Consider the situation: A company earns record profits, exceeding analyst estimates in most respects. Despite the skepticism, and dire predictions from over the years, just about everything the company touches turns to gold.

At the same time, journalists don’t want to make it seem that they are fawning over the company, and they no doubt want to provide at least a semblance of fair and balanced coverage. So they’ll call a few industry analysts from a list of folks covering the business, in search of some pithy quotes.

Yes, that’s the way to cover both sides of the story, but when it comes to Apple Inc., you just know that the company has a powerful spin machine that will be working at full tilt regardless of the actual facts. It doesn’t matter if it’s a profit or a loss, whether a product is a success, a failure, or somewhere in the middle, it’s easy to go away with the impression that the company plans to change the world and is doing just that.

But let’s look and see if there’s anything about the numbers that doesn’t seem so impressive. After all, Apple’s stock took a dip after the quarterly report was released, so clearly something was wrong, although it may well be their conservative guidance for the current quarter. But Apple has always been careful about such matters, and they come off looking like huge winners when the figures end up being a whole lot higher.

Well, I suppose the sales of new Macs might be a matter of a little concern. After all, with 50% of new Macs being sold to people who are new to the platform, shouldn’t the sales have risen more than they actually did? If that estimate of Mac switchers is correct, it means that a lot of existing Mac users may still be on the sidelines and not buying new computers. And, even though their market share in the U.S. went up somewhat, at least according to one estimate, it was down overseas.

Is there something wrong here?

A good question, and I don’t pretend to have solid answers, but you have to wonder why some of you aren’t buying new Macs in sufficiently high quantities. Well, it is true that Apple sells more computers during the September quarter, because of educational purchases. This time, it was the Christmas holidays, and PC sales in the U.S. weren’t all that terrific anyway, but Apple managed to sell Mac at pretty much the same clip as in the previous quarter.

It is true, of course, that the fall upgrades to Mac hardware were fairly tame. Sure, Apple switched many of their models to the new Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which offer a modest speed boost, but nothing you’re likely to notice all that much without a stop watch.

The Mac Pro came out in August, and it’s a speedy beast. But didn’t Intel come out with quad-core versions of its Xeon processor, so why didn’t they turn up in the Mac Pro? Apple didn’t even have to do anything more than issue a press release or quietly offer quad-core processors as a build-to-order option.

So were professional users sitting on their hands, waiting for double the processor power, or is a certain powerhouse application from Adobe making them hold off their purchase of new Mac hardware? Well, that’ll change by spring.
What about Leopard? Does the idea of a brand new operating system make you want to hold off buying a new Mac until they come installed with Mac OS 10.5 preloaded. After all, why pay an extra $129 — or whatever Leopard will cost — when you can get it free? Besides, perhaps Apple will upgrade Macs even more in the coming months, with faster processors, new form factors, the whole nine yards.

Of course, all of this is speculation. Perhaps informed speculation, since these scenarios are very plausible.

On the other hand, I do not think that some people are postponing new Mac purchases because of that stock options affair. Besides, if anything were to happen that would hurt Apple, I expect it’ll be telegraphed in advance to some degree, particularly if Steve Jobs were targeted further by government investigators and prosecutors.

But despite some wayward speculation from a few tech pundits, I don’t see that much of a chance of it happening. Although Steve Jobs is one of the most powerful executives in the tech industry — and the entertainment industry for that matter — there’s not really a huge incentive to bring him down.

So is there something potentially upsetting in Apple’s record-breaking financials? I’m sure there are plenty of naysayers out there who will try to find the dark cloth behind the silver lining, but I just don’t see it happening.

But I’ve been wrong before too.

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You can bet that Apple’s conservative guidance about income for a subsequent quarter must take Wall Street by surprise. It seems as if they add a little to the estimate, read a few tea leaves, and come up with projections that are way off the mark.

It’s almost axiomatic that so-called financial experts will assert guidance that underestimates Apple’s true earnings. Such things almost seem to happen often enough that people who believe in conspiracy theories might think that such behavior is deliberate, and not just the result of making a few mistakes. Or maybe you shouldn’t trust estimates.

In any case, the analysts estimated Apple’s revenue for the last quarter in the range of $6.42 billion, but it was actually $7.1 billion, up from $5.75 billion last year. Profits were estimated at 78 cents per share, and ended up at $1.14 per share, up 77 percent from last year. Do you recall when Apple couldn’t earn this much in an entire year?

Should I say it? Yes I will. The earnings were records for Apple Computer, and I’ll cover a few more highlights in this column. You can get many of the raw figures direct from Apple’s site.

While the alleged experts said that some 16.5 million iPods would be sold, the reality was way better, some 21.1 million. That’s 50 percent over last year, so take that Microsoft! Mac sales weren’t too shabby either, at over 1.6 million, which is up 28 percent from the same quarter last year. The actual breakdown is 969,000 notebooks and 637,000 desktops.

There’s little doubt that desktop sales remain somewhat tepid in the scheme of things because professional Mac users are still sitting on the sidelines awaiting a Universal version of Adobe Photoshop. Sure there’s a public beta of the forthcoming CS3 version out now, but you don’t do real work with public betas. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some of these folks are buying recent PowerPC Macs, used or refurbished, rather than the Intel-based versions. In fact, I know of one design studio in my area where the owner did just that, not wanting to chance a move to Intel right now, although the Power Mac G5 Quad he bought instead didn’t really save him all that much money.

