Products:After a record-breaking year, the focus will now shift to what new products Apple will release at Macworld in mid-January, writes John Collins
To get a sense of what a stellar year 2007 was for Apple and its co-founder Steve Jobs, you only had to visit the company's Fifth Avenue store in New York this autumn. It was easy to believe that Christmas had come early as the Apple faithful queued to part with cash for iPhones, iPods in their myriad forms, Macbooks, and even the occasional Apple TV set-top box.
New Yorkers and visitors first formed lines for an Apple staff member to show them the object of their desires. Once they were convinced they did actually want an iPhone/ iPod Touch/Macbook, the products were scanned and they joined another queue snaking around the subterranean store to part with their cash.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kids from local schools availed of banks of Macs at the back of the store as part of their school projects.
Back at Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, Steve Jobs, who in 1986 was ousted from Apple to be replaced by Pepsi marketing guru John Sculley, was having the last laugh. Apple's success is largely a triumph of marketing. As Silicon Valley marketing guru Regis McKenna said recently, Apple's marketing is "baked into its design, the quality of its products and support, and the whole supply chain".
The iPod, which has driven the resurgence at Apple, has hardly been an overnight success, but even by Apple's standards, 2007 was an incredible year.
Jobs & Co began the year by breaking one of their own unwritten rules - announcing details of a product before it was available to buy. Jobs pulled the wraps off the iPhone back in January at Macworld, even though it didn't go on sale in the US until June and has yet to make it to shops in the Republic.
During its 2007 financial year, which ended on September 29th, Apple said it had sold 1,389,000 iPhones and the product has been universally acclaimed as one of the easiest smartphones to use. Still, although the figure is impressive, Apple will have to significantly boost sales if it is to meet Steve Jobs's target of 10 million by the end of 2008.
Christmas sales were probably not helped when the chief executive of AT&T, Apple's exclusive US partner, revealed that a version running on the faster 3G networks would go on sale in early 2008.
Analysts have been talking about the "halo effect" that the iPod would have on other Apple products for some time, but now there is hard evidence to suggest that's a reality.
Apple sold a record number of Macintosh computers in its fourth quarter - 2,164,000 - which topped the previous record for quarterly shipments by 400,000. It is now the number three PC brand in the US behind HP and Dell.
The revamped line of iPods announced in September, including the iPhone without a phone, the iPod Touch, are also likely to help Apple top the sales of 10.2 million music players it reported in the fourth quarter.
The year hasn't been without its issues, however. Early US adopters of the iPhone felt aggrieved when Apple dropped the price of the 8GByte model by $200 (€138) less then three months after it launched.
The iTunes music store is also facing competition on all fronts, from Amazon to social networking sites. Greenpeace and other environmentalists have slammed the iPhone for containing toxic chemicals, while Nokia and the rest of the mobile handset makers have released viable alternatives.
At time of writing, the Apple share price is up an impressive 125 per cent from where it opened at the start of the year (the company's market cap is up almost 80 times on what it was when Jobs returned as "interim" chief executive 10 years ago) and Apple was surprisingly bullish with its guidance for the Christmas quarter - another departure from tradition.
With the focus now on what products Jobs will release at Macworld in mid-January and with first-quarter results due shortly after, the first few months of 2008 should tell a lot about whether any of the sheen is coming off Apple.
