“Consumers who gush over the beauty and efficacy of Apple products rarely quibble or complain about Apple’s premium pricing,” Kelleher writes in a note to clients. “Behind the tech-weenie veneer on transformative products, there is an accountant’s soul presiding over the P&L at Apple.”

There are innumerable reasons why Apple is sitting atop a pile of $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities — a conga line of insanely great products, savvy marketing and financial rigor. And together, they drove Apple’s operating margins from 12 percent in 2005 to 30 percent or more today; its revenue from $13.9 billion to an estimated $108 billion.

“Jobs did more than launch, in succession, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad,” Kelleher says. “He created and nurtured an infrastructure where these products could be conceived, engineered, and brought successfully to market.The marketing apparatus is no less well-oiled than the engineering machine at Apple.”

Or the financial one, for that matter.

Realistically, Apple is so on point right now, has so much momentum in the market, that it is unlikely to stumble any time soon. Kelleher again:

“IPhone currently has a less-than 5 percent handset market share; yet everyone who holds or uses one, whether first-time phone buyer or Apple lifer, is struck with its simple beauty and efficacy. If iPhone “merely” doubled its handset market share, annual revenues would rise by $60 billion. With RIM on the ropes and the Android Empire showing cracks from Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility, there is no reason to believe that 10% share is the ceiling for iPhone. … In other words, if newly-appointed CEO Tim Cook is no more than a caretaker, if he only presides over the ramp of existing products, he could easily ‘caretake’ the company from the current $100 billion revenue range to twice or thrice that size.”

But that’s not what Cook is going to do. He plans to keep the ball rolling at Apple and he knows how to do it, as he said in an all-hands memo to employees about a month ago.

“I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change,” Cook wrote. “I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values. Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that — it is in our DNA. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.”

Image via Jonathan Mak’s Tumblr.

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Steve Jobs Full Coverage »

The U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, closing out the worst year for job attrition since World War II, according to the BLS. Total job losses for 2008: 2.6 million, the largest decline since 2.750 million jobs were lost in 1945. A 16-year high. Congratulations, folks….

Suffice to say, that’s quite a bit more than some economists were expecting. And that’s an ugly, ugly number, 2.750 million jobs lost. With the national unemployment rate rising to 7.2 percent during December, the first quarter of 2009 is also looking pretty bleak. “The job situation is ugly and is going to get uglier,” Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research, told Reuters. “There’s no reason to expect hiring anytime in the next three to six months. We are not going to see any hiring until the government steps in and acts. Talk doesn’t work.”

Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, was even more pessimistic–if that’s possible. “I would suspect that starting this past October and lasting through April, we will have really big job losses,” he told The New York Times. “We are not yet near the numbers of those earlier recessions,” he added, referring to the downturns of the mid-’70s and early ’80s, “but five more months like what we have been having and we’ll be there.”