Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs will be the best or worst movie I’ve ever seen.

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

Can’t wait for high school calculus iBooks where kids have to triangulate Kindle sales with rubbish percentage data

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

Turns out, a lot of people. Millions, actually.

As Dan Frommer points out over at SplatF (worth bookmarking if you haven’t done so already), AOL still had 3.5 million dial-up subscribers as of the end of September. And interestingly, most have been using the service for an average of more than 10 years.

Sadly for AOL, the maturity of that subscriber base is in no way a guarantee of retention. The company still lost about 630,000 subs in the current quarter compared to last year. Ugly news, particularly since a lot of AOL’s profit comes from its access business.

That simplicity is supposed to be a core part of the service’s appeal. And CEO Reed Hastings has said, over and over, that he doesn’t want to monkey with it.

Which is why it was weird to read that Netflix CFO David Wells told an investor conference yesterday that actually, he can see Netflix monkeying with it.

Perhaps, he seemed to suggest, it could sell one-off rentals — video-on-demand, like Apple and Amazon and the cable companies all offer — for titles that it couldn’t include in its regular streaming package because of licensing issues.

Here’s a transcript of Wells’s comments at the Goldman Sachs “Communacopia” conference Wednesday, via Splatf’s Dan Frommer:

You know, traditionally what we said about VOD was it’s a low-margin business, we weren’t that interested in it because it sort of complicated the simplicity of the offering.

I think in today’s sort of evolving and changing world, we’d look at a number of different options. In terms of making it convenient for folks to find that content rather than going to a competitor, to another site, we certainly would look at it.

I wouldn’t expect us, for that to be, sort of, our reaction right now, but certainly in the evolving competitive set and the evolving market, we would look at other things as well.

As Frommer notes — he has tempered his original post to emphasize this — this doesn’t mean Wells is saying Netflix will offer VOD any time soon. But it sure sounds like one of its most powerful executives is at least opening the door to the concept.

But even that may be too much. After reading Frommer’s post, I reached out to Netflix PR to see if they could provide some context for Wells’s remarks.

Instead, spokesman Steve Swasey sent me this quote: “We have been very clear, Netflix is a subscription service. Our core competency we offer to consumers is unlimited movies and TV shows for one low monthly price. I am not aware of any deviations in this strategy.”

So there you go: Not happening!

And if I can read into that just a bit — things that also aren’t happening could include a new tier of service for certain kinds of content, which was supposedly a key condition that Starz had demanded in its renewal negotiations with Netflix.

Still. If earlier this year you’d have asked Netflix to tell you about its plans to raise prices by 60 percent and turn its popular DVD offering into a standalone service with a not-great name, I don’t think the company would have told you about its plans then, either.

Could be!

But the news that Netflix miscalculated the effect of its price hike, and now expects to lose subscribers this quarter, doesn’t seem quite so bad once you peer at the numbers for a second.

As Dan Frommer reminds us, almost all of the shortfall comes from the video rental company’s customers who only want to rent DVDs. And as Netflix has said — over and over and over — it doesn’t want to be in the DVD business.

It just said it again yesterday, in fact: “Our future is that of a streaming video company, not a DVD-by-mail company,” Netflix content boss Ted Sarandos explained at an industry conference.

And while Sarandos and everyone else at Netflix explains that they’re happy to have DVD customers for now, and that they want to let their DVD unit do better by operating as a standalone unit, etc., there are plenty of people — including me — who believe that the company’s price hike was designed in large part to kill off its DVD business sooner than later.

So mission partly accomplished!

If I had to guess, I’d guess that market freak-out yesterday is due in part because this may be the first time Netflix has had to come back to investors and acknowledge that it got a forecast wrong. A big chunk of the company’s appeal comes from the aura that CEO Reed Hastings projects: You guys always doubted me, but I’ve always been right. Not that I’m boasting or anything.

If you want to worry about Netflix’ future, then the core question is whether they’ll be able to wrest enough content from the big studios to keep their streaming customers happy.

Losing the Starz deal, which will keep Sony and Disney films out of their hands (for now) seems like a much bigger deal. But that news didn’t hurt Netflix stock nearly as much. Go figure.

