This week Apple released its earnings report for the second quarter. The company posted a net profit of $410 million on revenues of $4.36 billion. They shipped over 8.5 (real) iPods (61% growth over the year-ago quarter) and 1.1 million Macintosh computers (4% growth over the year-ago quarter). It’s important to note that Macintosh sales increased in the midst of the company’s transition to the Intel processor line. In fact, only three of the five Macintosh product lines have transitioned (MacBook Pro, formerly the PowerBook; the iMac; and, the Mac mini). This summer should see the arrival of the Intel-based replacement for the iBook (some think it will be dubbed the “MacBook”) and the fall should bring the replacement for the PowerMac (bets are on the “Mac Pro” name for it).

One interesting number “behind the numbers” is Apple’s estimation that 50% of the Macs sold in their retail stores this last quarter were to customers “new to the Mac”. In other words, folks who were switching to the Mac from that other operating system. You know, uh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Windows. Plus, this number doesn’t take into account sales from other authorized resellers, or even Apple’s own online store.

Also, these numbers don’t represent at all the effect on sales of the whole Boot Camp/Parallels “Windows on a Mac” thing (it didn’t happen until the quarter was over). Although many analysts believe dual-booting and virtualization will spur Mac sales, this remains to be seen.

Speaking of selling Macs with Windows, some catalog resellers have begun offering packages featuring pre-partitioned Macs with pre-installed Windows, for a lower cost than buying the Windows boxed version separately and installing it yourself. It’s a crazy world out there.

Speaking of crazy. A writer for a newspaper that covers the USA today and every day (except Saturday and Sunday) filed a story this week claiming that the whole Boot Camp thing would backfire. His take was that Mac users would use Boot Camp, go out and spend a couple of hundred dollars on a Windows XP CD, boot up into XP, suddenly see what they were missing, and not use the Mac OS X side any more.

The peyote must be passed around freely over there in the Gannett newsrooms. We Mac users know precisely what we’re missing, thank you very much, and it’s a lot like missing the winter flu when everyone else has it.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski