By Richard Blackden and New York
APPLE is expected to deliver a record profit this week as Wall Street analysts turn their focus to a television product as the company's next engine of growth.
The iPad maker is forecast to have chalked up a $US9.5 billion ($A9.1 billion) profit in the final three months of last year, 58 per cent more than for the same quarter in 2010.
iPads and iPhones are just what the Apple doctor ordered.Credit: Bloomberg
Sales of the iPhone fuelled the rise, according to Credit Suisse, which estimates China bought 30 million of the phones in the quarter. iPad sales are forecast to have risen 90 per cent in the quarter.
But as 2012 begins, signs that Apple may be seriously developing a television are generating interest among those who track the company. Co-founder Steve Jobs, who died last October, fuelled the interest by telling his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had ''finally cracked'' a TV with a simple interface that would synchronise with Apple's other devices.
''We believe that tackling TV is a natural next move for Apple in the living room,'' says Ben Reitzes, an analyst at Barclays Capital.
Apple does already have a product known as Apple TV, a device that consumers can plug into their TVs to gain access to iTunes. Gene Munster, a leading Apple analyst at brokerage Piper Jaffray, says Apple is already working on a serious product that may be introduced later this year or in early 2013.
Chief executive Tim Cook is likely to be questioned on whether Apple has any plans for a television product when he delivers the company's quarterly results on Tuesday. There have been worries that in the absence of Mr Jobs Apple will struggle to keep up the innovation that helped pull it back from the brink of extinction in the late 1990s.
Mr Cook may not give anything away at a company that is famed for its secrecy. Indeed, the depth of that secrecy is a key defining feature of Apple, according to a new book on the company that will be published this week.
In Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really Works, Adam Lashinsky claims that Apple's employees are kept in silos, have the need to be secret instilled in them through the fear of dismissal, and that the secrecy around product launches is worth millions of dollars of revenue.
''Like a horse fitted with blinders, the Apple employee charges forward to the exclusion of all else,'' writes Lashinsky.
Of more immediate concern to analysts will be when Apple introduces the third version of the iPad. Most Apple watchers have pencilled in March for the upgrade of a device that, according to technology research firm IDC, controls two-thirds of the market for tablet computers.
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