During the call, Oppenheimer used the phrase "extremely proud" several times to describe the bottom line for the period, while chief operating officer Tim Cook bragged that Apple had been able to maintain strong notebook sales even in the face of a generally lousy economy.

"We were very pleased with the overall Mac portable share gain," said Oppenheimer, who called out the unibody notebooks as driving sales since their October launch.

According to outside analysts, however, Apple actually lost market share, at least in the U.S., when desktops were added to the mix. Last week, Gartner Inc.'s Mikako Kitagawa estimated Apple's domestic share of sales had , down from 9.5% the quarter before.

Oppenheimer acknowledged the slide of desktop sales, which were off 25% year-to-year and down 22% from the previous quarter, but as he did, he put forward a pair of reasons for the plummet. One, he said, was the very strong sales of the just-released iMac in late-2007, and the tough time matching that volume in 2008. The other reason was simply a reflection of the market as a whole, which increasingly tilts toward laptops, he said.

Gottheil added a third: slowing sales in the K-12 education market, which typically buys desktops.