FEATUREbusiness. In fact, Apple is a company that’s rarely stood
still in terms of its evolution.
To prove the point, let’s step through 20 years
of Apple’s business, five years at a time.
1999: The Mac comeback
Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 and we all know
what happened next. But that transformation took a
while. Look at a sample quarter from 20 years ago –
the fourth fiscal quarter of 1999 – and you’ll see a very
different company that the Apple of today.
First off, there was only really one Apple product
back then: the Mac. 80 percent of Apple’s revenue
came from the Mac, with 20 percent coming from other
products, mostly Mac accessories and software. In the
fourth quarter of 1999, Apple’s total revenue was $1.34
billion, generating $111 million in profit. To put that in
perspective, Apple generated that much revenue every
two days or so in the third quarter of 2019.
In the fourth quarter of 1999, Apple sold 772,000
Macs. We don’t know how many Macs Apple sells in a
quarter now, because it stopped releasing unit sales
figures last year, but it’s probably in the ballpark of four
million. Keep this in mind when you consider that the
Mac is now only roughly 10 percent of Apple’s overall
business: back when the Mac was 80 percent of Apple’s
business, Apple was selling less than a fifth as many
Macs per quarter as it is in 2019.
2004: Rise of the iPod
2004 was an inflection point for Apple. After the
introduction of the iPod in late 2001, sales built slowly