Cook and the books

You must have seen or heard about Apple's record financial quarter by now.

Apple recently posted the results of its first fiscal quarter for 2011, which ended in late December 2011. The company pulled in US$26.74 billion in revenue, rising more than 70 percent year-over-year, with a record net income of US$6 billion (about NZ$7.9 billion dollars).

After the earnings call, Computerworld worked out that a Mac is sold every two seconds.

Apple sells 31.52 Macs every minute of each day

That means 45,384.6 Macs sold each day

All current Macs are sold with instant access to the new Mac App Store - Apple served up one million Apps via that store on its first day.

Apple's retail stores sold 851,000 Macs in the last quarter.

Apple is selling 6.5 Macs in an Apple retail store every minute, every day.

Apple's Mac sales have grown at a faster rate than industry averages for the last few quarters.

Actually, for the last 19 consecutive quarters. Mac sales have been ascending at faster than industry growth for almost five years.

There was a 50% growth for Macs in the Asia region, thanks to the MacBook Air and Pro.

Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said the tech giant earned $2.6 billion in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan during the last financial quarter.

The figure encompassing mainland China is a four-times increase from a year ago.

In the Asia Pacific area as a whole, Apple racked-up almost $5 billion in sales, 2.5 times that of a year ago. Australia and New Zealand are in this region. (By the way, the IDC figure I gave of 11.1% of PCs in the NZ market is from vendor units shipped, not revenue. Units.)

Apple wages

While we're comparing figures, Tim Cook, Apple's Chief Operating Officer (the one in charge while Steve Jobs is on medical leave) earned US$59 million last year according to the Wall Street Journal.

'Earned'?

That's NZ$77.7 million a year. That's NZ$6.47 million a month, or NZ$1.489 million per week. Or NZ$37,225 per hour (assuming a 40-hour week).

According to the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), average weekly earnings in New Zealand were $959.13 as of March 2010, or $49,874.76 per year.

If Cook used his wage of last year to employ New Zealanders instead, he could employ 1557 of them at the average wage for one year.

Or about 15,540 Chinese.

The Prime Minister of New Zealand earns $375,000 per annum plus $19,000 per annum in allowances (although Key has other sources of income). That's NZ$394,000 per annum. Tim Cook earns over 197 times that of a New Zealand Prime Minister, although I have to admit I find it easier to make out the results of Cook's work.

But while Wall Street's denizens has been falling over themselves singing the praises of Apple stock as the Cupertino company smashed sales expectations again, the average Apple employee salary is about a tenth that found in one Wall Street powerhouse.

Despite Apple's returns being much higher than Goldman Sachs (which reported its profit figures on Wednesday), the average Apple employee earns US$46,000 (about NZ$60577) versus US$430,700 (cNZ$566,267) at GS, according to calculator-punchers at the New Yorker.

So Tim Cook earns over 1200 times more than his average employee.

A cynic might point out that Goldman's output isn't derived from cheap, unprotected Chinese labour. On the positive side, you might say Apples' output is at least both tangible and useful.

Meanwhile, Apple investors are increasingly irked by Apple's refusal to issue investor dividends. With a pile of cash surpassing the GDP of two-thirds of the world's nations, including New Zealand's, Apple's decision to not issue investor dividends "has been beyond the point of being rational for a while now."

Methinks they have a point.

Amateur bloggers were more accurate than professional analysts predicting Apple earnings. Before Tuesday's Q1 2011 earnings call, Fortune issued a score card ranking various analysts' predictions (both pro and amateur alike) on how Apple would do this quarter

Across the board, the amateurs did a far better predicting Apple's results than the professionals at the brokering houses and banks.

Apple's iPhone brings in more revenue per sale for Apple than the iPad. Apple Chief Operating Officer Cook told reporters the company makes US$625 on each handset. It 'only' brings in US$600 per iPad.

So if you were wondering why iPhones and iPads cost so much ... you've got to hope there's some truly kick-arse R&D coming out of Apple in the years ahead to justify these returns rather than just paying top staff's wages.

Well, those hopes have certainly been justified in the past.

Viruses

Security firm Intego has just released a statement summarising Mac viruses that appeared over 2010. You have to have it to these security companies - they're the only ones who can actually find viruses.

One such was a proof of concept 'ransomeware' that could lock files in OS X by exploiting a feature of OS X. This was, however, never spotted in the wild.

In April, Intego discovered a new variant of malware for Mac called HellRTS. When installed on computers running Mac OS X, it could open a backdoor to allow remote users to take control of infected Macs and perform actions on them. Again, Intego found no instances of it in the wild.

June saw spyware affecting Mac OS X, installed by a number of freely distributed screen savers. This 'OpinionSpy' intended to be a tool for collecting information on users' browsing habits and was not intended to be dangerous, But many of its features could open backdoors, inject code into applications, and download new code without users being aware.

Koobface was a little more threatening. A Mac version of the Koobface worm, a serious problem for Windows users for years, spreads via social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. When users attempt to view videos, after clicking links on the aforementioned sites, the sites hosting the videos attempt to install a malicious Java applet.

But the malware was anything but silent; it presented a dialogue asking users if they wanted to install the applet. Its code was flawed, so the threat was very low (indeed, I have never heard of any Mac users who have experienced it).

The statement went on to raise concerns about bugs in Apple's systems (Mac OS and iOS) and the fact that it's an ever bigger and more attractive target, which should be clearer than ever now. As usual, though, Apple releases Security Updates to close windows of opportunity and to patch flaws. Apple has, however, been criticised for being slow to react to some discovered flaws.

Intego maintains The Mac Security Blog, which keeps Mac users up to date on the latest security threats, malware, security updates, and other security issues that affect Mac users.

Of course, as Intego's briefing rightly states, Mac users are as susceptible as anyone else to phishing and other email scams. Please, people do not accept any email that looks like it's from a bank, PayPal or other financial institution. They will never contact you this way, asking for account access details.

Intego ends on the rather hopeful note that it was a 'busy' year for Mac security professionals!

Anyway, feel free to consider the report for yourself - it's a freely downloadable PDF.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com