When you examine Apple’s financials in even a cursory fashion, you have to consider that, not so long ago, it took almost a year for them to earn $6.22 billion of revenue. Now Apple can do this in a single quarter, and nobody can guess just where this might end up in the next few years.

The basic numbers released Monday afternoon were extremely encouraging, and way more than Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter guidance and, as usual, ahead of Wall Street estimates.

In all, some 2,164,000 Macs were sold, of which 1,347,000 were laptops, and 817,000 desktops. The new iMac line, according to Apple, is getting great reception, and the company’s inventories are down to three weeks, which is, in the scheme of things. quite low. In all, Mac sales were up 34 percent over the same period last year.

In the iPod world, 10.2 million units were sold, an increase of 17 percent over 2006. Meantime, how many of you actually remember that there’s a new Zune line coming out next month? No raised hands! I thought so.

As far as the iPhone is concerned, total sales were 1,119,000, which greatly exceeds Apple’s original estimate of a million units by the end of the quarter, and you can bet the $200 price cut really sped sales to higher levels. And, lest we forget, that figure excludes the 270,000 during sold during the iPhone’s first weekend, which occurred in the previous quarter.

For this quarter, Apple is expecting $9.2 billion, which should reflect the holiday season upturn for the iPod and the iPhone. Mac sales, though, aren’t expected to change much, since the back-to-school season is where they truly excel.

When it comes to hard-core financials, Apple’s fourth quarter earnings were, as I said before, $6.22 billion, with profits totaling $904 million. Indeed, total revenue for the entire year reached a record $24 billion, with $3.5 billion net income.

Apple’s money stash amounted to $15.38 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. This is an increase of $1.68 billion over the previous quarter and you have to wonder what Apple intends to do with all that money, or are they still hedging against a rainy day some time in the future?

Clearly Wall Street loved the news, as Apple’s share price went up nearly five percent in after-hours trading. If you want the rest of the figures, go ahead and check Apple’s site for the specific numbers.

You have to wonder if Apple can’t just rest on its laurels, but the news continues to be coming up roses. As of now, there are reports that Mac OS X Leopard preorders remain at or at the top of the sales charts at Amazon and may, in fact, be selling twice as fast as Tiger, which came out in the spring of 2005.

Of course, there are millions of additional Mac users now, so that surely helped. At the same time, compared to the totally tepid reaction to Windows Vista, the anticipation for Leopard may be off the charts. Clearly lots of Mac users — and perhaps some potential Windows switchers — are going to be watching Leopard’s early days carefully. If it proves to be a robust operating system, free of serious bugs, the sales rate may even go higher.

Then again, I suspect a lot of you have new Macs on your shopping lists anyway, and you can be certain a lot of the future sales of Leopard will result from copies preloaded on new computers.

As to the potential for Windows switchers, Apple stills claims that over 50% of the people buying Macs at their own 197 retail outlets are new to the platform. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if financial analysts care to ask the question of just how Apple arrives at those statistics. I do know a number of people who have purchased new Macs from Apple, but haven’t been asked the key question of what kind of computer they were upgrading from.

So is this just another case of taking a statistical sample, in the fashion of one of those polling companies? I can’t say that I know anything about the process, except that Apple isn’t giving us the requisite sampling range.

As to the rest of the analyst conference, Apple typically didn’t provide much meaningful information. Most of the comments amounted to talking points that are designed to enhance their corporate image. Where probing questions were asked, Apple generally didn’t do much but amplify a few facts and figures, and seldom ventured beyond that point.

What this means on the long haul, however, is that Apple’s executives are happy, their stockholders are happy and, for now at least, Wall Street remains pleased.

You can also bet that the usual offenders will be carefully dissecting Apple’s numbers to see if they can unearth some bad news in the sea of favorable developments. When they find that information, they will shout it to the skies. One example, perhaps, is the Japanese market, where Apple doesn’t seem to be growing quite as fast as the rest of the world.

I can just see the headlines now, “Apple drags in Japan.” They admit it’s a “tough market,” though, and they’re working hard to break through. But that’s about it.

The rest of Apple’s financial picture is supremely robust. Let’s just leave at that.

