Apple unveils massive jump in Mac sales

Apple has announced record sales of its Mac computers in its third quarter, along with healthy sales of its iPod digital music players.

The company revealed revenue of $5.41 billion (£2.7 billion) for the three months to 30 June, and net quarterly profit of $818 million (£402 million), compared to revenue of $4.37 billion and net profit of $472 million (£230 million) in the third quarter the previous year.

With the iPod having brought in the majority of revenue for the last few years, the company has been keen to increase sales and profitability of its computer products, underlined by last year's migration to Intel's x86 processors, replacing the PowerPC platform the company had previously used.

Apple shipped 1.76 million Mac computers, 33 per cent up year-on-year and beating its previous record quarter for computer sales by just over 150,000 units. The vast majority of computer sales were laptops, with its MacBook and MacBook Pro products selling well in the UK, US and Europe. Sales of desktop computers, in particular the Mac Mini were sluggish, fuelling speculation that the Mini will be axed and the flagship iMac will soon receive a major makeover and specification update.

"Apple destroyed numbers for this quarter. Its Mac numbers were very strong and above expectations. Its gross margin at 37 per cent was extremely strong and bodes well for HP and Dell from a commodity-price perspective," said Shannon Cross, an analyst at Cross Research.

Among the factors contributing to the growth in Apple's computer sales has been the ability to run both Windows and Mac OS at native speeds on its Intel-based hardware. Apple itself kick-started interest in doing this with the release of its Boot Camp software to allow dual booting, while third party developers such as SWSoft offshoot Parallels has had success with x86 virtualisation software to allow Windows to run simultaneously with Mac OS.

"We aren't surprised at all to see such huge growth in Apple's Mac sales. In recent months, however, the Mac has been gaining more and more interest in the traditional PC market as people realise that they can run Windows, and more importantly, Windows-only applications on a Mac within the Mac operating system" said Ben Rudolph, director of corporate communications for Parallels.

"Looking back just 18 months ago, traditional PC users would not have dreamt of using a Mac as they would have had to give up many of the applications on which they are dependent, that has now changed, thus attracting even more PC and iPod owners across to the Mac" he added.

The company also sold 9.815 million iPods during the quarter, up 21 per cent, which was in line with expectations as iPod growth was hit slightly by some users waiting for the arrival of the iPhone smartphone before buying their next device.

The third quarter results also include the first two days of iPhone sales. While initial sales of the iPhone were healthy by mobile phone industry standards - the company and US network operator AT&T shifted 270,000 iPhones on the first two days of their US launch - the figure was way below analyst and market expectations of 500,000 to 525,000 handsets.

AT&T also added concern when it announced on Wednesday that only 146,000 iPhones sold in that period had actually been activated, with many unused handsets finding their way onto eBay.

Nonetheless, Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs remained upbeat about the iPhone in a conference call with press and analysts. "iPhone is off to a great start. We hope to sell our one-millionth iPhone by the end of its first full quarter of sales and our new product pipeline is very strong."

The iPhone is expected to go on sale in the UK in October, though no pricing or network partnerships have been announced.

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