Apple recently reported another record quarter of sales. Their rate of growth is truly astonishing and their share price makes be curse that I didn’t buy some shares when they were $7.
What is curious however is that they also said that the next quarter (bear in mind that’s the holiday one) will be very much less (by the tune of $600m).
Apple CFO Peter Oppenhimer drooped the bomb-shell (get it) at the recent financial conference call, saying that there are three reasons for the prediction “the promotion, higher component costs and product transitions. “I can’t get into” the product transitions”.
The promotion he was referring to is the “back to school” promotion in the US which heavily discounts kit to educational establishments and student.
I think the component costs he referred to are all the flash memory chips they are buying up at the moment for iPods, iPhones and possibly the rumoured Lightweight Mac Book Pro, which is supposed to have silicon storage, instead of a hard disk.
Product transitions
From what I am reading the next gen. iPod isn’t ready. We are all expecting an iPhone alike hard disk iPod to be released soon and from the rumour mill it won’t be here for another 6 months. We will get a revised 5g alike that is thinner and smaller with a new iPod OS.
Lastly, I would not be surprised if they release Leopard as a software product for third party Intel boxes.
This will of course mean that their hardware business will suffer terribly but it makes sense; Vista has failed to spark the expected enthusiasm with the PC community, and 10.5 is coming along nicely (it really is actually – I have been playing with it this week), what better time to capitalise on Microsoft’s failure and the wave of interest among the iPod and iPhone WinTel users.
Now I could be talking out of somewhere not associated with verbal communication because I haven’t seen this anywhere yet, but you never know, stranger things have happened.