But some of you are actually sort of interested in looking at ads. And lots of you like things that Apple makes. So: Here’s iAd Gallery, from Steve Jobs and company.

The free app is just what it sounds like–a highlight reel of ads created using Apple’s own in-app advertising system. That is, it’s an ad itself, for iAds.

You could choose to interpret the fact that Apple is rolling this out nearly a year after introducing iAds as an indicator that they haven’t taken off like a rocket. Or you could just take it at face value and acknowledge that lots of advertisers advertise advertising. Google, for one, runs banner ads promising free AdWords credits. I saw one today.

Dan Frommer at Business Insider has constructed a slideshow that explains, in detail, how the thing works. If you want to save yourself a couple of clicks, you can see it all on one page.

As Dan Frommer notes, that’s down one million from Q3 of last year, but it’s still AT&T’s second-best iPhone quarter ever. Overall, the carrier added a record 2.8 million more wireless customers.

This quarter, of course, is the quarter that AT&T’s U.S. exclusivity for the iPhone goes away, courtesy of Verizon.

AT&T also said it activated 442,000 wireless plans for tablets. That number includes both the iPad and Samsung’s new Galaxy Tabs running Google’s Android; reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of those activations are for Apple’s machines.

But clearly there’s more to the story.

Because while Facebook isn’t connected to Ping right now, it had been up through the service’s launch last night. And even for some time after that.

When Jobs demoed the service onstage yesterday, screenshots showed an ability to invite Facebook friends via the “Facebook Connect” service, as Business Insider’s Dan Frommer noted. And in an interview with Kara Swisher following the event, Apple marketing boss talked up the Facebook Connect option.

And, in fact, Apple’s promotional Ping page still mentions the ability to “find even more music fans with a quick search, by sending email invites, or by connecting to your Facebook account.”

And for a brief period after the service opened last night, new users did get a chance to invite friends via Facebook — you can still see the Facebook app page here.

I’m not sure that the service ever worked, though: When I tried the Facebook option, I got this puzzling error message: “We are unable to find any Facebook friends that you are not following on iTunes Ping. Check again soon.”

So. Anyone at Apple, or Facebook, want to clarify what happened?

Yesterday, at the Apple music event in San Francisco, I had a short chat with Apple CEO Steve Jobs as he strolled through the demo room for the media, just after he had announced various updates for the iPod, Apple TV and iTunes onstage.

One of the those was the introduction of a new social network for music called Ping that Apple (AAPL) has integrated within iTunes 10 and which looks an awful lot like the experience you get on Facebook.

Essentially, it is a vertical version–in this case for music–of the powerful social networking site.

Facebook has noodled for years about creating its own social music offering, including doing a partnership with Lala, which was bought by Apple last year and shuttered in June.

But its efforts have largely gone nowhere.

And Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.

When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere.

The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to,” related to connecting with Facebook friends on Ping.

For those who are struck by the word, the definition of onerous, according to an online dictionary: “Involving an amount of effort and difficulty that is oppressively burdensome; Involving heavy obligations.”

Jobs did not elaborate on those troublesome terms and also would not say if Ping would incorporate connecting with Facebook or even using Facebook Connect–which would make it much easier to find friends to share music with.

“We could, I guess,” he shrugged.

And when I asked how to find friends, Jobs offered, noting iTunes had 160 million users across the globe: “You can type their names into search or send them emails inviting them to join.”

Okay, although being more open would work too!

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted:

“Maybe Apple plans on joining the rest of the Web, via an open API that will let Facebook, Twitter et al–maybe even the to-be-launched Google (GOOG) music service–play nicely with Ping. We’ll see.”

Facebook–including some execs who are definitely irked about how closely Ping resembles Facebook, right down to the blue color scheme–hopes so.

Consider the statement issued by Facebook to me–after attempts to get it verbally failed, due ironically to several dropped connections on the iPhone of the exec I spoke to:

“Facebook believes in connecting people with their interests and we’ve partnered with innovative developers around the world who share this vision. Facebook and Apple have cooperated successfully in the past to offer people great social experiences and we look forward to doing so in the future.”

In other words: Zing, Ping.

UPDATE: Oddly enough, a Facebook connection feature appeared to be in Ping when some signed up–not for me–as noted by Cult of Mac. And Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer even spotted the wording in Jobs’s stage presentation. I have an email into Apple PR asking for a comment on the change.

