Amidst the ongoing macroeconomic malaise (is it over yet? Can we come out from under the covers?), the PC industry's sales have been suffering as big corporations and cash-strapped consumers postpone those discretionary purchases of shiny new gear. The expectation, based on 2008's results, was that this quarter would be tough sledding.

Results from analysts Gartner and IDC, however, both show an uptick in unit sales across the PC market year-over-year (2.3% higher globally per IDC, 0.5% higher per Gartner). Any pickup in sales comes as a surprise to Gartner, which had predicted a 5.6% decline in unit shipments.

For Apple specifically, the news is also good: both firms predict a boost in unit sales and share percentage for Apple's CPU shipments, with US numbers up from 8.6% to 8.8% share (Gartner) or a blazing 9.4% share (IDC). For the unvarnished results, you can tune in this coming Monday, 10/19 at 2pm PT to hear Apple's quarterly earnings call.

[via BrainstormTech]

Apple's earnings report came out just a few minutes ago, and the conference call is coming right up! Join us for the liveblog below as we follow along through the conference call.

For the quarter just completed, Apple reported 8.34 billion dollars in revenue, and earnings of $1.35 per share (versus the $1.17 consensus estimate). 2.6 million Macs sold, 10.2M iPods, 5.2M iPhones, 36.3% margins. Guidance for the next quarter is $1.18 to $1.23 per share (all via CNBC). "Best non-holiday quarter ever," says the company.

Full press release below. See you all back here at 2pm PT/5pm ET for our liveblog of the analyst conference call. Note that we will be listening to the call and cannot ask questions (much as we might like to!).

There's nothing quite as fun as an Apple earnings call!

Along with a lot of financial gobbledygook, disclaimers, and carefully-phrased "forward-looking statements", there are also pointed questions from top financial analysts. On occasion, Apple may even bring forth Steve Jobs to enliven the call.

Today is the day for Apple's 3rd quarter 2009 earnings call. Our very own Mike Rose will be leading the team on a liveblog of the event before rushing off to a Wednesday appearance on Fox Business News, where he holds the title of "The Unofficial Apple Analyst." You can also listen in on the festivities, as Apple will be streaming audio of the event.

The liveblog via CoverItLive will begin here on TUAW at approximately 5 PM EDT, so be sure to join us for the call.

It's been a nice year for Apple so far. Stock prices have been steadily rising since January, outpacing a middling technology market. Apple is poised to reach a stock price it hasn't seen since August, 2008. And this particular quarter has seen a lot of Apple news and activity: the new iPhone 3GS was released this quarter with an associated 1 million device sales in the first weekend alone, the MacBook line received a refresh and a price cut, and Apple reported that application downloads on iTunes reached the 1.5 billion mark. Plus, let's not forget that Steve-O (ostensibly) returned to work in June.

Apple appears to have weathered the Palm Pre assault with considerable fortitude, and the iPhone in all its iterations now commands more than 10% of the smartphone market.

So what are experts predicting for Apple tomorrow? For starters, above-average revenue. Among well-regarded Wall Street analysts (take that for what it's worth) the top estimate is by Mark Moskovitz of J.P. Morgan, predicting 8.49B in revenue, with earnings per share (EPS) of $1.23. Lowest is Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, who is predicting "only" 8B in revenue. But all revenue estimates are above the guidance numbers released by Apple itself, which put revenue at 7.9B. The Thomson Financial consensus (an average of all predicted reports) puts revenue at 8.18B. Everybody is in agreement that Apple's gross margins, which were 36.4% last quarter, are the envy of the market.

Trading is brisk today, and stock prices are rising in expectation of tomorrow's positive announcement. Apple's announcement will occur at 5pm EST Tuesday. Check back for TUAW's report. It will be very interesting to see how well Apple does.

Apple reported amazing earnings in its conference call last week, but SwitchtoaMac.com says not so fast -- while it's true that there was a lot of sun shining in Apple's report, there is one small shadow that they obviously didn't mention: their shipments of new Macs have started to drop off for the first time in 5.5 years. And they're the lowest they've been in a year and a half.

A problem? Not a terrible one, but as you can see from the chart over there, there is a definite downturn in new Mac shipments. That might actually be good news for Apple, though -- with the economy doing a nice downturn lately, less inventory might shore up sales a bit, and keep their budgets in line with estimations. Of course it would also mean fewer Mac sales (and despite the recent popularity of the iPhone and the iPod, Macs still make up the majority of Apple's revenue), but if customers aren't there, that's better than having warehouses full of computers paid for but not actually sold.

