Apple Posted a $7 Million Q4 Operating Profit

but a $45 million net loss for the fourth quater due to one-time charges, including an investment write-off of $49 million, that total $52 million. However, Apple finished its fiscal year with a pre-tax net profit of $65 million as opposed to a $25 million loss last year.

Revenue for Q4 was flat at $1.4 billion, unit sales of Macs were down 14 per cent to 734,000 and gross margins were down 30 per cent to 26.4 percent compared with the same quarter last year. Pretty bleak but not bad for the times. It meets the financial world's expectations which is important. Here is Apple's press release.

Sales of iMacs were down, iBooks and Power Macs were nearly flat and PowerBooks were way down compared with the previous quarter. During the ensuing webcast conference call, Apple CFO Fred Anderson interpreted the numbers as professional users putting off new purchases because of the current poor economic climate in the technology sector.

In response to questions, Anderson mentioned positives like 140,000 iPod sales, 54,000 of which were the Windows version, and the revenue increase per Apple Store. He also mentioned that to date over 200,000 subscriptions to .Mac have been sold and that Apple expects to sell 5 million copies of 10.2 by December 31st.