Revenue

Apple expected to report record Mac sales this week

On this one, most analysts agree: Summer '11 was even bigger than Christmas '10

The Mac was one of the few products that failed to live up to expectations in the June quarter (Apple's fiscal Q3). Analysts were looking for sales of 4.2 million. What Apple (AAPL) delivered was 3.95 million.

That's not likely to happen again on Tuesday, when Apple reports its earnings for fiscal Q4.

Everybody seems to agree that MORE

How many iPhones did Apple sell last quarter?

The Street is looking for a falloff in sales. The amateurs are looking for a blowout.

I expect Apple (AAPL) to report two important iPhone statistics next week.

The first, the number of iPhone 4S units sold this coming weekend, the company won't know until after midnight Sunday. The other, the number of iPhones sold last quarter, it already has in hand.

In this post, I'm going to look at the second number, MORE

Wall Street still doesn't understand Apple

With Q4 earnings due next week, the pros and the bloggers are $3.9 billion apart

It has become, for the Street, an embarrassing quarterly tradition.

The Apple (AAPL) independent analysts -- a growing community of bloggers, private investors and assorted amateurs -- file estimates that look, by Wall Street's standards, outrageously optimistic.

But as the day of reckoning approaches -- in this case, Tuesday Oct. 18, when Apple is scheduled to announce its MORE

Apple and Wall Street: Six quarters of lousy estimates

For as long as we have been tracking them, the bloggers have trounced the pros

On Sunday, the day after Apple's (AAPL) fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 ended, we posted preliminary revenue and EPS estimates from both Wall Street's Apple analysts and a group of amateurs we've been tracking for a couple of years.

After we posted the chart, one reader who calls himself jmmxx suggested that it would be more interesting to see how MORE

Apple's Q4 2011: A tale of three wildly different estimates

Between the company, the Street and the amateur analysts, a range of $9.4 billion

Apple's (AAPL) fourth fiscal quarter of 2011 ended Saturday, and depending whose estimates you believe, it was either a ho-hum quarter or a record-smasher.

The chart at right shows the actual revenue and earnings per share for the previous 11 quarters -- Q1 2009 through Q3 2011. In the last three columns we've plotted three pairs of data MORE

Apple's growth predicted to slow to 10% in 2013. Seriously?

Piper Jaffray's estimate of 20% looks bullish by comparison. It looks crazy to us.

Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray's longtime Apple (AAPL) analyst, issued his estimates for calendar 2013 on Wednesday. The highlights:

Revenues of $164 billion (8% higher than The Street)
Earnings of $40.50 per share (10% higher)
Revenue growth slowing from 82% the June 2011 quarter to 20% in 2013.
The consensus among investors he polled was that growth would slow even more dramatically MORE

Why Apple's earnings are growing faster than its revenue

It's something the amateur analysts seem to understand and the pros still don't get

A day before Apple (AAPL) is scheduled to report its 3rd quarter earnings, Robert Paul Leitao thinks he has put his finger on what's wrong with the Street's view of the company.

Leitao, who rides herd over 30 amateur analysts at The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board, has been tracking the gap between Apple's revenue and its earnings. MORE

Apple Q3 2011 earnings preview

Estimates from 48 analysts forecast earnings growth between 50% and 107% year over year

This was a busy week for last-minute revisions from the Wall Street analysts that follow Apple (AAPL). The spreadsheet above shows the final estimates we've collected -- barring still more revisions -- from four dozen amateurs and professionals, along with each analyst's rank, where available, in our earnings smackdowns for Q1 and Q2.

An amateur, Traderhood's Nicolae Mihalache, MORE

Apple hits No. 35 in Fortune 500

Up 21 slots from 2009. If ranked by profits, rather than revenues, it would be No. 8

Apple (AAPL) catapulted into the top 50 U.S. companies in the 2011 edition of the Fortune 500 released Friday. The rankings are based on revenues from the most recent fiscal year -- in Apple's case, the one that ended Sept. 2010. If profits had been the criterion, Apple would have come in eighth, right MORE

Charting Apple's off-the-chart growth

How can investors wrap their heads around 16 quarters of double-digit growth?

To fend off what he calls "superlatives fatigue," Asymco's Horace Dediu posted a pair of charts Wednesday that put Apple's (AAPL) sales and earnings growth in perspective.

The first, at right, assigns color bands to low, moderate, high, very high and exceptional (triple-digit) growth.

The second, below, is a little harder to make sense of, but it shows how much bigger MORE