As Leopard approaches, you have to wonder whether even 300-plus new features and enhancements will be sufficient to sway the skeptics about its potential. You see, as far as software numbering schemes go, incrementing a single tenth of a point usually signifies a pretty insignificant update.

I mean, you can name most any application’s transition from, say 7.0 to 7.1, and the differences will be awfully minor. It may be a little more involved than a few bug fixes, but still nothing worth charging a full upgrade price.

In the 1990s, even Apple had larger increments in its numbering schemes. Take Mac OS 8.0 and 8.5. Not substantial in any respect. However, moving from System 7 to 8 gave Steve Jobs leverage to seriously inflate charges to those Mac OS clone companies, with the ultimate goal of getting rid of them. Otherwise, maybe 8.0 would probably have been 7.7.

But moving to 9.0 was the equivalent to a full version upgrade, with a price to match. Sure, there were only a handful of new features, but it was a decent marketing tool to keep the Mac OS alive under Mac OS X arrived.

In the scheme of things, it’s really hard to understand why Apple is so stingy with its numbering system for Mac OS X, except, perhaps, to postpone the inevitability of Mac OS 11. Indeed, based on Apple’s current operating system schedule, you won’t have to worry about that until the next decade.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

All right, with a genuine 316 new features and enhancements in Leopard, you can probably talk all day about the ones that appeal to you. But you only read, most times at any rate, about a handful of sexy features that, while useful in and of themselves, may not be the most important reasons to buy an operating system upgrade for your Mac.

Sure, I do plan on trying Time Machine and comparing it to my existing backup solutions. I’m also curious about Space and how well it performs in relation to other multiple desktop applications that have appeared and disappeared on the Mac over the years.

I’m particularly hopeful about the Finder. Not so much about the spiffier interface, but whether its speed bumps have been eradicated. While it handle multitasking better? If a network share shuts down (such as putting a MacBook to sleep), will the Finder realize the changed condition right away, or present a spinning beachball for several minutes until it figures out what’s going on?

But that’s just the stuff that everyone is talking about. In fact, there are a number of elements to Leopard that don’t get listed among the top ten bulleted points, and I’m just going to touch on two here. I’ll get to more as time goes by.

First a disclaimer, though, and that is that I have not actually tested these new capabilities, and won’t be able to until the shipping version of Leopard arrives. So I’m mostly commenting on the promise, and I trust the reality is close enough not to present an issue.

Let’s begin with a significant new feature in Font Book that will affect desktop publishers and graphic artists — and, in fact, anyone of you who must use a large number of fonts for your workflow. That’s auto-activation.

What this means is that, if you open a document that calls for a font that isn’t active, Leopard turns it on. As soon as you quit the application, the font is switched off, so you aren’t saddled with huge font menus.

Up till now, this capability was reserved to font management programs, such as Suitcase and FontAgent Pro. It all dates back to the late 1980s, when graphic artists embraced the Mac because of its superior font handling capabilities. But actually, the Mac OS was not originally designed to function with loads and loads of fonts that had to be loaded and unloaded on the fly. The original Suitcase was, as the original author, Steve Brecher, said at the time, “a clever hack” because it had to perform feats of magic that weren’t native to the system.

Indeed, although it could be a little buggy at times, Suitcase and its competitors worked. But to get auto-activation functioning, you had to add special plugins to the major graphics applications, and when those applications were updated, the plugins had to be changed too.

Worse, these features, although mostly functional, didn’t always operate fast or reliably. Besides, they were simply attempting to replace what the operating system should have done in the first place.

Will Font Book’s auto-activation somehow make Suitcase and FontAgent Pro irrelevant? If it was their only feature, maybe, but they provide other font organizational tools, along with network support, that may still keep them alive. At the same time, many graphic artists, whose needs aren’t quite as extensive, may find Leopard’s font tools to be sufficient to get the job done.

The other feature also fits into the “what is old is new again” category, and that is the Leopard version of Automator, the application that lets you build scripts or workflows with reasonable efficiency.

Way before System 7 arrived in the early 1990s, we had Apple’s eternally buggy MacroMaker and some great third-party variants, such as QuicKeys. The latter has survived two processor changes and an operating system migration, and is still available for Mac OS X.

