The iPhone makes its mark
When Apple , the company left no doubt that the iPhone was a consumer success. More than 2.3 million iPhones were sold in the previous three months—and that was the first generation iPhone, not the faster iPhone 3G. In the last fiscal quarter of the year, iPhone sales were 6.8 million.
Perhaps the most significant announcement surrounding the iPhone in 2008 was the (SDK) and the . Using the SDK, Apple would allow third-party developers to make applications and sell them on Apple’s store.
While everyone thought the App Store would be successful, nobody could fathom the tremendous impact the store would have in the coming months. It started off with 500 apps, but by December, and customers had .
Apple also by the end of 2008 three months early, as demand for the device continued to grow.
Apple is rolling in money
How about these for numbers: , , , and . Those are the quarterly earnings Apple reported for fiscal year 2008.
During the , Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the company had $25 billion in cash and no debt. However, the company’s stock the day Apple reported its fourth quarter results was trading at $91.49, a far cry from the $155.64 it was trading at during the first quarter results.
Mac sales continue to grow
I remember when Mac sales were counted in the hundreds of thousands per quarter, not millions. In the first quarter of 2008 Apple shipped 2.3 million Macs, up 44 percent over the same quarter in 2007; the second quarter was up 51 percent at 2.2 million; in the third quarter, Apple shipped 2.4 million, up 41 percent; and in the fourth quarter Apple 2.6 million Macs, up 21 percent.
That’s pretty incredible growth, no matter how you look at it.
Apple’s notebooks received the majority of attention in 2008. The MacBook line was and with faster processors and upgraded graphics. The company also in January, which appealed to executive-type users who wanted a lightweight Mac for traveling.
The Mac Pro was updated early in the year and hasn’t been updated since. The Mac mini didn’t even do that well—it hasn’t been updated since 2006. The iMac saw its only update of the year in late April.
The lack of updates began to show by the end of the year as analysts said the older machines were in “need of a refresh.”
However, research throughout the year clearly showed Apple was onto something really good with its notebooks. According to market-research firm NPD Group, , an increase of 2.2 percentage points over the same period last year, when Apple posted a 15.4 percent market share.
(a subsidiary of IDG, which also owns Mac Publishing and Macworld) showed that Apple’s continued rise in computer sales put it in third place overall among all computer makers in the U.S. This is the first time since 1996 that Apple finds itself this high on the list of top-selling manufacturers.
iPod and iTunes continue to grow
You can’t look at Apple these days without factoring in the success of the iPod and iTunes. 2008 was a big year for both products.
By April, . It even beat out Wal-Mart, which is a difficult thing to do when you look at consumer spending.
In total, customers have purchased more than four billion songs from iTunes, which maintains a catalog of more than six million songs.
, giving users another movie-watching option. In the latter part of the year, and from many of the networks.
Apple also used iTunes as the storefront for the immensely popular App Store for the iPhone. What started off as simple jukebox software years ago had become a giant content-selling machine for Apple by the end of 2008.
Apple released a new iPod touch in early February, but it was at a special event later in the year that the iPod would take center stage. It was then that .
In 2008 alone, Apple sold more than 54 million iPods. The iPod continues to be one of Apple’s most successful product introductions in its history.