More than I thought. The Mac people aren't going to like this!
I think you can look at this at least two different ways...
From the
main MR article on the quarterly earnings report:
Apple shipped 2,611,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth and 17 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11,052,000 iPods during the quarter, representing eight percent unit growth and three percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 6,892,000 compared to 1,119,000 in the year-ago-quarter.
One way to look at this is to say that, as three "legs of the stool," the iPhone had explosive growth and the iPod had slightly better than saturation-market growth, while the Macs did somewhere in between -- the Mac revenue growth number would put Apple at pretty much best-in-class among computer OEMs for growth even without the iPhone sales. From this perspective, the Macs are doing fine, but there is the danger that, should iPhone sales ultimately tank, Apple will at some point have big year-over-year drops in gross and net revenue even if they continue to grow their Mac sales. But as long as that doesn't happen, it isn't such a big deal, and temporary fluctuations in overall revenues are thankfully smoothed significantly by amortizing the iPhone revenue over a period of time.
Another way to look at it is that,
if Apple can sustain this pace of iPhone sales, that once a full year cycle of selling iPhones this fast and hard finishes, the iPhone will represent a huge portion of their revenues both in the sense of actual collections and on their quarterly earnings sheet. From that perspective, there is always the danger of market pressure for Apple to dump its resources into the high growth areas and starve off Mac development, although recently they've been showing at least some principled aversion to this.
In the long run, I'm really curious to see how this will play out. While there have been phones this popular before, I don't know that there have been many times like this when a
single phone held one of the top three
company market shares in the phone industry. That's the astonishing part. Just the one iPhone, that only comes in a couple of capacity and color variants, is going toe-to-toe with the entire lineups of Samsung and S-E. I bet that's going to generate even more pressure for Apple to expand the iPhone into a range of mobile devices... or else defend why they believe they can sustain such a large fraction of the market on just one form factor. I wonder what will happen with that.
