In the fiscal second quarter, Apple's desktop sales rebounded with new products, and its lower-end laptop sales picked up as prices dropped. But despite those gains, Apple saw its overall PC shipments fall. It sold 2.22 million Macintosh computers, a 3 percent decline from a year earlier, the company said on Wednesday.

"We feel great about our performance, and the pipeline looks fantastic," Cook said.

Apple reacted strongly to netbooks because the increased adoption of that type of product is annoying them, said Roger Kay, founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

"If they didn't bother about [netbooks], they wouldn't comment about it," Kay said. Netbooks may not be ideal today, but there is plenty of room for them to mature, he said.

"They get in as a poor cousin like any disruptive technology, but the quality will improve," Kay said.