In any case, at the Apple event, Jobs told me he had great hopes for the social music service, adding that Ping could be the most significant thing to come out of yesterday’s announcements.

But soon enough he moved right on to the new iPods, declaring enthusiastically: “Isn’t the nano amazing?”

“Given the size of the iPhone 4 pre-order and our analysis of the expected upgrade cycle, particularly the remaining 3G users, we believe the full launch weekend of June 24-27 is shaping up to potentially be a 2 million-3 million iPhone event,” Fidacaro said in a research note today.

“[That’s] about 2-3x higher than the one million units sold over the first three days for both the 3GS and 3G launches,” the analyst added. “The strong initial demand seen during the pre-order is a positive for the June quarter and has apparently been limited by supply with new orders now indicating a July 14 delivery date.”

With 600,000 pre-orders racked up as of Wednesday and a few days yet to take more, a two-million unit launch weekend for Apple (AAPL) doesn’t seem much of a stretch. Frankly, neither does three million, given the iPhone 4′s feature set and price, as well as the fact that this year’s launch weekend begins on a Thursday rather than a Friday.

FURTHER READING

• Walt Mossberg’s iPhone 4 Review
• Analysts Raise iPhone 4 Sales Forecasts From Huge to Ginormous
• New iPhone 4 Pre-Orders Now Delayed to July 14
• Apple: Sorry We Sold 600,000 iPhone 4s Yesterday
• iPhone 4 Pre-Orders Sold Out at Apple, Suspended at AT&T
• What Happened to the White iPhone 4?
• AT&T Now Dropping iPhone Calls and iPhone 4 Pre-Orders
• And if You Have Any Questions About Your New iPhone 4, Just Ask Our Radio Shack Geniuses
• Everything You Need to Know About the iPhone 4

Don’t know why you’d want to, but you can now personalize Google’s famously austere search page with your own image. To make sure you understand the idea, Google (GOOG) is demoing it right now.

Too busy to verify? No problem. Here you go:

Google says this allows you to “make search more of your own.” But as Dan Frommer and other professional Web content producers note, it looks an awful lot like an homage to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing.

Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera takes the next logical step:

