Oh, for crying out Pete's sake-- we just said we aren't math whizzes, and yet now we're going to have to bust out the calculator anyway just to convince you people that Apple isn't about to collapse into insolvency or something. You all know that Apple's quarterly earnings conference call revealed a ton of good news, right? Well, faithful viewer Mace notes that, according to IDC figures reported by MacNN, "Apple last year shipped 1,675,000 units compared with 1,679,000 in 2002." (They're talking about Macs, not iPods or anything like that.) So Apple shipped fewer Macs last year than in the year before-- which, granted, doesn't sound good at all.

But here's the thing: remember how in the fourth calendar quarter of 2003 (that'd be fiscal Q1/04, the one we just heard about yesterday) Apple reported that it had "shipped 829 thousand Macintosh units during the quarter, up 12 percent from the year-ago quarter"? That's important. Hang onto that juicy little tidbit while we take you on a little tour of Quarterly Earnings Past.

For the third calendar quarter of 2003, Apple reported that it had shipped 787,000 Macs, which was "up 7 percent from the year-ago quarter." For the quarter before that, it said that it had shipped 771,000 Macs-- but there was no mention of how that compared to the year before, which should be a clue. Well, as it turns out, in the same quarter of 2002, Apple shipped 808,000 Macs, so the 2003 figure was actually a 4.6% decrease. And the quarter before that? 711,000 Macs-- again, no mention of the year before, but a little digging reveals that in 2002 it had been 813,000 Macs shipped, and so last year's numbers were a 12.5% decrease.

So-- time to put all this together. First of all, you may have noticed that Apple's quarterly unit shipments don't add up to IDC's at all. IDC says 1,675,000; total up the numbers from Apple's individual calendar-2003 quarterly results and you get 3,098,000. We have no idea why this is; maybe IDC doesn't include education sales or something like that. MacNN reports that "IDC counts shipments to distribution channels and end users, inclusively." Maybe Apple counts something else. Who knows? all we can say is, we're reasonably confident that Apple knows how many freakin' Macs Apple shipped each quarter. For all we know, IDC gets its numbers from the nightly Lotto drawing.

Now look at Apple's growth for each calendar quarter of last year, as compared to the same quarter the year before. From January through March, unit shipments shrunk by 12.5%. Not good. From April through June, they shrunk again-- but this time, only by 4.6%. That's better. From July through September, they finally grew by a respectable 7%. And to close out the year, from October through December they grew by 12%. Notice a trend? It's a good one, isn't it?

And heck, even look at the number of Macs shipped in each quarter moving forward: 711K, 771K, 787K, and 829K. See that? They go up every quarter. Neat, huh? That didn't happen in 2002, when the numbers (according to Apple) were 813K, 808K, 734K, and 743K; they shrunk every quarter until they started to tick upwards again right at the end of the year. And if you go by Apple's numbers, the company shipped just as many Macs in 2002-- 3,098,000-- as it did in 2003. So, no growth when you look at it as year-by-year (similar to the teensy 4,000-Mac year-over-year decline that IDC reported), but quarter-by-quarter it looks to us like Apple had a terrific 2003, with both sequential growth in raw sales and accelerating growth percentage-wise when each quarter is compared to the same one the year before.

Okay, no more math; time for the qualitative wrap-up. What's all this mean? To us it means that Apple picked up steam throughout 2003, releasing more and more must-have products as the year went on. It went from shrinkage to growth, improving consistently in every single quarter. So when IDC says that Apple's total 2003 shipments shrunk a bit compared to its total the year before, we're not even remotely worried, because as always, the real question is this: "What have you done for me lately?" And lately, it seems like Apple's doing pretty darn well.