So Apple launched the iPhone 3G last night, and it quickly became clear that this launch was less about adding whizz-bang new features – 3G and GPS are really the only new additions – and more about selling (and this is a technical term) a shitload of iPhones. The price cut and the move to subsidised, traditional mobile phone revenue models (no revenue sharing, in other words, at least with AT&T that we know of) means that Apple's stated goal of 10 million iPhones sold in 2008 begins to look positively conservative.

On Monday Apple released details of the last quarters sales. Profits rose 66% to $904 million, which equates to £1. 01 per diluted share, based on sales of $6. 22 billion for the three month period ending September 29th 2007. Steve Jobs said: Apple shipped 2,164,000 computere representing 34% growth on the same quarter last year. The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17 percent growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone sales were 1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.

Apple today announced that OS X 10. 5 (Leopard) would be released at 6pm on October 26th at Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple's online store is now taking pre-orders for the operating system. Steve Jobs is quoted in saying - The Apple website has also been updated with a new look, see here.

This week has seen the start of rumours on when Leopard, the new OSX operating system will be released to the world. If history is to repeat itself, the last friday of the month will be used as the release date for Leopard. For example 10. 4, OSX Tiger was released on Friday, April 29, 2005. Currently there is only one remaining problem in the developer builds being sent out by Apple, which can be found in the PowerPC build, which is said to exhibit problems launching Civilization IV and The Sims 2.

So September 18th came, and to the delight of all Apple followers in the UK, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Since its release in the US I for one have been waiting for the day I could get my hands one one (without having to hack the software to use other providers SIM cards). The presentation gave a lot of details about what would, and wouldn't be included in the UK iPhone. A price tag of £269 was revealed, which when compared to US price ($399), is considerably more than our Apple chums across the water have to pay, nearly 30% less infact.