Apple’s Q3 was the company’s best ever. It raked in $5.41 billion in sales, posting a $818 million in profit. Gross margins — the amount of revenue that is profit — is up to a whopping 36 percent. This surely is the highest in the industry. By contrast, Dell reported Q2 2007 margins of just 4.3 percent, earning $605 million profit on revenues of $14.1 billion.
Apple also reported 10 million iPods sold — up 21 percent on the year before; and 1.76 million Macs, up 33 percent year-on-year.
Apple’s stock is rebounding on the news: it’s up 6 percent after taking a hammering yesterday on AT&T’s iPhone numbers.
AT&T’s quarterly results said only 146,000 were activated in the first two days — so it looks like 124,000 people either waited a few days to activate their phones, or had trouble activating them, as was widely reported.
We now have definitive proof that a business world built on the quarterly earnings report is destined for self-destruction: Apple’s stock fell almost $9 because its partner AT&T “only” managed to activate 146,000 iPhones in its first day and a half on sale. Not that the activation figure directly reflects the number of iPhones sold.
Yes, I’m serious, and I’m totally bewildered. Analysts and investors are pretending that the second quarter, which closed June 30, would be the one that reflects the impact of the iPhone. Which is nice, except that the iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. on June 29, and AT&T had serious network issues that prevented people from activating their phones until well into the next week. Which means that anyone who couldn’t or chose not to activate their iPhone until after midnight on June 30 got left out of this report.
Which is obviously a clear sign that it’s time to sell all of your shares in AAPL. Obviously. You know how, in movies, we’ve gotten to the point where people talk about the highest opening 5.5-day gross ever by a film released on a Tuesday in a month with a full moon that falls on a Saturday? This is the opposite. This is the smallest 1.5-day activation ever for an incredibly successful product. They chopped off Sunday, for heaven’s sake!
But this is the world that exists. It’s all about the quarterlies. And maybe that means that Apple did AT&T a disservice by not launching a week sooner. It shouldn’t have any impact on the long-term health of either firm. But it’s idiotic. Especially since AT&T experienced — wait for it — 61 percent total revenue growth!
Grrrr. Anyway, don’t read too much into these numbers. Apple will release its sales numbers soon, which are a clearer indication of how well the iPhone did in its first day and a half. Not that a day and a half of sales matters. It’s stupid. Can we talk about this in October?
Watch the video up top. It’s a pretty terrifying video of a totally compromised iPhone through a new exploit of Safari, both on iPhone and likely PCs and Macs. A fix is already in the works, but I have to say I’m not that bothered. Why? Because it, like every other really dangerous exploit of a Mac or Apple product I’ve seen is heavily reliant on social engineering. For your iPhone to freak out and possibly shoot your cats with an iLaserbeam, you first need to go to a website specifically designed to make your iPhone freak out and kill your kittens. And I’m sorry, there’s no amount of protection that can protect people who are dupes for fraud. You can only go so far. This hole needs to close, no doubt, but if people vulnerable to harm on the web don’t know to only go to links they can trust, they probably shouldn’t be using the web at large.
Now, when people can make this happen over WiFi without the use of an exploit-focused website, then I’ll panic. And probably go back to landlines.
Color customizers extraordinaire Colorware are now offering iPhone paint work. For $150, they’ll take your iPhone and remake its look in your image. They’re also selling pre-colored iPhones for the same premium over stock models. I’m always surprised that Colorware’s work looks so good — color’s such a tricky design element, especially when it’s literally an after-thought — but their work is hot.
That said, it’s not for me. I’m still scraping together the money for an iPhone, so…
We’ve all seen Apple use the New York Times website to demonstrate the iPhone’s tremendous facility on the Internet. But the Times site works so well in part because the newspaper’s web page somewhat mimics the look of a real newspaper front page. What about the hundreds of terrible newspaper web pages that we read for local content?
Enter PressDisplay. The company takes the original layouts of newspapers and turns them into browseable web objects. And it’s now compatible with iPhone.
