[DM-MUG] Best Mac Quarter Ever (Good News)

[Russ & Marilyn Carlson]

Best Mac Quarter Ever

By Jason Snell (jsnell at macworld.com)

Apple's Quarterly Performance

It seems like I do a whole lot of writing and talking these days --  
in print, online, even in newsletters -- about all the things Apple  
does that aren't the Mac. With the iPod an entrenched part of modern  
tech culture and the iPhone this year's biggest tech product launch,  
it's easy for the Mac to get lost in the shuffle. It's old news from  
a company with a whole lot of new news.

Except for one thing: the Mac business has never, ever been better  
than it is right now. And even people outside our little world --  
financial analysts and technology pundits alike -- seem to be  
realizing it.

What did it take for this to happen? Try this one on for size: in the  
past three months (April, May, and June 2007) Apple sold more Macs  
than it has ever sold in a single financial quarter. Ever. Last  
quarter Apple sold 1,764,000 new Macs, up 154,000 from the previous  
high. That's four straight quarters in which Apple has sold more than  
$2 billion worth of Macs. To put that in perspective, in early 2005  
Apple was selling about a million new Macs per quarter, for a total  
of about $1.6 billion.
Read Apple's quarterly earnings report
Leading the Mac's surge in popularity: laptops. Yes, sales of desktop  
Macs perked up in the last quarter, bolstered by the arrival of Final  
Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite 3. But all in all, desktop sales  
have been flat for the last three years. Not so with laptops. -- in  
early 2005 Apple was selling less than a half a million Mac laptops  
per quarter. But in this last three-month period, the company sold  
1.1 million MacBooks, the most laptops Apple has ever sold in a  
single quarter. In the past year 61 percent of all Macs sold have  
been laptops (back in early 2005, the numbers were reversed -- 60  
percent of Macs sold in the first quarter of 2005 were desktops).

"It's the absolute best quarter we've ever had," Apple chief  
operating officer Tim Cook said Wednesday. "We sold more portables  
than we ever had, we sold more total units than we ever had. It was  
the best education quarter we ever had. And the pro business had a  
nice uptick."

All told, it seems to be a pretty good time to be a Mac user. And it  
appears that there are a whole lot more of us today than there were  
just a few years ago.
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