Minority Report: 12 months of Apple

The defining event for the company in 2008 was the launch of the iPhone 3G in July. In its opening weekend the company expanded its reach to more than 22 new territories and sold more than a million handsets.

Later in the year, Jobs attended an earnings call with CFO Peter Oppenheimer and analysts to reveal the extent of the iPhone 3G sales.

Apple follows accounting practices that mean it has to report sales of iPhones across eight quarters (representing the estimated economic lives of the product). However, the company was keen to shout about how much revenue it could have reported if it wasn't constrained by the need to defer the income for the quarter across the length of iPhone contracts.

The answer was a hell of a lot. Apple claimed it sold 6.9 million iPhones during the fourth quarter of 2008. It has sold more than 13 million to date, easily surpassing Jobs' target of 10 million sold by the end of 2008. According to the adjusted figures, iPhone sales represented almost 40 per cent of the company's revenues for the quarter.

During the quarter, Jobs said Apple had leapfrogged RIM in unit sales. Meanwhile, earlier in December it was reported that iPhone sales had also surpassed sales of Windows Mobile in the smartphone market.

Hello App Store
Along with the new iPhone came the App Store, a marketplace for the third-party developer community to develop applications for the device and the iPod Touch.

Apple came under criticism for restricting the kinds of applications that could be distributed via the App Store but the sales figures sent a clear message. Within a month, the store had sold 60 million apps and was drawing in $1m per day for Apple. Jobs was naturally ebullient and predicted the App Store could soon become a billion dollar marketplace.

Face the music
On the music front, the company's range of iPods got their now-traditional September update, with the entire range getting a facelift and a splash of colour.

Most notable were the changes to the iPod nano, which eschewed the chubby image of the previous model and got back to basics with a slimmer look and feel. To top off the event, Apple added a touch of Genius.

Jobs health watch
Apart from new products, Steve Jobs' health has remained in the spotlight all year.

The Apple CEO battled and overcame pancreatic cancer back in 2004 but following a number of public appearances where he appeared somewhat gaunt, the focus in the industry and the media switched from the products coming off the Cupertino conveyor belt and focused on whether the company's hugely influential leader had fallen ill again.

The company has denied the reports stringently stating at one point that the CEO had a common bug. However, the rumours endure and Bloomberg didn't help matters when it accidentally published an obituary of the Apple CEO on its site in August.

At the iPod event in September, Jobs' opening keynote slide simply read: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

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