Wow! That's a lot of kit being shifted by Apple. With the publication of its financial results for the fiscal 2008 third quarter ended June 28, Apple announces revenue of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per diluted share. International sales accounted for 42 percent of the quarter's revenue.

Compare that with a revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share, for the same time last year. Mind you, the gross margin was down from 36.9 percent to 34.8 percent but I guess that Apple will not be complaining too loudly about that.

It is the amount of hardware shipped that impresses me most though, let's just run over those figures again:

• 2,496,000 Macintosh computers shipped, which represents a 41 percent unit growth and 43 percent revenue growth over this time last year.
  
• 11,011,000 iPods sold, which represents a 12 percent unit growth and seven percent revenue growth over this time last year.
  
• 717,000 iPhones sold, compared to just 270,000 this time last year.

Given the disastrous launch of the iPhone 3G, from the end user perspective during the first few days at least, Apple will be happy to focus on those hard fact, bottom line figures instead of suffering the verbal gunfire from bloggers.

"We're proud to report the best June quarter for both revenue and earnings in Apple's history," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We set a new record for Mac sales, we think we have a real winner with our new iPhone 3G, and we're busy finishing several more wonderful new products to launch in the coming months."

"We're extremely pleased with the growth of our business and the generation of almost $5.4 billion in cash in the first three quarters of fiscal 2008," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO. "Looking ahead to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008, we expect revenue of about $7.8 billion and earnings per diluted share of about $1.00."