Profit Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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 ...

iSuppli: iPhone 4 parts cost $187.51

by Mike Schramm (Jun 28th, 2010)

Update: As pointed out below, our original analysis here did not highlight the difference between the subsidized pricing (what consumers pay with a 2-year contract) and the much higher unsubsidized price (what carriers pay Apple for each phone). The unsubsidized price of the 16 GB iPhone 4 is not ...

iAds could make a billion dollars, help Google make their deal

by Mike Schramm (Apr 12th, 2010)

There's not a lot of details out about Apple's upcoming mobile advertising program, iAds, quite yet, but Broadpoint Amtech is already convinced it's a moneymaker. Analysts there say that the program could generate a whopping US$4.67 billion in revenue in just one year's time. Of course, that's a ...

Content sales expected to bring in 30% of iPad hardware revenue

by Mike Schramm (Mar 9th, 2010)

Sure, Apple will sell about a gajillion iPads when the device finally releases on April 3rd, but analysts are saying that's not all -- apparently 30% of the revenue from the device itself is expected to be from the sale of content read, listened to, watched, or otherwise consumed on the iPad. ...

Tapulous making a million a month off the App Store

by Mike Schramm (Dec 21st, 2009)

Well, even with rampant piracy, review craziness, and that funky approval process, it's good to hear that someone can still make a truckload of cash on the App Store. According to Reuters, that someone is Tapulous, who is apparently making almost a million dollars a month thanks to twenty million ...