Apple Earnings Buck Recession Trends with 46 Percent Rise

Apple earnings up — way up

Image from Wikimedia.

While most companies are still striving to pull themselves out of recession slumps, Apple is back and better than ever. The company posted sales of more than  $10 billion for the past three months. That puts Apple earnings somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 billion in profit for that quarter.

Apple earnings are 46 percent higher for the past three months than they were for the same quarter last year.  The market for instant cash loans is also seeing an increase as Americans struggle to maintain financial stability, but many other retail and manufacturing sectors are still seeing declines in earnings.

All hail the iPhone

Despite the state of the economy, Apple earnings reflect the highest-ever sales of iPhones and Mac computers. This isn’t particularly surprising in the case of the iPhone, which has not been around very long. As some people have started to see smartphones as a necessity rather than a luxury, sales of iPhones have skyrocketed.

Not surprisingly, sales of the iPod have gone down slightly as sales of iPhones increased. Who would want a plain, old mp3 player when you could get a phone that has one built in? Increased sales of Mac computers are somewhat surprising, considering the emergence of inexpensive NetBooks, but apparently Apple has figured out how to recession-proof the popularity of its products.

Will Droid put a dent in Apple earnings?

In fact, Apple’s products such as the iPod and iPhone have made such an impact on consumers that they are being directly targeted by competitors. Verizon has started running commercials for Droid, its answer to the iPhone. The slogan for the Droid is “Everything iDon’t, Droid does.”

The “putting a lower case i at the beginning of a word” fad is so deeply ingrained in American consumers, in fact, that after word started traveling about the Droid commercials, people began searching for “iDroid” on Google.