saying they want to make a music player that remains better than anything you can get on a phone. Does that mean Bluetooth? Wi-Fi? Something else?
What do you think they're planning?