It's definitely not a sign that the company is going down in flames (in fact, all evidence says exactly the opposite), but it may be a sign that Apple's amazing growth is slowing down a bit.

Thanks, Larry T!

While Apple stock is up over seven percent since its positive earnings report and conference call yesterday afternoon, both Nokia and Microsoft have released dourer reports about their financial outlook.

Microsoft said that it will lay off up to 5,000 people, about five percent of its workforce, over the next year and a half, according to the Seattle P-I. 1,400 of those jobs would be eliminated today. The news comes as the company announced earnings per share two cents less than their quarterly guidance -- 47 cents versus 49 cents -- on revenues of $16.63 billion. Analysts had expected revenues upwards of $17 billion.

Nokia today posted a 69 percent drop in profits for its last quarter. Nokia stock earned 15 euro-cent per share in profit, compared with 47 euro-cent in the same quarter last year. Sales fell 19 percent to €12.66 billion, missing forecasts of €13 billion.

What can we take away from this? Perhaps this is understating things, but Apple appears to be doing very well against its competitors. In yesterday's conference call, the company announced that it had grown sales and revenue even in the face of challenging worldwide economic conditions. In both retail and iPod sales, much of the growth was outside the United States. Apple sold 88 percent more iPhones than they did the same time last year, although much of that may be attributed to pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G.

At midday, AAPL is $10 higher than its record-low close on Tuesday, trading at around $88 per share. Both NOK and MSFT are trading down about $1.65 each.

[Via Daring Fireball.]

Update: Sony, too: It's posting a record annual loss of $3 billion, and plans to close factories and lay off workers.

Just a reminder: Be sure to come back today at 5 p.m. Eastern (that's 2 p.m. Pacific) for Apple's First Quarter 2009 Results Conference Call. We'll be liveblogging the occasion, with contributions from your favorite TUAW bloggers, and yours truly.

Apple is streaming audio from the call here. A recording of the call will be available at that page for a few weeks afterward.

Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog has its roundup of projected Q1 sales numbers from Bernstein Research's Toni Sacconaghi and Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster:

• Mac sales. Munster: 2.5 million to 2.6 million. Sacconaghi: 2.57 million.
• iPod sales. Munster: 18.6 million. Sacconaghi: 18.1 million.
• iPhone sales: Munster: 6.4 million. Sacconaghi: 3.5 million to 4 million.

In related news, AAPL hit a two-year low yesterday, closing at its nadir of $78.20 per share. Also, Bloomberg is reporting that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will review Apple's 10-K filing from last year. Apple hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing, but Bloomberg says the SEC wants to make sure investors weren't being misled about Steve Jobs' health. (Via Macworld.)

More coverage of the earnings report is available at our sister site Blogging Stocks.

We recently reported on Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's expectations of phenomenal iPhone sales over the next year, and now he's back with more happy Apple news!

As reported on Macsimum News, Munster looked at preliminary July sales results from NPD Group, did some extrapolation, and came up with numbers showing that both iPod and Mac sales could beat Wall Street's expectations for the quarter ending September 30, 2008.

Munster's prognostications show Apple selling 2.7 - 2.9 million Macs, which is up 28% year-over-year from the same period in 2007 and beating Wall Street's expectations of 2.65 million units. He also expects iPod sales to hit 10.7 - 11.2 million units, which is slightly above Wall Street's 10.8 million unit guesstimate on the high end.

If Apple happens to hit the high end of these estimates (2.9 million Macs, 11.2 million iPods, 4.1 million iPhones, and a 32% gross margin), Munster calculates that Apple could post earnings per share in the range of $1.19, much better than the Street estimate of $1.11.

TUAW will definitely be following this monster news during the earnings call in October.

[via Macsimum News]

We're going to be covering the Apple earnings call live at 5pm ET / 2 pm PT, now that the earnings report is out ($1.16 per share, hot hot hot!). To listen in on the call, you can pick up the QuickTime stream here. Remember, for ongoing coverage of AAPL be sure to check out our sister site BloggingStocks.

