Apple's Future is still the MacIntosh

Overall it's been a good week for Apple although sales of the iPhone didn't meet expectations. Apple (AAPL) reported quarterly revenue of $5.41 billion dollars which is its 2nd highest in its history. The sale of 1.7 million Macs accounted for 55% as opposed to last years 29.7% piece of the Apple Pie. Apple is now in a tie for 3rd place with Gateway for sales of computers in the US.

Like its revenue, Apple's image is the best it has been in many years. People love the iPod and its polished company image is one of the reasons for an increase in Macintosh sales. It also hasn't hurt that nobody has been standing in lines to get Windows Vista. It appears that 8–9% of my readers are using Vista but that number hasn’t changed much.

The iPhone sales may have been a national event 2nd only to Paris Hilton going to jail, but only half of the expected half million units were sold. AT&T reported Tuesday that 146,000 phone have been activated as of June 30th. That’s not bad, but doesn’t match up with Apples claim of 270,000 phones sold through their stores. Perhaps, a lot of them were purchased to sell on eBay.

I predict that iPod, Mac and MacBook sales are going to continue to grow and will provide a healthy fiscal orchard for Apple. Now that the hype for iPhone has subsided I doubt Apple will meet their goal for 1 million iPhone sales this quarter and 10 million by the end of 2008. It will be interesting to see if the iPhone has the same impact on Apple as the Xbox has had on Microsoft.