Profit Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

An iPad mini with Retina display could cost $12 more to build

by Mike Schramm (Feb 18th, 2013)

Hardware market research firm iSuppli has released a new report that claims the cost-per-device of an iPad mini sporting a Retina display screen could be fairly high: as much as $12 or more. Even if all of the other parts stay the same price, just adding a Retina display in the iPad mini's ...

Apple's "disappointing" quarter cause for questions, not panic

by Richard Gaywood (Jul 25th, 2012)

In amongst the MoLo Madness, there's been some back and forth in the blogosphere today over the possibility that Apple's third quarter financial results were "disappointing" or not, mostly based on the fact that professional analysts predicted Apple would earn far more than it did and now they're ...

Dev survey: 59% of app devs not breaking even

by Mike Schramm (May 2nd, 2012)

A marketing firm named App Promo has released some data on a developer survey it took, asking over 100 developers about how they were doing with selling and marketing their apps. Of those developers asked, over 59% told App Promo that they weren't even breaking even on the App Store. And a full ...

Apple defends its tax practices in the New York Times

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 30th, 2012)

A recent New York Times article slams Apple for avoiding billions in state and federal taxes using common corporate loopholes. Apple didn't take kindly to this report and has issued a four-paragraph response defending its practices. The Cupertino company says it pays "an enormous amount of ...

Microsoft's $21B in quarterly revenue is nice, but it's no iPhone

by Michael Rose (Feb 6th, 2012)

When you think Microsoft, you think "big." Especially from the perspective of Apple's long-time customers and loyalists -- those who remember the rough times in the 1990s, when Microsoft's US$150 million investment helped keep the company from fiscal ruin -- the idea of corporate behemoth-ness is ...

10 percent of US mobile phones are iPhones; Apple earns half of all industry profits

by Chris Rawson (Nov 4th, 2011)

Two reports have come out which show the immense impact Apple's iPhone has had on the mobile market. The first report from comScore indicates that one in ten mobile customers in the US owns an iPhone of some kind. That's not just smartphone customers; that's all mobile customers. Given that ...

iPhone 4S 16 GB costs US$196 to build

by Kelly Hodgkins (Oct 21st, 2011)

Shortly after iFixit tore down the iPhone 4S, iSuppli also took its turn with the iPhone 4S and evaluated the cost of the materials that go into the handset. According to its analysis, the iPhone 4S 16 GB costs US$188 in materials and and extra $8 to build, a dollar value that's close to the ...

Apple Q3 2011 earnings released: Impressive, most impressive. (Updated)

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jul 19th, 2011)

Apple hit another home run in the third quarter of 2011. Total revenue for the quarter reached US$28.57 billion, as compared to $15.70 billion in the same quarter last year. Earnings per diluted share were $7.79, as compared to $3.51 last year. Net profit reached a staggering $7.31 B. All of ...

Apple's Asia-Pacific profits reportedly soaring

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jun 28th, 2011)

Apple might be growing in the US thanks to brisk sales of the MacBook Air and the expansion of the iPhone 4 to Verizon Wireless, but in Asia-Pacific, the Cupertino company is exploding. Over the past five years, Apple's revenue has climbed from US$14 billion in 2005 to $64 billion in 2010. ...

For the first time ever, Apple beats Microsoft in quarterly profit

by Michael Grothaus (Apr 28th, 2011)

Today Microsoft announced its net profit for the first calendar quarter of 2011. That net profit was $5.23 billion, or $760 million dollars less than Apple's $5.99 billion net profit over the same period. For those keeping track, first Apple surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization, next ...

iPhone profits swamp competitors

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 31st, 2011)

Now that the flurry of earnings from the last months of 2010 have been announced by all the major mobile phone manufacturers, Horace Dediu of Asymco has summarized these figures in several stunning graphs. The market analysis company has compared the market shares, sales shares and profit shares of ...

Average Apple salary is only $46k

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 20th, 2011)

John Cassidy of The New Yorker took a deep dive into the balance sheets of both Apple and Goldman Sachs to see which company offers the best return on the capital it employs. Using the latest earnings reports from the two American companies, Cassidy calculates that the two firms share similar profit ...

Pocket Frogs hits 3 million downloads, 350k daily active users

by Mike Schramm (Dec 1st, 2010)

NimbleBit developer Ian Marsh tweeted a link to a promotional infographic about popular app Pocket Frogs yesterday, and the title has apparently reached a whopping three million downloads in just ten weeks on the App Store. Daily active users have peaked at 350,000, which is a pretty sizable number ...

Analyst: Flash memory makes MacBook Air more profitable than bigger laptops

by Mike Schramm (Oct 26th, 2010)

We already know the MacBook Air is thinner than most laptops, but it turns out that the stack of money it makes Apple isn't. An analyst named Brian Marshall of Gleacher & Co. says that the flash memory in the MacBook Air is one of the big places that Apple makes its money on the machine, ...

Xmarks calls it quits

by Mike Schramm (Sep 28th, 2010)

I've been a big fan of Xmarks for a while now -- I work on a few Macs and PCs regularly, and while MobileMe is nice, I've always appreciated Xmarks' ease of use (after a one-time setup, it basically worked automatically) and compatibility across whatever browsers I happened to use. That's why I was ...