I’m sure you realize that the release of Apple’s financials is a staged event. The numbers were already present long before they were unleashed to an expectant audience. The don’t just emerge full blown in an email from the company accountant, ready to immediately present to the financial analysts, investors, and the public at large.

Even though every single detail about Apple’s last quarter was known to them for hours or days before you learned what they were, Apple’s executives remained stone-faced. There was not a clue as to what they’d contain. Sure, the media has been busy evaluating the pros and the cons, and trying to read the tea leaves. Industry surveys were probed to see a sales trend, and certainly the fact that Verizon Wireless moved more iPhones than any other smartphone in the last quarter only confirmed expectations of stellar numbers when Apple released their quarterly earnings Tuesday afternoon.

Now ahead of the report, I must admit I was not a little concerned, because inflated estimates may make a stellar quarter seem unexciting, even disappointing. How could Apple possibly match anyone’s expectations almost every single quarter?

Well, can you spell blowout?

In the first fiscal 2012 quarter, Apple reported a record $46.33 billion earnings, with a record net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion and a net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per share, for the same quarter last year. The financial community was clearly caught off-guard, since they expected earnings of $38.76 billon, with $10.07 earnings per share. And I thought that maybe they were growing just too optimistic about Apple.

Two numbers were particularly significant. Some 37.04 million iPhones were sold, a 128% unit growth over last year, and way ahead of analyst estimates of between 30-34 million. Now this number wasn’t unexpected. The iPhone 4s remains backordered as it spreads around the world. Apple also continues to make inroads into the Android market, with a gadget that some members of the media felt disappointing because the case was the same as the previous version. Even more fascinating is the news that Apple’s iPhone division, which brought in revenue of $24.42 billion all by itself, beat all of Microsoft, who reported $20.89 billion total revenue during the last quarter.

But the real surprise came with the iPad, with 15.4 million units sold, representing an 111% increase. But analysts expected something in the range of 13 million, in part because of the perception that the Amazon Kindle Fire cannibalized from one to two million iPad sales. Maybe, but Apple has nothing to apologize for, and they appear to dismiss the possibility that they lost any sales to Amazon’s tablet.

Microsoft would surely be concerned at the news that 5.2 million Macs were sold, a 26% unit increase. Compare that to falling PC sales and how that impacted Microsoft’s financials. In the meantime, analysts were predicting Mac sales in the range of 5 million.

iPod sales shrunk to 15.4 million, versus 13.9 million expected. The unit decline was 21% over last year, but don’t forget that those 37.04 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads are also iPods too.

Meantime, 58% of the quarterly revenue came from overseas sales. In all, Apple now has $97 billion on hand in cash, short-term and long-term securities. What this means is that they are not only thoroughly insulated from a future business downturn, but they can invest huge amounts of money in making strategic acquisitions. But before you start spending Apple’s money for them, don’t forget that they tend to buy smaller technology companies that meet their strategic needs, and are easily integrated. They don’t just buy out competitors with false promises of synergy, hoping to kill the opposition and leave more people out of work.

According to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, they expect revenue of $32.5 billion and diluted earnings of $8.50 per share for the current quarter. Not too shabby. So as you might have expected, Apple shares soared over 8% in after hours trading.

Number junkies can find more information in Apple’s press release.

In the quarterly conference call with financial analysts, Apple amplified somewhat on the results. But I continue to wonder why audio quality during these sessions is so bad. Also, Oppenheimer may be a positively brilliant financial manager, but his delivery of the scripted material is always stilted. Maybe Apple can take some of that 97 billion dollars and invest in acting lessons for the senior staff.

During his presentation, Oppenheimer also revealed that nearly all Fortune 500 companies now support the iPhone. In addition, some 1.5 million iPads are already in use in educational institutions around the world.

CEO Tim Cook said he didn’t think that people who want an iPad would settle for a “limited function” device, clearly addressing such products as e-book readers and the Kindle Fire. Apple will, he said, innovate like crazy to stay ahead. He also remarked that there will come a day when the tablet market grows past traditional PCs, and that IDC data has already indicated that tablets exceeded the sales of desktop PCs in the last quarter. So the PC era is fast, fast coming to a close. Talk about dismissing the competition with a broad brush.

As to the iPad, he remarked how the iPad has spread into the corporate and education world, remarking that you see them everywhere these days. “It’s winning market by market by market,” said Cook.

Predictably, the questions were mostly softball, often concentrating on arcane issues of sales, numbers, inventory and supply chains that aren’t terribly sexy. Apple also restricts questions to a single follow-up, so it’s not possible to really probe much further past the initial inquiry. Besides, Apple never deviates from their core messaging, and don’t expect even a hint about future products, although that does happen on a rare occasion.

