39 million phones and $42 billion — all in a quarter's work

Apple’s 4th quarter results were published this week and what a set of results they are.

Just over $42 billion in revenue and a tasty little profit of $8.5 billion can be described as a good day at the office for Tim Cook and the team. A year ago these numbers were $37.5 billion and $7.5 billion respectively.

Now, bearing in mind the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were only available for the last two or three of weeks of that quarter, Apple sold over 39 million iPhones which saw a healthy 16% year-on-year increase. On top that of that were 12 million iPads, down 13% on last year and an outstanding 21% increase in Mac sales which checked in at around 5.5 million. Before we move on, I must pay homage to the little machine which is sitting on my desk in it’s dock playing some nice soothing music while I write this — the iPod. This classic device which changed the way the world consumed music is now effectively out of the Apple catalogue and with sales down 24% reached just about 2.5 million sold.

As you can imagine, Tim Cook was grinning from ear to ear as he ran through these numbers and oozed ebullience when summarizing the highlights of Apple’s new product line up — new iPhones, new iPads, new Macs, iOS 8 and Yosemite. He finished up with the usual tease about more exciting products in the pipeline for next year and, of course the launched but yet to be available, Apple Watch.

A “strong businesses performance" is probably a fair way to describe the goings-on in Cupertino right now as Apple yet again confirmed itself as the world’s most valuable technology company. To wrap up the financial fun and games, the shareholders might have enjoyed some generous dividend payments but Apple still has over $150 billion sitting in the bank.

What will they spend that on?

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