• Some totally unverified gossip from my fellow scribes here at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas: Expect an AT&T (T) announcement as well. [UPDATE: Make that "sort of verified"--AT&T already indicated it would support the Palm operating system yesterday, as Business Insider's Dan Frommer notes.]
• Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein takes the stage: Our platform is a deliberate bet on the Web, he tells us. It’s at “the heart of everything we do at Palm.”
• Rubinstein notes that there have been 85,000 downloads of the webOS software development kit since launch in July and 20,000 registrations for the new online developer program, adding that these are clear indicators of interest in the Palm platform. [Translation: We're going to start catching up to Apple (AAPL) and its gazillions of apps. Promise.]
• Rubinstein: Pixi is the “perfect choice for consumers looking to purchase their first smartphone.” That’s why we have these supercool back covers available. Check ’em out! And now a video of people talking about our stuff. [In the video, a talking head mentions "the death of the PC." Ominous!]
• Palm announces a new partner: French carrier SFR, co-owned by Vivendi and Vodafone (VOD). Vivendi SVP Jean-Marc Tassetto says his company reaches half of the country’s population, simultaneously taking a dig at Apple and offering praise for Palm: “We started negotiating in Cupertino, we ended up in Sunnyvale.”
• Palm SVP of Product Marketing Katie Mitic updates Palm’s developer program. After six months in closed beta, it is formally opening up. Any developer can submit a webOS app. Why work with Palm, Mitic asks? Her answer includes more coded Apple digs: The company promises a “fast and easy development” cycle and “freedom and choice” in how developers take apps to market. There are now 1,000 apps and Palm expects much faster growth.
• Palm promises a “new approach to app distribution,” i.e., you won’t have to get Palm apps exclusively through Palm’s equivalent of iTunes. You can get them anywhere on the Web or via mobile. Mitic shows off Projectappetite.com as an example.
• Coming this spring: A “Hot Apps” bonus program–$1,000 to developers with the best distribution (both free and paid), measured by downloads.
• Also coming: A new “Plug-in development kit” for webOS.
• We’re shown some new games from the likes of Gameloft and Electronic Arts (ERTS), including Need for Speed and Sims, etc. These are available today in the U.S.
• Here’s Travis Boatman, VP of EA Mobile’s Worldwide Studios. Palm came to us a few months ago, he notes, before offering praise for Palm (duh): “Within a few weeks, we realized how great this SDK is….It’s really easy to use,” etc.
• Some demos: Sims3, Need for Speed Undercover (which does indeed look “gorgeous,” as Boatman says).
• More from Katie Mitic, who introduces Paul Cousineau, product marketing director, who is going to demo something involving Pre’s camera.
• New feature: Video recording. Cousineau demos an editing feature with footage he just took onstage. It can be shared to Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, Facebook, etc., and will be available to all customers in February via software update. “No new hardware required.”
• Cousineau demonstrates integration of various webOS features, moving data/elements from one app to another–sharing a YouTube clip that was just shot, for example.
• Back to Mitic: More on over-the-air software updates. There have been nine updates since June, she says, covering battery performance, email, search, etc., adding that Palm is “bringing the pace of Web development to the mobile environment.” The February update will have a battery performance boost, too.
• Back to Rubinstein, who focuses on two new products. He pulls the first, “Pre Plus,” from his pocket, describing it as a “more elegant, easy-to-use experience.” Button goes away, memory increases. It comes with 16 gigabytes of flash. The second new product,”Pixi Plus,” comes with built-in Wi-Fi. More color choices for back cover.
• Carrier announcements: Both new phones are available exclusively on Verizon Wireless.
• There’s a new 3G “mobile hotspot” app for both new phones that allows users to tether with the “appropriate data plan.” They can connect up to five devices.
• Next: A taped message from Verizon Wireless CMO John Stratton, who is snowed in at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, apparently. Phones will be avail starting Jan. 25, he says.
• How much will the new Palm phones cost? We won’t tell you! Ho ho ho.
• Rubinstein recaps, promising to allow CES visitors to actually hold the new phones this time. (Last year Palm had a “look but don’t touch” policy when it showed off the Pre).

There’s no mention of AT&T, even though the carrier has been talking about Palm options in public. Interesting. Maybe there’s a “one carrier per press event” rule.

UPDATE (sort of): After the event, I asked Rubinstein about the phantom announcement from AT&T. Here’s the entire exchange.

Rubinstein: “We don’t have anything to announce.”

Me: “Really? Because AT&T executives are saying they’ll have two phones running the webOS later this year.”

Rubinstein: “We don’t have anything to announce.”

He was smiling a bit, though. Certainly cheerier than when I asked former Palm CEO Ed Colligan about Pre pricing last year.

Add this to the news that Apple has reportedly booked the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco “for several days in late January,” according to the Financial Times, and it’s pretty easy to connect the dots: It’s a very good bet we’re getting a look at this thing within the next 30 days or so.

A mobile industry source tells me developers have been told that while the mystery device will be shown off at the event, it won’t be ready to ship (Dan Frommer at Alley Insider relays the same news).

Announcing a product before launch used to be unusual for Apple (AAPL), but it’s a pattern the company has practiced more recently, notably with the first iPhone. And if Apple is indeed coming out with a new product that will require developers to rethink their approach, it makes a lot of sense.

I’ve asked Apple for comment, but I’m not holding my breath.

My source says Apple’s instructions to developers indicate that the tablet–or at least the thing the company is showing off next month–will be based on the iPhone OS and rely on the same iTunes Store that has moved two billion apps in a couple of years.

If so, it will mean that some people who have been guessing at what Apple is planning may need to go back to the drawing board.

Magazine publisher Condé Nast, for instance, has been working on a digitized version of Wired magazine that would run on Adobe (ADBE) software. But the iPhone’s OS doesn’t work with Adobe’s Flash platform, and if that holds true here, Condé Nast (and Adobe) is going to have to think of something else. Same goes for many Web video distributors who rely on Flash.

But first things first. Let’s take a look at this thing, whatever it is, and see what it actually can and cannot do before we get too far ahead of ourselves.