As you might expect, it’s optimized for crazy zooms, rotations and all of the other interactions that just make iPhone special. It is a commercial service, but it’s free through the end of August, so there’s really no better way to read the Washington Post or the San Francisco Chronicle on the train to work until then!
I think we have a new usability standard. The above YouTube clip shows a 2-year-old girl named Anna very fluently flipping through modes on the iPhone before heading to the YouTube tab to watch a favored Coldplay video. Apple’s current ad campaign is working just fine for the time-being, but when they want to go for the jugular, they should call this family up.
It’s just a mock-up, but I’d totally wear it, wouldn’t you? For me, I would want a single pendant with the iPhone Safari logo, nestled against my heart…
We’ve officially moved beyond skepticism that Apple would be able to get a foothold into the mobile market to full-on speculation for how the company will follow up the breakout success of the iPhone. According to MSNBC, it will be with the iPhone Nano. Which they make sound like…the iPod Nano. With a phone on it.
Kevin Chang, a JP Morgan analyst based in Taiwan, cited people in the supply channel that he did not name and an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office for his report.
Apple filed a patent application document that refers to a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad control, similar to the Nano’s scroll wheel.
Yeah, I’m sure that will be exactly what Apple does. I’m sorry, there’s no way Apple ever releases a product with a click-wheel. The company has sent clear messages that it considers that to be the iPod interface and the iPod interface alone. The iPhone is about multitouch. You don’t get the name otherwise.
The iPhone will quite obviously eat into iPod sales. That’s kind of the point long-term. It doesn’t mean Apple’s ready to roll out a bad product to replace good ones.
A bit more than a week into the iPhone launch, we’ve established some certainties:
All the iPod functions are awesome
Browsing in Safari is surprisingly good
No. 2 is only true when connected to WiFi, because EDGE is SLOW
For all of the nit-picking and armchair quarterbacking, the only feature that people are consistently upset about is the lack of high-speed wireless data. Unfortunately, some early adopters are trying to justify their purchases. From the sounds of it, the always-entertaining Robert Cringely is among their ranks:
The question here is whether 3G is already built into the iPhones shipping now or whether it will require a new model? Given that it is coming so soon after the iPhone introduction, I can’t believe that even Steve would make us buy new phones. It is very likely that a firmware upgrade will awaken the 3G within all you iPhone owners.
That’s a different definition of “very likely” than I’ve ever heard. I wish it were true, Bob, but it just ain’t. Many people have gone through the iPhone with a fine-toothed comb, and there is no secret 3G hardware. If there were, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have explicitly complained about the poor battery life of current 3G chipsets, and the many geeks who’ve ripped open their iPhones would have found the chip. The first-gen iPhone is the first-gen iPhone is the first-gen iPhone. Flash and java support can be added. New hardware can’t.
I won’t be surprised at all if Steve gooses iPhone sales with a 3G model in time for Christmas, maybe with 16GB of on-board storage. I will, however, eat a haberdashery worth of hats, if current iPhones get on that high-speed highway.
Jon Lech Johansen, the 23-year-old who first cracked the CSS encryption screen for DVDs when he was 15, has now discovered a method for activating the iPhone without registering with AT&T at all. With the help of a little Windows application called Phone Activation Server and a few “magic numbers” Jon posted, Apple’s amazing new device wakes up as a touchscreen iPod and WiFi-enabled Internet device — that, of course, can’t make phone calls. With this, I think it’s safe to assume we’ll see an unlocked iPhone running on T-Mobile or one of the European carriers very shortly. I know there’s a lot more to it, but people are really honing in on the secured side of the iPhone now. Still, it would be nice if the cracks were written for Linux and Mac OS X instead of .NET…
At the end of its first full week on sale, a distinct pattern has emerged for iPhone availability: We West Coasters are out of luck. Though Apple has obviously begun to restock its stores with iPhones, they appear to be working from East to West.
