2008 was indeed a great year for Apple. They broke many of their own records, and managed to sustain good financial performance even as the rest of the market went to the gutter. Apple sold 13.7 million iPhones in 2008, beating their own 10 million estimate. The App Store, which was introduced half a year ago, now has 15,000 applications (yes, most of them are flashlights and calculators). Application download numbers are also staggering : 500 million. Even if we discount multiple downloads (new versions, etc) it’s still quite a significant figure.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen many discussions and speculations on the health of Steve Jobs, and the prospects of Apple without Jobs. I think that Jobs has built a strong management team that can continue to work well and produce great products. Apple is still a highly profitable company and they have enough cash to weather several years of operations in bad times : $28 billion (billion!) in the bank. So, I’m not worried about Apple for the next couple of years at least.

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