$26.7 Billion Revenue; 7 Million iPads, 16 Million iPhones Sold | Hacker News Reader

$26.7 Billion Revenue; 7 Million iPads, 16 Million iPhones Sold

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70 pointsdavidedicillo38 comments

7 million iPads is a pretty good market to develop for. How many Windows users where there in, say, 1990?

"7 million iPads is a pretty good market to develop for."

That's just the quarter. I think there's 15 million total running around. For a product that is not even a year old. Astounding.

That's definitely impressive, but it's not really a product less than a year old. When you're buying an Apple product (iPhone, iPad, mac) you're buying into the brand too, when they release a new product a substantial part of the product is the apple branding. If another unknown company would have released the iPad I don't think it would have got such traction. When you buy an apple product, you're buying the apple brand.

That's not anything against Apple in case I sound as if I'm suggesting that, Apple are a great company and "deserve" the success because they do build solid products, but the iPads success is down to Apple being successful as much as it is the iPad as an individual product. Does that make sense? Maybe not.

Apple product = hardware + brand

Make that Apple product = hardware + app ecosystem

This.

Plus, in the case of Apple, they have a distinct first mover advantage. As we learned from watching the original round of Mac vs. Wintel, in the platform market, first mover advantage accrues to the company that puts together a viable OS + application ecosystem. That's why they're printing money, and it's why Android will have a very difficult time unseating iOS. Android is somewhat behind in the maturity of their OS. They're incredibly behind in the size of their app ecosystem. While I don't see Android ever shrinking to Apple's late 90s market share, I'll be surprised if they ever exceed Apple's installed base. I think most of Android's advantage so far has been in distribution. And now that Apple is free of it's exclusive contract with AT&T, I don't think that Android's advantage will last.

That's exactly why lot of developers stick with iOS.

To be fair, any product = product + brand. It's just that in the case of Apple, their branding counts for a whole heck of a lot.

And nearly twice their per-unit Mac sales for the quarter.

Ten years of work on OSX barely shifts the needle; less than a year of iPad sales breaks the gauge. It's pretty clear which OS is more important to Apple now.

"Ten years of work on OSX barely shifts the needle; less than a year of iPad sales breaks the gauge. It's pretty clear which OS is more important to Apple now."

It's unfortunate, but I think you're right. OS X is BY FAR my favorite Apple product (even over the hardware, which is beautiful, but seems to be trending down with regards to quality). iOS is the money-maker though; Apple would be hard pressed to not see it as the future of the company. Boo.

Dear Apple,

I don't want iOS on my desktop. I want OS X on my desktop. Please.

Apple isn't putting iOS on the desktop. It wouldn't look right, feel right or work right. They will however be incorporating some iOS ideas into OS X. I really do believe that they'll do it with a careful and steady hand.

I really hope you're right. The demos I saw of Lion scared me a bit about the future of the OS. I was hoping for some new features/refinements, along the lines of tabbed Finder windows, better Spotlight, and Resolution independence. Instead, I saw iOS looking menus, and not much by way of features. That caused me to be concerned about the direction of the OS. My main concern is that an "iOS direction" may remove and simplify, rather than supplement and improve.

I should disclose that while I love OS X on my desktop, I have the robot in my phone.

EDIT: Added a sentence for clarification of my concerns.

There's not a whole lot to gain by making the desktop increasingly iOS-ish. Most of the iOS advantages don't 'fit' quite right, the existing base would scream, and the market they'd theoretically be chasing with said changes will have been happily working on their iPads for years.

As far as convergence goes, what I'm starting to wonder, is if it wouldn't make more sense to add a docking solution to iOS instead. After all, Moore's law is bringing desktop-class power to the iPad far faster and more convincingly than any case for iOS style interaction on the desktop is being made.

So the question then arises, whether it would make more sense to support a docked iOS 'mode' -- allowing use of desktop-style app UI and interaction (keyboard/mouse) in native iOS apps -- or just run OS X virtualized when docked (with some shared file bucket between the OSes)?

