7. Swift Growing At Unprecedented Rates

Cook said the company has been "blown away" by the reaction to Swift, Apple's new programming language that became available in September as part of its Xcode Apple developer toolset.

In the first month after Swift's release, Cook said the tools were downloaded over 11 million times, and a recent report from Redmond shows that the language is growing at unprecedented rates.

"Inventing a new programming language is something very few companies can do, and we believe it will have a profound effect on our ecosystem," said Cook. "We've seen many of our developers choosing Swift as they build significant new projects, and we are seeing fantastic work with Swift going on in education."