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 ...