Apple And The Forgotten (Apple)TV
Apple’s AppleTV seems to have fallen off the radar as pointed out by Business 2.0′s Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
Apple certainly didn’t provide much Apple TV guidance yesterday. In the nearly hour-long conference call with reporters and analysts, the issue of Apple TV sales came up exactly once, in this exchange with Apple’s CFO:
Harry Blount – Lehman Brothers: Could you give us a sense of Apple TV units? They are not discreetly (sic) broken out here.
Peter Oppenheimer: We don’t announce that level of product detail.
Harry Blount – Lehman Brothers: Okay, but it’s not included in the iPhone numbers, correct?
Peter Oppenheimer: It is not, it’s a separate category. It’s reported in the other music category as an accessory.Never mind that Oppenheimer was happy to go into that level of product detail when it came to the 1,764,000 Macintosh computers sold in the quarter, or the 9,815,000 iPods. Apple goes into product detail when it serves them and keeps things vague when it doesn’t.
As it happens, the line item Oppenheimer points to, “Other Music Related Products and Services,” is too ill-defined to be any help at all. The catch-all category accounted for $608 million of revenue in Q3, but that’s down from $653 million in Q1, the Christmas quarter, when there was no Apple TV to account for.
The long and the short of it, Lehman Brothers is guessing Apple sold 235,000 units. But how to you gauge that? Do you compare those numbers against XBox which has media streaming capabilities? If so those numbers are abysmal. Or do you compare it against Sling Media’s SlingBox, where the numbers might be more competitive?