One of the best features of these programs was something labeled in QuicKeys as “Watch Me,” which did just what the name implied, and that meant recording the steps you took in opening applications accessing various functions, and then being able to play them back by invoking a single keystroke.

For Leopard, the Automator variation is called “Watch Me Do,” and it’s supposed to operate even with applications that aren’t script savvy. If it accomplishes much of what you could do with those great macro utilities way back when, it’ll definitely encourage the masses the try scripting for themselves. After all, if you don’t have to learn an often arcane scripting language, the ability to automate repetitive functions is something every one of you will find extremely useful.

Yes, as I said, these aren’t sexy features that are apt to be discussed very often. However, they have the potential to make Leopard indispensable for many of you, even if you don’t care about backing up your Mac with 3D pizazz and having multiple desktops.

There’s a lot more to say, and I’ll continue to examine Leopard’s potential in future articles.

You know a lot of what Steve Jobs says during interviews may be overlooked when controversy erupts about something Apple is doing at any given moment.

Months back, for example, when Jobs was asked about a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone, to give third-party software developers a chance to build applications for it, he demurred and said not right away. He added, and this is important, that Apple was considering the best ways to accomplish that goal without making the iPhone vulnerable to security threats.

Indeed, the so-called “jailbreak” software that allows you to run unsupported applications or unlock the iPhone all take advantage of some sort of security hole to take control of the device. That may not be so big a deal, if that’s what you want. But it also creates the possibility that some Internet vandal could do the very same thing with nefarious intent, and you wouldn’t want that to happen, I hope.

One of the key features of the recent iPhone 1.1.1 firmware update, for example, was improved security, which locked down the gadget in a way that made the third party hacks incompatible. Of course, the prevailing wisdom is that this was a bad thing to do, because there was a growing cottage industry of such hacks that provided all sorts of cool stuff for the iPhone.

Now understand that it’s very easy to look at the nasty consequences, and blame Apple for wanting to protect its contract with its exclusive carriers. From a business standpoint, that makes a lot of sense, even if many of you don’t like the result.

Let’s shift to another development: At the recent WWDC, Jobs talked of a way to provide iPhone applications through the Safari browser. Again, this was done to create a sort of safe sandbox to allow you to gain additional features, but not at the expense of harming security. And, of course, it meant that the hoped-for SDK wasn’t here, and somehow far too many people got the wrong impression that it would never arrive.

In the ensuing weeks, there was a loud demand for Apple to open up the iPhone’s software to let third-parties in. Again, there was the general feeling that it wouldn’t happen, unless you filed class action suits, held picket signs outside of Apple’s corporate campus — or prayed a lot.

Well, I’m going to quote two key paragraphs from Job’s latest blog, which I think simply reflects a position that he’s expressed previously:

“Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

“It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.”

Forgetting the marketing spin, what he says in the second paragraph seems on the mark to me. If Apple is doing to get the job done, give them time to do it right and make the experience a happy and safe one for all of you.

Indeed, in addition to providing a secure framework, I also suspect Apple wants to incorporate some of the new features of Leopard in a forthcoming iPhone update.

Now one reason that the news of Leopard’s actual release came so close to that event is because Apple was probably struggling until the last possible moment to get a build that they could, with clear conscience, declare to be Golden Master. Or, to be cynical, they held out in an effort to eradicate as many serious bugs as possible, and the marketing people finally said “ship it and fix the rest with a 10.5.1.”

All right, maybe I’m inclined to favor the latter, because that’s the way and the truth in the software business. In fact, if you look at the results of our new Leopard poll, you’ll see a heavy percentage of the people voting — and we really want all of you to get involved, since we have thousands and thousands of visitors every day — prefer to wait for the first maintenance update before diving in.

Certainly, the shaky experience with Tiger might loom foremost in your memories, particularly those of you who needed to use VPN to log into corporate servers. My friend John Rizzo, at his MacWindows.com site, carefully logged those early problems. Fortunately, it seems that the ongoing updates to Tiger repaired most of the issues, along with a host of third-party updates.

Let’s just hope Leopard doesn’t force us to revisit old nightmares, and that the forthcoming iPhone SDK is indeed something worth waiting for.