Apple announced Friday it will reveal its financial report for the first fiscal quarter of 2011 Tuesday, Jan. 18 at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. The conference will likely include some gangbuster numbers, including what was behind a reported 23 percent jump in Mac yearly sales. This at a time when PC demand was off 6.6 percent.
Mac sales, boosted by the introduction of a revamped MacBook Air, is just the lead story in a series of likely wins for the Cupertino, Calif. company. Analysts also predict 2010 was a good year for the iPhone. Thursday, analyst Maynard Um of UBS Securities projected iPhone sales of 15.6 million handsets, up from previous expectations if 14.1 million units.
Although iPod sales could fall 4.6 percent, the drop may have been slowed by the introduction of the updated iPod touch, a popular gift during the 2010 holidays.
As for the iPad, the analyst foresees 6 million of the tablets sold during the previous three-month period.
Although the exact sales figures won’t be known until next week, the enthusiasm over the event appears to bode well for Apple and its continued high-profile popularity on Wall Street and Main Street.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