If there is an area where Apple sales didn’t quite meet estimates or hopes, it was the number of Macs shipped, where the numbers were closer to 1.75 million. On the other hand, let’s be real here. Apple’s peak sales actually occur during the previous quarter, due to educational sales. So this is the first time Mac shipments haven’t declined for a first fiscal quarter. That’s progress.

Still more information emerged from the conference call with analysts. Although Apple kept some facts close to the vest as usual, you can still get a decent picture of what’s going on.

For example, the iPod had 72 percent of the U.S. market in December, according to NPD, and iTunes dominates the legal music download arena with an 85 percent share.

Now as to that stock option mess, according to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, during the conference call, the company is “voluntarily and proactively” cooperating with the authorities during the ongoing investigation of the whole affair. Indeed, the skeptics are still wondering if Steve Jobs might get still somehow caught up in some sort of legal mess, despite the claims that he really didn’t appreciate the unsavory accounting consequences of approving the backdating of stock options.

But that’s nothing I’m about to comment on right now. Even the people who don’t like Jobs wouldn’t really want to see him forced out of Apple.

On a more pleasant matter, Mac OS 10.5 Leopard reportedly remains on track for a spring release, and, according to VP Tim Cook, they don’t expect sales to be impacted as folks await the upgrade.

For the current March quarter, Apple’s estimates remain extremely conservative, with revenue at between $4.8 to $4.9 billion and earnings of 54 cents to 56 cents per share. If you take those numbers seriously, if Apple can manage to exceed those figures, they end up coming up roses.

All in all, it seems quite hard to find bad news out of all this, and I don’t want to seem paranoid. But it probably won’t stop some tech pundits and financial “experts” from trying.

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Over the years, one of the reasons why Apple has persevered despite lots and lots of failures in products and the “vision thing” is because so many people love their Macs and were willing become unpaid cheerleaders.

Indeed, there is something about the Mac experience that — even though the computers remain highly imperfect devices — empowers your creativity, and gives you the thrill of accomplishment rather than a sigh of relief. So even in the dark days, when Apple seemed to have lost its mojo, millions of loyal Mac users kept buying and using the products, hoping against hope that things would soon get better.

Although some Apple executives played the Mac press over the years with their pet projects, that behavior came to a shattering halt under Steve Jobs. Suddenly Apple became secretive, with information about new products emerging in a carefully controlled environment. To be sure, this only made the tech press all the more curious about what the company was up to, and Mac rumor sites flourished.

So far, I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. But you have to wonder how many Windows users are equally fervent about their platform preference. Do they choose Microsoft products because they love them, do they regard Bill Gates as a rock star, or is it all a matter of necessity? Businesses use Windows, and if you want to keep your job, you use the computer put in front of you, although some do, admittedly, protest.

Well, I do not doubt that there are folks who prefer Windows for logical and/or emotional reasons. But you also have to wonder if Microsoft has to work just a little harder to stoke the fires of avid fandom.

Take the Zune digital music player, which is now regarded as essentially a failure, even though Microsoft swears it’ll keep on trying to expand its reach beyond that reported two percent sales figure.

In the weeks before Zune came out, several Web sites appeared extolling its virtues, its wonderfulness, and the fact that it far surpassed the iPod in nearly every important respect. These sites were allegedly run by young people who were somehow lured to Microsoft’s headquarters for an advanced hands-on with the new product, and you can bet they sounded real impressed with what they saw.

In all fairness to Microsoft, this would appear to be what they wanted all along, to expand the concept of viral marketing and build a growing Zune community. That’s what the “Welcome to the social” ad campaign is all about.

Alas, these expressions of avid enthusiasm apparently didn’t result from a real grassroots campaign behind the Zune, but the result of Microsoft surreptitiously stoking the fires by providing free product and even sponsoring the Web sites to spread the word. Now there’s nothing illegal about the practice, and it’s surely understandable that Microsoft wants to build a fan base as quickly as possible, although the ultimate success of such maneuvers is highly questionable.

You see, when the iPod came out, Apple didn’t seed Mac users with free players, or build sites to create anticipation for the product. In fact, perhaps aside from some rumors here and there, Apple said nothing about the iPod until it was actually released. That and a traditional campaign of broadcast and print ads was all that was needed to build demand. In retrospect, I wonder if Steve Jobs and his crew truly realized the iPod’s potential, or that it would become the first Apple product that would become a smashing success on both the Mac and PC platforms.

In every way, however, Apple was proud to put its name and logo on the iPod. Microsoft? Well, it almost seems as if Microsoft was embarrassed to let anyone in on the fact that they were truly responsible for Zune. For the longest time, the product was absent from their home page and, in fact, they built a separate site for the music player.

Microsoft’s name? Well, you’ll find it, of course, in tiny type in the copyright notices, but not much elsewhere on the Zune site. It’s almost as if they felt that the Zune could only succeed if it didn’t carry the baggage of the Microsoft name behind it.

Indeed that, and the fact that they apparently had to pay or otherwise subsidize the early adopters is what distinguishes them from Apple.

So I ask you: Why isn’t Bill Gates proud of what the company he co-founded is doing?

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