Apple's Most Profitable Quarter Ever

apple.com

36 pointsPeterRosdahl4 comments

From http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html, March 2005, AAPL = $40-41:

"So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these."

3.267x return over 4.5 years = 30% annualized. Mr. Graham must be happy.

I'm sitting on some shares of $10.60 AAPL from the 90's that I picked up as a pre-teen enthralled with Macs. Apple has really gone quite far in even a decade.

"[2] Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago."

It would be interesting to see a comparison between the "five years ago" 2000 stats, these 2005 stats, and the current 2009 stats.

Is there any breakdown of the profits? I'd like to see how much of it was due to the iTunes store vs iPods vs Macs etc

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