The app offers many of the features offered in its standalone GPS devices, including navigation help, trip-planning tools and multi-language support. “True, it’s not the first app offering turn-by-turn driving instructions for the iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS–but it is from TomTom, an industry heavyweight that is finally delivering on years of rumor and speculation,” Thomas Ricker of Engadget writes.

On Silicon Alley Insider, Dan Frommer calls it “the $100 iPhone app you might actually buy,” adding, “Assuming you use it for more than 10 months, the one-time fee will end up being a better purchase than other similar apps, which run as $10 per month subscriptions.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But COO (and temporary CEO) Tim Cook’s dismissal of the netbook market will continue to spark speculation that the company is readying something that sits in between a laptop and an iPhone (which is itself a computer, of course). Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer got more of Cook’s response than I did so I’ll reprint his quote here:

“When I look at what is being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on. So it’s not a space–as it exists today–that we’re interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in. That said, we do look at the space and are interested in how customers respond to it. People who want a small computer than does browsing and email might want to buy an iPod touch or iPhone. We play indirect basis. Then of course if we find a way where we can deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we’ll do that. We have some interesting ideas in this space.”

EARLIER:

Apple (AAPL) just turned in a strong quarter and followed it up with conservative guidance. A fairly typical performance for the company. Now investors will want to know about new product lines, Steve Jobs’s health and other matters. I’ll be covering the call live. Please refresh this page for the most current information. Click here if you want to listen in yourself.

Joining call now. Tim Cook CFO Peter Oppenheimer going over info that’s already in the release.

Mac products: 2.2 million Macs, a three percent decline year-to-year. Tough comparison from last year. But better than the seven percent drop in PC sales overall. “We feel very positive about our Mac performance.” Began and ended quarter with three-to-four weeks of Mac inventory.

iPod: People still buying ‘em! iPod touch selling well, and so are apps. Claims people like the new shuffle player. [Dubious about that]. We own the MP3 player market. [Duh.] Began and ended the quarter with four-to-six weeks of inventory.

iTunes store: 35,000 apps available in store, up from 15,000 a quarter ago. “We are within hours” of one billions app downloaded.

iPhones: Unless I’m missing something, absolutely no new data here. Praising new iPhone 0S 3.0 that’s in the works. Apple delayed the start of revenue recognition of all iPhones sold after the company announced the new OS, which was March 17. Will start up again once OS is released.

Stores: Half our Macs sold to people who had never owned one before. Average revenue per store is down year over year, because the economy is lousy.

Gross margins: Commodity and other component costs lower than expected. Higher-margin sales better are also than expected. Apple also spent less on operating expenses than expected.

Guidance: Forecasting is “challenging” in macroenvironment. Again, noting delay in revenue recognition for iPhones (see above). Excited about new products in pipeline, etc.

Q&A

Outlook for pricing on component supply? Mostly favorable, but some commodities, like NAND, will increase sequentially. Cook does not expect to see the level of reduction seen in calendar Q1. Will it be down? It will be “in a similar range as last quarter.”

Cash flow issues? Not really, for several reasons: 1) Apple made prepayment to…. [sorry, I didn't catch who that was]; 2) accounts payable were down, from holiday quarter to spring quarter, which is standard; 3) at $1.3 billion, tax payments were up “significantly” from last year.

Mac business: Desktops selling well, but average selling price down quite a bit. What’s going on? Sales accelerated in March after Apple announced new product launch. Higher-end Pro products sold to professionals are down a bit, which is related to economy for obvious reasons. Education sales also down a bit, for same reasons. Hoping Federal stimulus funds will help with that.

Back to netbooks–why won’t Apple sell them? Cook is still criticizing netbooks. The ones available today are ”just not a consumer experience and not something we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. It’s not a space today that we’re interested in, and it’s not a space we think that customers in the long-term are interested in.” But… a slight hedge with regard to smaller computers, which are, of course, what the iPhone and iPod Touch are. We “have interesting ideas in this space.” Today’s netbooks really shouldn’t even be called computers, really.

App store: What’s the mix between paid and free downloads and the iPod and iTouch mix? Nope. Apple won’t say. Again, Cook notes that we’re just “hours away” from the one billionth download. Cook: One of the keys behind the growth of iPod has been that sales of the iPod touch “more than doubled year-over-year.” The iPod and iPod Touch have reached sales of 37 million units, a big platform for developers. So there’s a virtuous cycle there.

