5: Apple is Going Out of Business

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Apple reported $1.2 billion in earnings during the first quarter of 2009.

The biggest running joke in tech circles is that Apple has been going out of business for 33 years. For decades, it was the remote outlier of the personal computing world, grabbing a miniscule share of the Microsoft-dominated market whenever it could.

Many of Apple's product releases have been met with derision from the tech journalism establishment. A lot of that ire was directed toward the Newton, the first commercially produced, writable tablet PC that turned out to be a critical and commercial bomb. Innovation can be costly, and for some journalists, Apple is always one (false) step away from bankruptcy.

As recently as 2007, critics dismissed Apple's new iPhone (and its price tag) as "nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks" [source: Lynn]. In the fourth quarter of 2008 -- several months into the current recession -- Apple sold 4 million iPhones, representing an 88 percent increase over the same quarter a year before [source: Apple].

Critics have also long predicted that Apple will be pushed out of the computer hardware business, forced to focus instead on software or electronics. Recent forecasts say Apple will stop making Macintosh computers by 2010 [source: Siebold].

Meanwhile, Apple shipped 25 percent more Macintoshes in May 2009 than it did one year ago. By comparison, the personal computer market in general only increased shipments by 1 percent over the same period [source: Gonsalves]. Macs now account for a solid 9 percent of the American PC market, compared to 6 percent only two years ago [source: Cheng].

Even Apple's toughest critics would have a hard time finding anything to criticize about those figures.