Nik Rawlinson
You can’t help but be cheered by the fact that in Apple’s latest earnings statement, released on the day we went to press, Macs are still going strong.
Apple’s line of desktop and portable computers – note, not laptops – has lost its headline appeal over the past few years, and I’d wager that we’ll see few, if any, non-Mac news sources reporting the fact that the company sold 33% more Macs in the third quarter of its current financial year than it did in the same quarter last year. What’s that in real terms? 867,500 additional Macs, for a total sale of 3.47 million.
Unfortunately, it also sold 8.4 million iPhones and 9.41 million iPods. Why ‘unfortunately’? Because those are the products that will garner all the general media attention. Likewise iPads, which only went on sale in this quarter, sent an impressive 3.27 million tills a-ringing, coming close to matching full-blown Macs unit for unit. What does this mean for Apple? Increased profits in the first instance – $3.25 billion (about £2.13 billion) on revenues of $15.7 billion (about £10.3 billion), to be precise – but also increased opportunities.
When the first iPod shipped, it was strictly Mac-only. I know, because I had plenty of friends who would never have dreamed of buying a Mac yet lusted after Apple’s revolutionary music player. The iPod was a stealth marketing device as much as a product in its own right. It was designed, in part, to shift Macs, which back then were still Apple’s crown jewels.
The trouble is, in the same way that Mr Blobby grew far beyond the confines of the Saturday night telly, so the iPod quickly grew beyond the Mac. Apple saw the potential for playing nicely with PC owners, it bundled it with third-party software, re-formatted its hard drive and forgot all about trying to push Macs onto a music-loving public.
Thank goodness it did. If it hadn’t, the iPod wouldn’t be where it is today, the iTunes Store would be a shadow of its current self and, in all likelihood, without the income it generated, we’d have neither the iPhone nor the iPad in Apple’s still fairly small hardware line-up.
With these latest results, though, it’s time for Apple to get back to basics and revisit the potential the iPod has always had for marketing the Mac. I could name you half-a-dozen friends and family, who have switched to the Mac on the strength of the experience they’ve had using the iPod or iPhone. How many more of those 18 million people who have bought an iPod or iPhone in the past three months could the company encourage to do the same with a little careful marketing, and introducing some truly compelling Mac-only features to each product?
