Apple making headway in attracting new customers to Mac platform

“For most of July, investors have been searching for reasons why Apple Computer couldn’t maintain its hot earnings streak. Many seized on its July 2 announcement that due to a product delay, it would have no iMac home PCs to sell for much of the back-to-school season. Result: Over the next 10 days, Apple shares plummeted 9.5%, to $29.22 (it was trading around $33 as of July 15),” Peter Burrows reports for BusinessWeek.

“When Jobs & Co. announced third-quarter earnings on July 14, however, the naysayers were silenced. Quarterly sales increased 30%, to $2.01 billion — the best June quarter performance in eight years. The red-hot iPod music player led the way, with sales up 183%, to 860,000, in the quarter. But Apple’s earnings also jumped — up three-fold, to $61 million, from the year before. That’s in large part due to solid sales of its G5 PowerMac. Apple sold 173,000 of these high-end, high-margin machines, up 30% from the year before… the best news is that, after years of selling to its own diehard fans, Apple seems to be making headway in attracting new customers,” Burrows reports.

Full article here.

23 Comments

  1. Yes. You rock apple. Marketshare will grow. The retail stores r excellent. They will do this. They are going 2 have 100 retail stores by the end of the year. Amazing. they have 80 now with 270 million in revenue for the 3rd quarter they rock. Imagine 500 stores or 600 like best buy. Slowly the marketshare will grow. Also Mac OS X helping out with ofcourse tiger which is high.

  2. thank you IT guy. wish I could do more but used is all I can afford.
    but buying the used ones will let the seller buy new. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />

  3. Doing my share……bought a new 15″ PB for myself, a 12″ PB for the wife and a 14″ iBook for my 7 year old son! Gotta make sure my Apple stock continues to rise! Say “thanks”, Steve!

  4. I brought my ibook with me when we visited my sister in law and her family last week. She had been unable to restore their PC after a malfunction caused by a virus about two months ago. Their computer limped along and crashed repeatedly and refused to provide more than 16 colours (gross!). While I tried and failed to restore her system, she surfed the web on my ibook and nearly fell over when she went to the online Apple store and saw how inexpensive they were. We spent a pleasant evening listening to music on iTunes before returning home the next day. Before our plane reached Australia, she had already visited the local Apple store and within 24 hours had purchased a laptop with a $100 education discount. She also picked up an iPod and received a $100 rebate. She is obviously a bit of an impulse buyer, but the computer sold itself.

  5. My 18 year old cousin bought her first Mac (an iBook) for her University studies. This is a family of PC users until I showed them my iBook with Panther. Now her father is trying out things that in his mind would not work with a Mac & is he surprised by what you can do & how Panther works.
    Just an observation but 12-20 year olds think that Macs are so cool & a must have item here in Oz. Wonder if this is same in other countries which bodes well for Apple’s future.

  6. This article has glaring errors.
    It says K-12 Mac sales declined in the last quarter, but Apple said they went UP 3% (which isn’t much, admittedly, but it has been a terrible market due to the economy and this is surely NOT a decline).
    The article also OMITS to say that Mac sales overall increased 19% by revenue (and, I believe, 14% by units sold).

  7. I’ve been on an iMac at business and home for 3 years now – and this November, every one of our Dell Windows machines will be at the end of lease at work.

    Now… let me see…. what do I do? 3 years of iMac heaven with no crashes, no data loss and no hardware problems – vs. weeks of downtime with crashes, viruses and hardware failure. We still haven’t been able to get Dell to repair one of the DVD burners and its been 8 months of chasing them.

    Hmmm… Apple or Dell?,,,, Apple or Dell? hmmmmmm…..

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