Apple’s earning soared during its fiscal fourth quarter, beating Wall Street estimates and leading to a record high share-price on Monday and Apple chief Steve Jobs to slam the company’s rivals during an earnings call.
The company reported net income of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per share, during the period, compared to net income of $2.53 billion, or $2.77 per share, during the same stretch last year.
Apple’s revenue, meanwhile, soared 67 percent to $20.34 billion.
The red-hot producer of the iPad and iPhone hit $318 per share before trading was halted on Thursday.
Apple said it 14.1 million iPhones during the quarter — almost double what it sold last year. This was the first time the company included sales of its iPhone 4, which hit the marker in June.
Apple sold roughly 4.2 million iPads during the quarter — up from 2.3 million last quarter — though analysts had expected the company to sell more.
During an investor call, Jobs called Google’s assertion that its open platform for the Android will beat Apple’s closed iPhone platform a “smokescreen,” and dismissed the launch of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 (Jobs said "Android and iPhone are winning the battle" in the smartphone war). He said he considers Google Apple’s biggest competitor, but predicted his company will prevail because of an increasingly fragmented market.
He criticized Google for pitching an open platform model of Android versus the Apple closed platform model. According to Jobs, this is nothing else but a Google "smokescreen," and the real issue is a comparison between a fragmented versus an integrated model. He predicts that as more Android devices emerge, more Android versions come to market, more phone manufacturers create more proprietary interfaces, and more app markets go online, developers and users will see a big "mess." In some cases, software developers will have to put out more than 100 different versions of their software to support more than 200 different phones.