Although iCloud’s rollout was somewhat shaky, Apple reports that the online service already has 85 million users. Now if they can fix the lingering problems, and add some critical features removed in the transition from MobileMe, I’d feel happier with the whole thing.

Meantime, Steve Jobs is no doubt smiling as he looks down upon the company he left behind when he passed away.

Knowing that Apple’s earnings for the last financial quarter will be posted hours after this article is published, I won’t hazard a guess as to how the numbers will turn out. Instead I’m going to look a bit closer at the products and services you might see from Apple over the coming year. But understand that, if I go off the deep end and come up with anything a tad outrageous, so be it, although I think my observations are on the conservative side of the ledger.

In recent days, there have been published reports that Apple will, in the next few months, release new Wi-Fi hardware to support the burgeoning 802.11ac standard. Although the standard won’t be ratified until the second half of the year, that won’t stop manufacturers from releasing hardware based on the preliminary specs. Supposedly they will all be upgradeable via firmware to the release version.

Now 802.11ac, or “Gigabit Wi-Fi,” supposedly boosts existing wireless networking to roughly three times what you get now. That will take it within the range of today’s gigabit Ethernet, which, in effect, means you may not have to worry about installing unsightly wires anymore to get maximum file transfer speeds. Well, at least if you have hardware that supports the new standard.

At first, Apple will likely add 802.11ac draft standard capability to new Macs, and introduce an updated AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule. The iPad and iPhone will come later, since it will probably take a while to build power efficient chips and antenna systems that will exploit the new performance levels on such tiny gear. At the same time, whether you’d actually benefit all that much from 802.11ac in a mobile device is a huge question mark.

Since Apple is expected to introduce new Macs this spring to coincide with the release of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors, that might be the ideal time to add 802.11ac to the mix. You can probably expect new Wi-Fi hardware from Cisco and other makers of network hardware in a similar timeframe.

If the next generation of Apple mobile processors, which some refer to as the A6, is truly a quad-core chip, I suppose there’s an outside possibility of a future MacBook Air incorporating an ARM-based CPU. However, there would have to be a hardware-based translation layer to allow you to continue to use your existing Mac software without modification. Remember that Microsoft is porting Windows 8 to ARM, and they will confront the same dilemma, which means regular Windows software just won’t run. I suppose it’s always possible for Apple to consider AMD as a processor alternative for something other than graphics chips, but it doesn’t seem as if a great amount of money would be saved, nor is AMD necessarily as competitive with Intel as they used to be.

The rest of the year seems awfully predictable at this point. The mid-year WWDC will deliver news of iOS 6, though the upgrade may be more incremental than in previous years, since the system has really matured. But Apple could still upset your expectations, so don’t assume anything. On the other hand, the chances that Apple will reveal preliminary details about Mac OS 10.8 are slim, but, assuming the recent two-year release cycle, it’s not out of the question. The actual release would come in the summer of 2013. But don’t be surprised if those announcements and a media event to demonstrate the new features of Lion’s successor don’t happen until fall or early the following year.

I’m less certain as to how Apple will deal with Apple TV and the expected arrival of a large screen integrated TV set. I’ve been skeptical about the prospects for a variety of reasons, particularly if Apple reaches a content deal that involves streaming content, since it will put many of you in danger of exceeding your ISP’s bandwidth caps. On the other hand, there are areas where Apple can make a difference in the TV space, particularly when it comes with dealing with programming from multiple providers and managing various hardware components.

Depending on how well Apple does in its quarterly financials, you can probably look for clues about how new product introductions might turn out. So if iPad sales are in the middle or lower end of the expected range, perhaps because of the perceived success of the Amazon Kindle Fire, Apple might well keep the iPad 2 in the lineup at a lower price. So for those who regard the iPad 3 (and I presume that will be the product’s name) as a tad expensive might just buy the previous model; that strategy has succeeded tremendously with the iPhone. Certainly if large numbers of customers were able to accept the Fire, which is inferior to the iPad in so many ways, a lower-priced iPad might be just the ticket.

But Apple’s biggest problem these days is in meeting all those inflated expectations. In the past, Apple’s sales tended to be underestimated. However, in the September quarter, iPhone sales were less than expected. The question will always be asked: How does Apple top that? This is an impossible goal to achieve, even for a company with Apple’s stellar successes. There has to be a point where growth will level off somewhat, and where their “next great thing” isn’t as great as some might hope. On the other hand, Apple has confounded the nasty negativists before. They can still amaze us.

Just this week, AT&T revised their wireless data plans for smartphone users. Although the entry-level price is higher, you also get more bandwidth for your money. Well, that is unless you are still using the grandfathered unlimited plan, as I am, and rest assured I have no intention to change.

