$61 Million Profit is Apple's Third Quarter Financial Result

The result was presented in a 5 pm ET telephone conference call yesterday. Revenue, gross margin and profit were all down from the same quarter last year. Revenue and unit sales were up from previous quarter this year. The main news is that Apple was profitable, and not insignificantly so, in a badly slumping tech economy. Apple still has $4.2 billion in cash.

New iBooks flew out the door to the tune of 182,000 even though they were only fully available in the latter half of the fiscal quarter. The total for all iBooks was 190,000, up from 55,000 of the second quarter. iMac sales were virtually the same at 306,000 versus 300,000 last quarter. The unit sales of both Power Macs (225,000/262,000) and PowerBooks (106,000/134,000) were lower this quarter versus last. Mercifully, probably, G4 Cube sales are not listed separately. Total unit sales and revenue were up this quarter over last and in every region but Europe.

With iMac sales still fairly healthy, we'd be surprised to see any real change to the iMac announced today, at least at the low end--maybe just some refreshing tweaks. While we'd love to see a high end iMac derived from the Cube's design, we're guessing that the principal hardware focus will be on the flagging Power Mac G4 with possibly some significant tweaks for the PowerBook G4 to bring it in line with the new iBook's features--DVD/CDRW combo drive, faster FireWire ports and a minor CPU speedup. We'll see later today!

Here is Apple's press release.