Quotes from Apple's (AAPL) conference call

Apple's on a roll, constrained only by IBM's inability to supply microprocessors. This is the power of a differentiated product combined with the consumer digital upgrade cycle. Here it is in 200 words from this evening's conference call; notice the terrific last sentence about how many Walkmen Sony sold...

Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript:

Revenue of $2.35 billion was up 37% year-over-year… driven by a second consecutive quarter of over 450,000 portable Mac shipments, extraordinary sales of over 2 million iPods.

Mac-based revenue was up 9% year-over-year… constrained due to lower than expected G5 microprocessor availability… causing ending channel inventory… to fall below our minimum target... Portable shipments grew a robust 44%… 54% of total Macs sold during the quarter.

Music-based revenue grew 370%… incredible quarter for iPods. HP … accounted for about 6% of total iPods sold during the quarter.

Results from our U.S. education channel were extremely positive… CPU units were up 19% year-over-year. Revenue was up 21%… biggest education quarter in over 4 years.

Revenue in Europe was up 31% year-over-year, … Americas 39%… Japan 12%.

Gross margin was 27%, consistent with guidance.

December quarter… outlook… targeting revenue between $2.8 and $2.9 billion… gross margin… about 27.25%.

Memory and LCD fell further than we had expected... In … Q1, we expect the favorable pricing trends to continue for hard drives, for optical drives, and for LCD panels… DRAM pricing to stabilize.

This market is in its infancy… Sony shipped close to 300 million Walkmans in the '80s and '90s.