Apple earnings: Q2 ahead of estimates, Q3 slightly below

iPROFIT: Apple's Q2 numbers are in, and they're slightly ahead of the company's own projection--and right on track with Wall Street's. The tally: $9.5 billion in earnings on $43.6 billion in sales (the latter a March record), exactly matching Wall Street's profit expectation and slightly exceeding its sales estimate. The profit is lower against a higher sales figure compared to last year's $11.6b in earnings on $39.2b in sales. The report shows 37.4 million iPhones (a 6.7% year-over-year spike) and 19.5 million iPads (a 65% increase) sold in Q2. For Q3, Apple anticipates between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion in sales, slightly below analysts' expectations. "The decline in profits," opined The Wall St. Journal, "is one reason why sentiment surrounding Apple has been so poor in recent months." The tech behemoth's stock nonetheless bounced sharply upward today, and is trading at $406.13 (up 1.87%) as of this writing. CEO Tim Cook expressed his pleasure in a fashion remarkably similar to human emotion and added, "Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline." Upon hearing the word "pipeline," several UMPG staffers mistakenly believed there was finally a device that would enable them to download weed. (4/23p)