Apple Earnings Lead Off With 17 Million iPads Sold

Apple unsurprisingly had a pretty excellent third quarter, announcing today that total revenues for the quarter topped $35.0 billion with a net profit of $8.8 billion. Both of those figures are up quite a bit from last year, with Apple reporting a revenue of $28.6 billion and a net profit of $7.3 billion for quarter 3 of 2011. Hardware sales were up for the most part, lending to Apple's increased revenue and net profit from the year before.

iPhone sales were strong in quarter 3, with total sales of the smartphone up 28% year-over-year, hitting 26 million total sales. However, while iPhone sales are looking good, it's the iPad that's the true star. The iPad's 17 million sales may not come close to the iPhone's 26 million, but iPad sales grew a whopping 84% over the same quarter last year. Macs didn't too bad either, with sales up to 4 million for Q3 – a 2% increase from last year. iPods sales, on the other hand, were lacking, falling 10% year-over-year and settling at 6.8 million units sold.