You can explain to people until you're blue (or red) in the face why (tip o' the antlers to ) and you'll still get size queens going on and on about how the iPhone will eventually fail because it doesn't have a 4-inch screen. Even though this day never comes, it's always out there, waiting in the wings, and the fact that you Apple fans can't see that is, well, pff, it's just, well, dur, pssh.

It's not only on the business side that we're inundated with herds of analysts loudly mooing the same conventional wisdom, it's also--as we saw on Tuesday--on the finance side.

The idea is that the market had baked in the assumption that Apple would meet Wall Street analysts' estimate of $7.39 per share and is now correcting because the company reported earnings of $7.05 per share. Here's the horny one's problem with this.

First is the charmingly farcical verbiage that Apple "missed estimates." Whose estimates did the company miss, ? Not its own. Apple's guidance was for $5.50. In a normal world the headlines would be "NOTORIOUSLY BAD ANALYSTS MISS AGAIN." Instead, it's supposedly somehow Apple's fault. Whatever.

But, more importantly, let's look at what Apple said about next quarter: