CF Apple Computer

Apple’s Q4 fiscal earnings totaled $1.14 billion ($1.26 per share) on revenue of $7.9 billion. The company beat Wall Street expectations of $1.11 per share on $8.05 billion in revenue. Notably, it sold 6.9 million iPhones, outpacing its goal of 10 million sold for ‘08. (When the iPhone 3G debuted last summer, three million units were sold in the first month.) iPhone now comprises 39 percent of total business.

11 million iPods were sold this quarter, up eight percent from last year a record for a non-holiday quarter. Market share for portable music players remained above 70%.

Apple did lower its least expensive laptop, the existing version of the entry-level MacBook, by $100 to $999. But in the updated versions of its MacBook and MacBook Pro machines, Apple focused mainly on adding features. Some had been in the svelte MacBook Air, including thinner laptop casings and a “multitouch” track pad, which, like the iPhone, understands gestures for spinning and zooming.

In an event at Apple s headquarters, Steve Jobs, Apple s co-founder and CEO, also said Apple broadened its use of graphics chips and associated technologies from Nvidia Corp., at the expense of Intel Corp., which still supplies the computers central processors. Jobs said the change speeds up processing-intensive activities playing popular 3-D video games, for example as much as six-fold.

As at other events in the last few months, Jobs appeared thin but, in a tongue-in-cheek nod to persistent questions about his health, projected a slide with his healthy 110-over-70 blood pressure reading. The redesigned laptops are thinner and lighter, and use what Apple touted as a construction “breakthrough” when it debuted in the super-slim MacBook Air in January. All the new laptops now use casings cut and tooled from aluminum, without a stronger skeleton fused to the insides.

At the lowest end of the redesigned laptops, a MacBook will cost $1,299, while the most expensive MacBook Pro, which comes with two graphics chips from Nvidia for extra-fast graphics processing, costs $2,499 a $300 reduction from the previous top model. An updated MacBook Air, the ultra-thin portable notebook that does not have a CD or DVD drive on board, begins at $1,799, just as the previous Air did. The track pads built into MacBooks and MacBook Pros also got a makeover.