Apple's Vista. Not.

Apple's new version of OS X, called 'Lion' will be released next year. Photo / Supplied

Apple surprised everyone recently with its financial announcements - strangely, even though Apple had yet another record return, it disappointed some fairly wild speculations reckoning on a figure as high as (a pretty ridiculous) US$30 billion.

Partly this seemed like very wishful thinking - partly this was on the back of iPad sales for the just-gone quarter being lower than expected ('only' 4.19 million, not five million as some hoped).

This hardly seems a blow, though - Apple's latest revenue call was still a record at $20.34 billion, representing a net quarterly profit of $4.31 billion. These results compare to a revenue of $12.21 billion and net quarterly profit of $2.53 billion, or $2.77 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.9 per cent compared to 41.8 per cent in the year-ago quarter.

International sales accounted for 57 per cent of the quarter's revenue as Mac sales grows outside the US. But at home, Apple just surpassed 10 per cent of the US PC market for the first time since the early 1990s (10.4 per cent, to be precise). This comes after New Zealand passed 10 per cent a couple of months ago, strengthening my feeling that Apple has a higher percentage of the market in New Zealand than Australia does, despite 'Apple NZ' being based there and Australia having its own actual Apple stores.

Actually, it makes you wonder if that's the main reason Apple built its own stores there - to raise Apple's Ocker profile.

It hardly seems necessary in NZ - we're looking like the Oceania flagship already.

This overall region was recently listed as having an 8.6 per cent market share. Oceania includes Australia and New Zealand, yet ICT research company IDC Research reported that, in the second quarter of 2010, Apple actually exceeded 11 per cent market share in NZ for the first time in 15 years. Which likely puts Australia at more like 8 per cent. Australia was 7 per cent last September '09, so it's growing there, too.


Apple's personal computer sales have grown 24 per cent year-over-year. By comparison, says Fortune, Hewlett-Packard grew 3 per cent year-over-year. Dell fell 5 per cent.


This is all without counting iPads as 'Macs'. Even without iPads, IDC recently declared Apple the third-biggest PC maker, representing a substantial transformation from the periphery into the core of the PC industry.

But if you add in iPad, Apple's share of the US PC market is more like 25 per cent. That makes it the clear market leader. Apple has recently improved component supply, so many expect iPad sales to keep rising. You can also see why all those copyists are lining up with their tablet knock-offs. It's not often a whole market sector is defined, or even redefined.

Apple sold 1.83 million Macs in the last quarter. Acer sold 1.84 million. If you add in iPads, Apple's figure for computers sold would be over six-million units shipped.

HP shipped 4,459,473 computers in that period.

Just to further upset all those who gleefully anticipated 'Antennagate' would really hurt Apple, the Cupertino company sold 14.1 million iPhones in the last quarter. This is a new record far beyond anything Apple had ever achieved before, writes TechCrunch. That pushed Apple past RIM in smartphone sales.

Apple sold nearly twice as many iPhones compared to one year ago (14.1 million versus 7.4).

Apple's 'Vista'? I think not. By any estimation.

Apple Mac still hovers under 5 per cent of the global PC market, some of you will be pleased to note.

Just not where it matters.

This all rather brings the focus back to the Mac - it's easy to feel a bit left out these days, as a long-term Mac user, since all the press is about iPhones and iPads. But Apple has certainly not been ignoring the flagship, and the new i5 and i7 Intel processors have certainly boosted the performance of iMacs and MacBook Pros into new realms, For Mac users.

Yeah, some PCs are much faster. It's like having a really fast Lada compared to a middling speed Lexus. You can overtake me as much as you like, it's fine. I'm sitting pretty in my Lexus.

And the crash statistics will no doubt be similar.

Besides, Apple just announced OS 10.7 'Lion' - at least there will be more promo images to choose from (Snow Leopards, the animals, are like Mac malware. Extremely rare and hardly ever spotted in the wild, verging on mythical).

Steve Jobs has just announced that Apple's Mac revenue was a third of Apple's total revenue last year, equating to a $22 billion industry - if the Mac division was a standalone company, it would be at number 110 on the Fortune 500, so it's hardly peripheral to Apple.

Mac has outgrown PC's for 18 quarters in a row, for 4.5 years. NPD is 20.7 per cent of US Retail market. There are 50 million Mac users around the world and 600,000 registered Mac developers, a figure being added to by 30,000 a month. The new Mac App Store will be online within 90 days, promised Jobs, to allow developers to sell apps directly to Mac users with the same 70.30 split as the iOS App Store (that 30 per cent is Apple's take).

Apple also proudly cited that the Mac is number one in customer satisfaction for years in PCWorld, Consumer Reports and PC Magazine.

Apple is making three times what it did on OS X five years ago. There are 50 million users worldwide.

The new Mac operating system, OS 10.7 'Lion', is not out today, unlike the just-announced iLife 11, but should be available by the middle of next year. It will have multitouch gestures through the trackpad and Magic Mouse, and brings a Launchpad, like a bigger, 3D styled Dock that can have folders.

Mission Control will let you easily find all windows, widgets and apps running on your Mac in one place and you'll be able to flick through your active apps with a flick, like on the iPad.

In other announcements, the new MacBook Air is still underpowered but is thinner, lighter, has SSD storage, much longer battery life and comes it two sizes - there's more info on that elsewhere on the Herald.

For immediate release, the new features of iLife look really interesting - even more powerful GarageBand, the audio lacks of iMovie have been addressed and iPhoto has still more capabilities. I will write about these individually as I get to inspect them - but it's available now and free on new Macs.

Possibly most interesting is a Mac-based FaceTime, just announced. Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller demonstrated the new functionality, which lets you video-call between an iPhone 4 and a Mac. When Steve rotated his iPhone, it rotated on Phil's Mac ... It even does fullscreen.

Apple will be releasing FaceTime for Mac in beta form today. (Didn't we used to call this 'iChat'?).

Pretty nifty, able to call Mac users from your iPhone - this all makes the Apple experience even more clubby, doesn't it?

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com