For what it's worth, Motorola Atrix does basically the equivalent of the latter.

Keep in mind the fact that all you know about OS 10.7 is what was announced at the 'Back to the Mac' event--which was specifically highlighting aspects of iOS that are being carried into OS X.

I guarantee there're are lot of other improvements to be seen, come summer.

I've gone full circle in the last few years regarding my choice of desktop. I used to love only Linux. Then I bought a mac, and thought OSX was the shizz.

But more recently, I've been tending to use Linux more, and more and more.

I'm not sure if it's because Linux has gotten better, or because OSX has just enough quirks to be annoying. (eg: launchctl, Apple Python).

OSX is probably the best consumer / business desktop in existence. But personally, I'm falling in love with Linux again.

You should spend some time w/ FreeBSD.

Care to elaborate on why you feel that way? I'm not a BSD user, but I am interested in why you might feel it a good alternative to Linux or OS X.

Same here. With things like Spotlight and iTunes, OS X was feeling increasingly bloated. Combined with the somewhat weird development setup I found going back to GNOME better.

Hum, they sold mor Macs then ever before, and they make a pretty good margin on them. I would say the needle is going upwards quite nicely.

> And nearly twice their per-unit Mac sales for the quarter.

However, Mac sales are also up and the record number of Mac were sold this quarter.

Microsoft sold 8 million Kinnects in the first 60 days. And now it like it's being positioned directly as a Windows peripheral.

And P&G sold much more rolls of toilet paper. You can totally compare sales of products priced three times apart.

If one does not allow the comparison of sales figures among new consumer electronic devices, then claims that 7 million iPad's last quarter indicates success are invalid.

When the iPad was first released, I stupidly thought "0.x% of people are going to have one in Australia. Tiny market."

Then I came to realise, that's x hundred thousand people who will suddenly be looking for something to do with their new device. At the beginning, if you were the first, strong player in a given field, you didn't have to shotgun-advertise all over the place, you could've just been noticeable in the app store.

Also, because Australia is one of the only places where the iPhone is by far the most popular smartphone platform (it has 36.5% of the market), iPad sales might actually turn out to be higher than in many other places -- halo effect and all.

http://www.macworld.com.au/news/iphone-is-australias-most-po...

I like the question you raise here. Similarly: we learned today that there were 160M iOS devices out there. What year were there 160M Windows machines?

In 1993, twelve years after the introduction of the IBM PC, there were 152 million personal computers [1]. That figure includes Macs, and many of the IBM PC compatibles were probably running only DOS or OS/2, not Windows.

I'm guesstimating that the Windows platform reached an installed base of 160m around 1996. That means it took iOS 1/5 of the time to get to 160m.

[1] http://www.itu.int/wsis/tunis/newsroom/background/missinglin...

"Excellence Has Become a Habit"… nice snippet from Tim Cook.

Alluding to this Aristotle quote, which I recall being quoted in one of Steve Jobs' speeches: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/we_are_what_we_repeatedly_do...

Is anyone feeling that Apple products are particularly sticky and viral? I found myself keep wanting to buy more Apple products ever since I bought my first MacBook. And I tend to recommend Apple products to my friends much more than any other brands I love before. Or am I just hooked…

I'd imagine that the number of iPhones sold are only going to go up now that it's coming to Verizon.

Insanely great.

Since this is an earnings report ... would you buy AAPL right now?

Don't know- but I did buy some this morning the second I realized that Steve Job's announcement was coming right before earnings. If nothing else, Apple knows how to time things. Also, Tim Cook has been speaking more publicly and being put in a higher profile ever since Steve's last leave in 2009.

Yeah, I expect the analysists are very low on their CDMA iPhone sales estimates.

Hmm. IBM's revenue in 2009 was around $95Bn, near as I can tell.

Has Apple now overtaken IBM in revenue? If so, that's an astonishing turnaround from 20 years ago ...

annual revenue vs revenue for the quarter.

it looks like IBM pulled in $29 billion last quarter, so still ahead, but just barely. Regardless, it has been a remarkable turnaround.

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