Financials

Apple clobbers estimates, iPad sales fall short

Sales were up 83% and earnings up 92% on 18.65 million iPhones and 3.76 million Macs

As expected, Apple (AAPL) reported record second quarter earnings Wednesday, blowing past its own guidance and Wall Street's expectations in everything but iPad sales.

"With quarterly revenue growth of 83 percent and profit growth of 95 percent, we're firing on all cylinders," said Steve Jobs in a prepared statement that said nothing about those iPad numbers. MORE

Apple earnings: 5 numbers to watch

Despite strong sales, iPad supplies and Japan's quake make Q2's report a hard one to call

Nobody, not even CFO Peter Oppenheimer, thinks that Apple (AAPL) earned as little as $4.90 per share on revenues of $22 billion last quarter -- the numbers he offered in January when he issued his guidance for the company's second fiscal quarter of 2011.

As usual in the Steve Jobs/Tim Cook era, the game at the MORE

The Apple slingshot is primed

The pullback in advance of the company's Q2 earnings report has gone far enough

"If you can keep a good stock down, then you are able to load up for the ride back up. It's like a slingshot -- the harder you pull, the more propulsion you generate."

That's how Jason Schwarz, an author and investment adviser, described the game that hedge funds play with Apple (AAPL) in an article entitled "Apple: MORE

How many iPods did Apple sell last quarter?

In this category, the pros are more bullish than the amateurs

iPod unit sales, despite seasonal spikes, have been drifting down since Christmas 2008, when they peaked at 22.7 million for the quarter (Apple's fiscal Q1 2009).

That quarter also represented the low point in iPod average selling price (ASP) per unit, $148. That's because Apple's (AAPL) business model was shifting from selling dedicated music players to selling more expensive hand-held computers, MORE

How many Macs did Apple sell last quarter?

Estimates from the analysts we polled range from 3.34 million to 3.87 million

Apple's (AAPL) computer line celebrated a unusually merry Christmas in its first fiscal quarter of 2011, selling more than 4 million Macs for the first time it its history.

In what was a difficult quarter for the rest of the PC industry, Mac unit sales were up 23% year over year.

None of the 43 analysts we polled -- MORE

How many iPads did Apple sell?

Perhaps the question analysts should be asking is how fast could it build them?

When estimating unit sales in a highly competitive market -- like computers or cell phones -- the traditional method is to sample some part of the sales channel and use that as a proxy for the broader market.

In a post entitled "Predicting iPhone sales for dummies," Asymco's Horace Dediu makes a strong case that in markets where MORE

Two top amateurs post AAPL estimates

Looking for fiscal Q2 2011 earnings between $5.89 and $6.32 a share

Asymco's Horace Dediu, whose track record on Apple (AAPL) over the past three quarters is second to none, and Daniel ("Deagol") Tello, one of the industry's most closely watched blogger-analysts, have posted their Apple estimates for the topsy-turvy quarter than ends this Saturday, March 26.

Dediu, who likes to make his predictions early, announced on Jan. 22 that he's looking MORE

CNBC's anti-Apple crusader

Erin Burnett has hit on what she must think is a winning formula

I don't spend a lot of time watching CNBC, but I've seen enough of Erin Burnett's coverage of Apple (AAPL) to see the pattern.

Last fall, it was an interview with Tiger Management's Julian Robertson in which she tried -- and failed -- to get him to call Apple's rising stock price a "bubble." (See How not to interview MORE

Apple analysts' frenzied Q4 round-up

The Street scrambles to get its spreadsheets ready for Monday's earnings call

Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi added 2.3 million units to his iPhone estimate on Friday. Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster doubled his iPad number. Hudson Square's Daniel Ernst raised his price target, from $300 per share to $500.

With Apple's (AAPL) products flying off the shelves and its shares setting new record highs every trading day in October (the stock closed Friday at MORE

Gene Munster sees his own shadow

Once the darling of the Apple bulls, Piper Jaffray's senior analyst now walks a cautious line

In June 2007, three weeks before Steve Jobs sold his first iPhone, Gene Munster predicted that within two years Apple (AAPL) would be shipping them at the rate of 45 million a year -- a call he reiterated 9 months later, along with a road map specifying exactly how the company would do it.

In fact, MORE