eweek.com — Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, said that the company had seen an "unprecedented demand" for its Mac line in the fourth quarter, selling 1.61 million Macs; the most ever in a single quarter. Apple will hold about 3% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2006, and that number could rise to 4% by the end of 2007
Dec 14, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountDec 14, 2006
I am as undeserving as the next guy...
lynnDec 14, 2006
Apples Net Profit Margin is +10.32%. Microsofts Net Profit Margin +28.52%.
adpowersDec 14, 2006
Lynn, that's because Microsoft's main money makers are Windows and Office. Software has a huge profit margin. Apple makes hardware and software. If you compare them to other hardware companies, you get a better idea:Dell: 6.39%Acer: 2.66%Lenovo: 0.21%Gateway: 0.16%HP has really good profit margins, but they make a lot of consumer products (like printers) that I'm sure help their bottom line.
anagamiDec 14, 2006
"I farkin' love my Mac, and many of its differences stem from Apple's idealism. It was founded to make the best computer possible, not to make craploads of money, and I'm not eager to see that change."I didn't know that making the best computer possible and making money were mutually exclusive.
flipmeatDec 14, 2006
A lot of people that rail about Apple's 'hardware monopoly' are really missing the point.Having end to end control of the user's experience is a dirty, nasty, evil advantage over the rest of the world, which Apple leverages well. Take your photo editing for example. Say something breaks, or doesn't look right, and the glitch might be in some underpinning of the system. Joe App Engineer can basically walk over to where the 'underpinning' guys work, they can study the problem together, and they can figure out a fix. They might also end up clubbing each other with ADB keyboards, but that's beside the point. :-)This situation simply does not exist in the Windows world. It is a key Apple advantage. Taking it further, hardware and software groups could work together to make sure things are not only compatible, but that they *enhance* each other. On Windows, all those different companies are separate, and communicating that well would be hard. Not impossible, just hard. On Windows, guys who build systems are having to act as their own system integrator. Out of millions of possible combinations of hardware parts, will all your apps work on yours? Who has to work that out? You! There's a business opportunity there for someone... What's that? You want a screaming, clocked to an inch of its life, multiprocessor box in a trick aluminum case? Apple's hardware geeks like those too, and they ship them that way from the factory. :-) Go on, stick a cold cathode in there, and have the door laser etched, you know you want to.
rodrigo74Dec 14, 2006
"The more market share Apple gets, the larger Apple becomes and we'll end up with lower quality hardware and software."Why does bigger market share necessarily means lower quality?I believe that Apple's market share is increasing not because they're lowering their standards (their current lineup is as good as any previous), but because some people is raising their standards and learning that it is better to pay 30% more to get a computer that will last longer and work better.
kugoDec 16, 2006
Happy with that share of the market? They have no bloody choice!
kugoDec 16, 2006
When you need antivirus and anti-spyware and still can't be confident you're clean and when you have a wide open architecture so that even a preschool trojan can parade in unannounced and not be stopped at the door - I'd hardly call that a 'small annoyance'.
Closed AccountJul 25, 2007
Calm down firemillen2. Just because I said the uptick was "huge" for their bottom line doesn't mean I've never read their 10k. I do realize AAPL sells a lot of iPods, and I do realize those impact AAPL's profitability more than computers.Chill. When you use all caps it gives the impression that your are screaming.