According to Apple’s availability checker, virtually every Apple Store in New York, all of them in New Jersey, and most shops up and down the eastern seaboard are chock full of iPhones, while no state west of Utah has even one iPhone available in Apple Stores. Hopefully, new shipments could arrive out here tomorrow for a weekend pick-up. As a reminder, Apple announces the next day’s iPhone availability at 9 p.m. each day – which is a nice way to avoid going to a store and coming back empty-handed.
It must be a constant frustration to Steve Jobs that journalists and message board commenters alike routinely “misspell” iLife, iTunes, iPod, etc. as Ilife, Itunes, Ipod. Well, in the universe of the iPhone, that vicious cycle will end. Reader Scott notes:
I don’t know if anybody else has noticed this yet, but the spellcheck on iPhone auto corrects the “mis-punctuation” of Apple’s i-products.
For example:
Ilife becomes iLife
Itunes becomes iTunes
etc.
It gave me a little chuckle to realize Apple edited the dictionary in it’s own favor.
The paparazzi caught Ms. Lohan leaving Planet Blue at the Country Mart in Malibu on Saturday clutching an iPhone in her hand, according to crazyGossip. More crazy Lohan shopping pics at the site. I bet the iPhone’s glass top is great for chopping and snorting.
Todd Ficharker, who describes himself as the “clumsiest person in the world” smashed the screen of his iPhone less than 24 hours after he bought it. He explains:
“I tried answering a call while it was plugged in and the short cord pulled it out of my hand and hit the corner of a table on the way down. 100% my fault.”
But there’s a silver lining! Unbelievably, Apple replaced it for free.
“They gave me a brand new phone for free. Talk about fantastic customer care. I am in love 4-eva with Apple.” Via MacFeber
Pic by Leander Kahney: Apple’s San Francisco store on iPhone opening night.
Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey thinks Apple sold 700,000 iPhones on its opening weekend, more than half again than the 500,000 estimated by his esteemed colleague Gene Munster.
Bloomberg reports that Bailey initially pegged 350,000 iPhone sales, and Munster estimated 200,000.
Said Munster: “In 2009, we estimate a third of Apple’s sales will be from iPhone. This is a huge product.”
Apple sold half a million iPhones in its opening weekend, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates.
Munster was impressed with the raw speed at which the iPhones were sold. Some stores had 50 cashiers selling 1,000 iPhones an hour, he said. Most were the 8-Gbyte model.
It looks like the iPhone is beginning to sell out. Almost every store in California is out, except for one San Francisco store. However, there are iPhones available in New York and other states.
But I bet they’ll be sold out by the weekend. EBay sellers disappointed that the handsets aren’t being snapped up need only wait a week or two and they’ll be scarce again. (iPhone Not Quite The Cash Cow eBay Sellers Were Hoping: by Corey Spring, Newsvine)
The iPhone is gadget heaven. It really does restore your sense of childlike wonder. I’ve had a blast all weekend running my greasy finger over its glassy surface.
It’s a Crackberry for the masses. Finally, mobile email, messaging and web browsing is fun and easy — how did it take so long?
I’ve had a Treo and cell phone email for years, but never, ever used them — they’re a mess. Now I’m an iPhone text addict — a 41-year-old acting like a teenager.
I bought one on Friday and have been out around town with my kids all weekend. The little angels monopolized it, surfing the web and watching YouTube. They figured it out immediately. I showed them one thing — how to use your fingers to shrink and zoom — that was it. I took some calls, surfed the web and sent some email.
I found it’s not all roses — there’s serious issues using it for work — but in general, we’re true believers.
The Good and The Bad after the jump. Plus camera phone samples.
This never takes long anymore, does it? The guys at WirelessInfo.com seem to have been the first to film and post an unboxing video of their new iPhone to the Intarwebs, as you can see above. A bit excited, yes?
iFixit, meanwhile, not only posted an unboxing gallery, which you can see here, they took it all the way to the logical conclusion: TOTAL DISASSEMBLY. Do not try this at home, folks. Damn.
Via Digg and Apple 2.0
See above. I’m heading to the Genius Bar tomorrow. Who wants to be bet there’s already someone there to complain that Apple sold them a defective phone without a keypad?