Where's all that cash that Apple made from the iPhone and all those iPods, Macs, and iTunes downloads last year going? Why, right into Apple's mattress. According to the Financial Times, Apple currently has $18 billion sitting on their balance sheet, doing nothing much at all. And they're OK with that -- Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer recently said in the Q1 conference call that they like having that "flexibility." And after all, you never know when you might need to drop $18 billion on something important.

All that money doing nothing isn't so great for Apple's investors though, some of whom apparently want a piece of the pie. They might like to see dividends, stock buybacks, or even actual spending come out of that on Apple's part (later in the piece, I'm surprised to see that Apple only spends 3% of their sales on R&D, while Microsoft spends 14%). But no -- Apple is flush with cash from all their big sales numbers, and they want to apparently stay that way.

[Via Ars]

OK, I get it. Equity investments are bets on the future, not rewards for the past, and a stock like Apple's with such stratospheric growth over the past 12 months is vulnerable to gloomy outlooks in a way that more plodding investments might not be. Still and all: another record quarter. Best sales, best revenue in Apple's history. More than 2.3 million Macs sold, and nearly as many iPhones (!). Over twenty-two million freakin' iPods. Year over year, the December quarter gained almost 2.5 billion dollars in revenue -- my goodness, it was a 9.6B quarter, which would have been a spectacular entire year for the Apple of recent memory. Apple beat the internal guidance by $0.34 a share... there's no way to describe this financial performance except "stunningly good" -- unless you're Doug Krizner of Marketplace Morning Report, who characterized the results today as "less than stellar." Man, I am so happy they made that guy stop signing off with "Make it a good day," because the way he said it made me want to get back in bed and hide my money under a mattress.

But I digress. With these results in mind, why would after-hours traders respond with the fiscal equivalent of "Go crawl in a hole and die, you hippie freaks?" Granted, Apple's CFO is anticipating earnings per share for next quarter around a dollar, which is less than analysts were hoping for and may point to some drag on the business from deteriorating economic conditions. It still seems to me that with iPhone revenue growing (remember, it takes two years to extract all the profit from those iPhone sales, so there's an upslope out there as the sales and new markets accumulate) and new streams coming in from iTunes rentals and the so-hot-it's-untouchable retail operation, we've gone from irrational exuberance to a gang initiation beatdown.

Oh well. If I wanted peace and quiet I probably should have bought Dell stock.

Disclaimer: I hold shares in AAPL. Bought them at a split-adjusted $13. Not selling, either.

Apple will be reporting its 2008 Q1 financial results today at 5 PM EST. After yesterday's worldwide market plunge (U.S. exchanges were closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), Apple shares dropped as much as 8% as the markets opened this morning. Though the stock has largely rebounded (thanks to the Federal Reserve's surprise emergency cuts in lending rates), this will certainly make for an interesting backdrop for today's earnings call.

We'll be live-blogging the call (it is streaming live via QuickTime here) and trying out the CoverItLive service to see how it performs.

Join us back here at 5 PM EST for all the action.

Doctor Macenstein has a very good commentary up: even though he's a happy iPhone owner, he wants the iPhone to fail. Fail miserably. In fact, he was cheering on the news during the earnings announcement yesterday that Apple completely missed their analysts' fever dream-induced goal for iPhone sales. Why would a man (woman? Did we ever find out what the Doc's gender was?) who's invested $600+ in a phone want it to not sell well? If you're like me, you might answer that, "because he's crazy." Everyone knows success is always good for a product-- if the iPod had failed, we'd never have had the Nano, the Shuffle, or, for that matter, the iPhone. So if Doc Mac wants to wish the iPhone wrong, he's a loony.

Or is he? He makes good points-- lower-than-expected iPhone sales might make Apple nervous enough to get in gear on pushing new software features and updates out, and get that price point dropping for the rest of us. And on the price point Doc's especially got a point-- when Apple was asked if there was going to be a lowered price point, they actually cited customer satisfaction as the reason not to drop it. In other words, if people are happy with the iPhone (and Apple is convinced that they are), there's no reason to change it.

With AAPL doing so well, Apple has a chance to sit back on their laurels and let the AT&T payments roll in. But any self-respecting iPhone user shouldn't let them take it. With a happy customer base, Apple has less incentive to fix those "little" problems like copy and paste and a missing iChat Mobile.

Update: My good colleagues point out that the iPhone missed analysts' goals, not Apple's.