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They sold roughly 60M units of high margin products in one quarter. They are printing money for years now. One of the quotes usually around this is "they did not meet the expectations of analysts" and i really dislike it. Hopefully someday we will move away from quarter performance.

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The amazing thing about this quarter's performance is the 47.4% gross marging.

How often does a company as widely followed as Apple post a number so amazing that it beats even the most rabid fanboy analyst's predictions? (At least among the 52 guesses that Philip Elmer-DeWitt rounded up[0])

[0] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/21/can-tuesdays-earnings...

Analysts were actually below what was posted this quarter. Next quarter looks to be disappointing for analysts, they are aiming higher and Apple's guidance is lower ...

Apple always low-balls their guidance and it is always well below most analyst estimates, so nothing to go on there.

Even their "bad" quarter Q4 2011 had a guidance of $25 billion and $5.50 earnings per share with actual numbers of $28.27 billion and $7.03 a share (which was up from $20.34 billion and $4.64 per share in Q4 2010).

Isn't that true every quarter? AAPL always gives very pessimistic guidance.

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