"Right now, the iPhone is driving Apple's growth, absolutely," Gottheil said.

During the question-and-answer segment of the call, the Apple executives talked about netbooks, the small, low-priced notebooks that grabbed as much as 10% of the laptop market in late 2008, and declined to comment about the health of .

On netbooks, Cook, who is in charge of day-to-day operations at Apple while Jobs is on a six-month medical leave, essentially reiterated the wait-and-see attitude that Jobs himself expressed three months ago.

"Right now the products in there are much less powerful than customers want, they have cramped keyboards and small displays," said Cook. "We think that the products there are inferior. But we'll see. We have some ideas here and we're watching the space."

"I think that at this point, they don't feel a need to enter the [netbook] marketplace," said Gottheil, who last month had speculated that Apple would, in fact, at Macworld, which Apple did not do.