Apple MacBooks Drive Soaring Apple Revenues

Apple continued to report impressive quarterly results, due to an actual increase in notebook sales during the traditionally slow first quarter.

The company said it sold 2.29 million Mac computers, 10.6 million iPods  and 1.7 million iPhones in the quarter. Of those Macs, 856,000 of those were desktops, and 1.43 million were notebooks. The latter number is the significant one: Apple sold 1.34 million notebooks during the height of the holiday sales season, which meant that sales grew 6 percent. Historically, sales decline during this period. About the only down point was in iPod sales, which fell from 22.1 million units during the fourth quarter to 10.6 million units.

The result? The highest revenue and earnings for the March quarter in the company's history: $1.05 billion in profits on top of $7.2 billion. Even the outlook was strong: Apple expects about a 33 percent increase in revenue for the current third fiscal quarter. Analysts noted, however, that both gross and operating margin declined year over year, primarily due to a decline in sales in the Leopard operating system.

Retail sales soared, and foot traffic in Apple's 208 stores was up 12 million people, and the iPhone actually fell into an unexpected short supply within the U.S. as a result.