How Apple is squeezing out more profit than ever
Apple's remarkable ability to remain unaffected by seems to be continuing unabated - here's the news story, and Jack mentioned the results too. The numbers were certainly impressive: $1.21bn of profits on sales of $8.16bn - up significantly on the same time last year. However, it's pretty hard to get an idea of what those numbers mean in context - so we've plotted the company's financials on a graph to show you how Apple's been performing in recent years. As you can see, the numbers follows a pretty straightforward pattern - a slow increase throughout the year, followed by a drastic jump over the period that covers Christmas. Then things come down again, continuing the upward trend. Keeping an eye on revenues (the blue line) there did appear to be a little flattening of growth last year - the spike in December 2007 was huge, largely on the back of the iPhone and iPod Touch. However, it's interesting to notice that the pink line (profits) doesn't move as