At the same time, you have to wonder whether the bandwidth crumbs the wireless carriers are throwing at us are sufficient to accommodate your needs. Can you get by with a couple of gigabytes per month if you download a fair amount of video content? What about the simple act of pushing stuff to and from your iCloud account, where you have 5GB of free storage?

I suppose you’d have to set your Mac or PC to do the heavy lifting there. Of course, I might be a little overly concerned about such matters, since, two-thirds into the month of January, my iPhone’s bandwidth consumption over AT&T’s network is a tad over 500MB. On the other hand, I haven’t actually been viewing many videos, and when I do, I tend to be in the range of my Wi-Fi network, so I’m actually using my broadband provider’s bandwidth. But that opens up yet another potential can of worms.

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This is an all-too-common scenario: When walking to school or from class to class, your child is lugging a huge backpack containing textbooks and other course materials. With large halls or a long distance between classes in separate buildings, your child may be struggling under that load for hours each and every day. But I’m not about to suggest the extent of the damage to one’s spinal column or back muscles. The point is that it’s a heavy load to bear, particularly for a small child.

While books are, in my experience, usually supplied free of charge in most grade schools, once a student goes to college, there’s a huge upfront expense in buying the textbooks needed for a single semester or the entire school year. Once the books are used, they may be sold off for a fraction of the money originally paid, stored in a garage or recycled. But I’m using strictly the U.S. example here.

Now when I first read about the iPad, I joined others in imagining a revolution in the making for our educational systems. Instead of having to lug all those hefty and expensive books around, all the material could be stored in digital form on Apple’s tablet.

For months, not much happened, except for reports that iPads had been deployed at a number of schools. But to enter the textbook game, Apple had to reach deals with the major textbook publishers to create interactive e-books. It also evidently required an update to Apple’s iBooks software and iTunes to complete the process.

Well, that happened this week with the release of iBooks 2, which is available for the iPad and, in fact, the iPhone, although textbooks are meant strictly for the former. There’s also an iBooks Author app for the Mac that allows anyone to create such an e-book.

The final piece of the puzzle involving cementing deals with the biggies in textbook publishing, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson. That step opened the possibilities for loads of textbooks to soon become available for iBooks 2, although only a handful of titles have been released so far.

The other part of the equation is uptake by school systems, or at the very least agreeing to accept students using their own iPads to acquire the digital versions of the textbooks they need. Perhaps, for a time, the printed and e-book versions will exist side by side, maybe as a test to see how grades might be impacted. The betting is that students will feel empowered by the interactive textbooks and score higher.

I suppose school systems could also have site licenses for these digital textbooks, and maybe the reduced cost — because of all that money saved from printing physical books — will be sufficient to even justify the purchase of iPads to hand out to students on loan or to keep.

In “reinventing” textbooks, Apple has the first mover advantage here. Sure, Amazon and Google could upgrade their e-book apps to better support similar interactive content. But they’d still have to sign contracts with the publishers in order to be able to provide those titles. Obviously neither Apple nor the three publishers under contract are going to say if the deals are exclusive. That won’t become obvious unless or until textbooks appear in other formats.

And remember that even if there’s an Amazon Kindle or Android app that supports interactive textbooks, publishers would have to provide their files in forms that are compatible. That could mean producing not just one digital version, but two or three. At the same time, don’t forget that Apple has long held a substantial presence in the world of education. It’s going to take an awful lot of work for other tech companies to convince publishers and school systems that they deserve a chance.

Meantime, I’m happy to see that education is being pushed kicking and screaming into the 21st century. My biggest concern, though, is how many cash-strapped school systems are going to be able to take the plunge. Will the price per student, including an iPad, be low enough to make it possible for school systems in lower income areas to get on board? That’s something I surely don’t know, but if the iPad and digital textbooks can make it to the inner cities and cash-starved rural districts, Apple will have created yet another revolution.

Besides, if students are using iPads in school, and they would naturally have to take them home to complete classroom assignments, how will that impact Apple’s sales of iPhones and new Macs? The legendary halo effect has already helped boost sales of Macs; Microsoft is suffering from reduced PC demand, reporting a 6% drop in sales of Windows in the last quarter. Apple’s new initiative can only increase the prospects for Macs, or maybe encourage more people to simply use iPads as personal computers.

Meantime, I think back to my son’s huffing and puffing when he got home with that stuffed backpack in tow. He didn’t suffer any physical damage, fortunately. In fact, he’s now an English teacher to Spanish-speaking students near Madrid. I wonder how long it’ll take for the iPad, iBooks 2, and those interactive textbooks to spread around the world. It sounds like a win win to me.