For all the strength of Mac sales, however, Apple's computers accounted for a smaller slice of the company's total revenues than either the quarter before or the same quarter the year prior. Last quarter, Mac sales contributed just 34.9 percent of all Apple revenues, down from 36.9 percent in the same period in 2007 and off even more from the 45.8 percent in the quarter that ended in September 2008.
"The Mac piece of the pie is getting smaller and the overall iPod market is saturated," said Gottheil. "That's why the iPhone is the big propeller behind the overall growth of the company."
Apple sold 4.3 million iPhones in the last three months of 2008, down substantially from the 6.9 million it sold the quarter before. But that still represented an increase of 88% year-to-year over the 2.3 million sold in late 2007.
Gottheil was bullish on the iPhone, in particular the amount of money each one sold brings to Apple's bottom line. "They were even more transparent than they have been in the past," he said, referring to Apple's new habit of noting what revenues the iPhone would have contributed if the company didn't spread out the money over a 24-month span.
Each iPhone, said Gottheil, is a "$600 cash infusion" -- the amount it makes from the retail sales and mobile carriers' subsidies -- to Apple.
"Right now, the iPhone is driving Apple's growth, absolutely," Gottheil said.
During the question-and-answer segment of the call, the Apple executives talked about netbooks, the small, low-priced notebooks that grabbed as much as 10% of the laptop market in late 2008, and declined to comment about the health of CEO Steve Jobs.
On netbooks, Cook, who is in charge of day-to-day operations at Apple while Jobs is on a six-month medical leave, essentially reiterated the wait-and-see attitude that Jobs himself expressed three months ago.
"Right now the products in there are much less powerful than customers want, they have cramped keyboards and small displays," said Cook. "We think that the products there are inferior. But we'll see. We have some ideas here and we're watching the space."
"I think that at this point, they don't feel a need to enter the [netbook] marketplace," said Gottheil, who last month had speculated that Apple would, in fact, unveil one or more netbooks at Macworld, which Apple did not do.
"They don't seem so much concerned about leaving that money on the table as more concerned about the erosion in the Mac market," Gottheil said.
