Last night after the market closed, Apple released their F3Q05 numbers, surprising many supporters on the street and possibly quieting some of those concerned that the firms future is in doubt, at least for a quarter or two. I have some details in the rest of the article, and the conference call is available online.

The numbers break down like this (comparisons to previous year, same quarter):

• $320M net income ($.37 per diluted share) up from 60M
• $3.5B in sales up from $2.0B
• iPod unit sales were 6.2M, up from 870K
• 2/3 of net income once again came from the iPod
• Macintosh unit sales were 1.2M, up from 860K
• Macintosh revenue $1.57B, up from $1.26B
• Quarter-to-quarter sales in Japan were down 20%

The Wall Street Journal (in a release that was emailed as an alert last night), has commented that "The results suggest that Apple has reversed a decade-long slide in its share of global PC sales."

Next quarter might be a bit more interesting, as it should show the effect of whatever fear may be generated over Apple's pending move to Intel-architecture CPUs.