Another quarter, another record Apple profit – but will everyone be pleased?  The Cupertino company have announced an $818 million profit in its fiscal third-quarter, with $5.41 billion in sales from April through June (a rise of 24-percent from the same period last year); sales of Macs and iPods are sky-high, shipping over 1.7 million of the former (up 33-percent) and more than 9.8 million of the latter, maintaining its DAP ubiquity with 71.5 percent of the market share.  But what of the iPhone?

Well, Apple reports 270,000 iPhones sold during the quarter – impressive, since it was released a mere 30 hours before the quarter ended – and they expect to sell their one-millionth handset by the end of the September quarter.  Unit sales exceed AT&T’s own activation figures (146,000 over the same period), for the most part due to unprecedented demand for a handset overwhelming the activation process:

“AT&T said more iPhones were sold in the first weekend than they had sold in the first month of any other wireless device in their entire history” Tim Cook, Chief Operating Officer, Apple

Yet the figures must be tough reading for the analysts who so wildly overinflated reports of iPhone sales and bandied about predictions such as “it’ll sell it’s millionth in less than a week”.  Thankfully for Apple the stock market has proved unconcerned by the varied fiscal badinage: stock closed up $2.37 (a rise of 1.76 percent to $137.26), and in after-hours trading that’s fluttered to over $4.50.

There was also a healthy business in iPhone accessories, hitting $5 million for the quarter, while sales of MacBook notebooks rose 42-percent to 1.13 million and comprised 64-percent of all Macs sold during the period.

From a news standpoint, it will be interesting to see how the public and media react now to analyst reports given the monumental over-hype of the iPhone launch.