Bottom line: Apple had about as good a year as any business can expect to have. The company recorded $65.2 billion in sales, an increase of 52 percent from the previous year. And profits were up, too: in fiscal 2010, Apple made $14 billion in profit, a 72 percent increase over fiscal 2009. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer quite rightly as “a monumental year for Apple.”

Look at a chart of Apple’s total revenue for its last six fiscal years, and you see a company that’s on a steady upward march, its year-over-year growth slowed only slightly by the global financial crisis and recession that hit during Apple’s 2009 fiscal year.

For the first fiscal quarter of 2011—that’s this current holiday season—Oppenheimer told analysts in October to expect revenue of $23 billion, which would be an increase of 47 percent over the previous year’s holiday quarter, but only a 13 percent increase over the last three months of fiscal 2010. Given Apple’s tendency to be remarkably conservative in its guidance, and given the tendency of Apple’s holiday quarters to improve on the quarter preceding them by between 25 and 50 percent when the economy isn’t imploding all around them, it wouldn’t be surprising for Apple to be at the end of a $30 billion quarter. We'll find out .

This was a great year for both the iPhone and the Mac. In fiscal 2010, Apple sold 13.7 million Macs, by far the most it’s ever sold in a single year. That figure also represented a 31 percent increase in Mac sales from the previous fiscal year. And if you look over the past six years, it becomes clear that Mac sales are growing rapidly.