[Sorry, missed two questions here.]

Why is Apple still doing an exclusive with AT&T for the iPhone? And how’s Steve Jobs? AT&T (T) is the best wireless provider in the U.S. “They have done a very good job with iPhone….We’re very happy with the relationship we have and do not intend to change it.” Structurally, we’re using GSM architecture, and Verizon (VZ) uses CDMA, and we wanted a world phone.

And Steve Jobs? Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer: “We look forward to Steve returning to Apple at the end of June.” [Translation: No news.]

[Yet another question missing here. Apologies.]

Any info on DRM-free/”iTunes plus” sales? Too early to tell.

How much impact did Wal-Mart (WMT) have on Apple sales? Very key partner for the iPod. The company believes Wal-Mart provides extended reach. Pleased with results, but “early going, and not much to report there yet.”

So many iPhone Apps. How can you make them easier to find on iTunes? (Same problem as music.) Any kind of unusual patterns? Nonanswer here.

Please talk about competition for smartphones–i.e., please discuss the Palm (PALM) Pre. “Difficult to comment on products that aren’t shipping. So there’s nothing intelligent I could say on the Pre.” But “we think we’re years ahead.” We see things through software lens and that has benefited us and customers very well. Power of device and ecosystem enormous and we’re now just scratching the surface.”

What about suing Palm re: patents on the Pre, etc.? “We think that Apple’s innovation is leading the industry by years. We think competition is great; we think it makes all of us better as long as other companies invent their own stuff.”

Next up: The company’s earnings call, where investors will be looking for more information about a product line refresh, Steve Jobs’s health and any other info the typically closemouthed company dribbles out. I’ll be covering that live at a separate post at 5 p.m. Eastern.

Relevant unit sales: “Apple sold 2.22 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing a three percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11.01 million iPods during the quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 3.79 million representing 123 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.”

Here’s what that looks like if you break it down (click to enlarge):

Earlier today, AT&T (T) said it had shipped 1.6 million iPhones this quarter, down a bit from the previous three months.

Here, from Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer, is what the Street was looking for:

• March quarter revenue: $7.69 billion consensus (6% y/y growth)
• March quarter EPS: $1.09 consensus
• March quarter GM: 32.5% guidance, 33.6% RBC estimate
• March quarter Mac shipments: 2.1 million consensus
• March quarter iPod shipments: 10 million consensus
• March quarter iPhone shipments: 3.3 million consensus (some analysts at 3.7 million)
• June quarter revenue: $8.28 billion consensus (11% y/y growth), guidance could be $7.8-$8.1 billion
• June quarter EPS: $1.12 consensus, guidance could be 92 cents-$1.02
• June quarter GM: 33% consensus, guidance could be 30.5%-31.5%

Press release excerpt:

CUPERTINO, Calif., April 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2009 second quarter ended March 28, 2009. The Company posted revenue of $8.16 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.21 billion, or $1.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion, or $1.16 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 36.4 percent, up from 32.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 46 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

In accordance with the subscription accounting treatment required by GAAP, the Company recognizes revenue and cost of goods sold for iPhone(TM) and Apple TV® over their estimated economic lives. Adjusting GAAP sales and product costs to eliminate the impact of subscription accounting, the corresponding non-GAAP measures* for the quarter are $9.06 billion of “Adjusted Sales” and $1.66 billion of “Adjusted Net Income.”

Apple sold 2.22 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a three percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11.01 million iPods during the quarter, representing three percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 3.79 million representing 123 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

“We are extremely pleased to report the best non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings in our history,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Apple’s financial condition remains very robust, with almost $29 billion in cash and marketable securities on our balance sheet. Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter of 2009, we expect revenue in the range of about $7.7 billion to $7.9 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share in the range of about $.95 to $1.00.”

Apple will provide live streaming of its Q2 2009 financial results conference call utilizing QuickTime®, Apple’s standards-based technology for live and on-demand audio and video streaming. The live webcast will begin at 2:00 p.m. PDT on April 22, 2009 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq209/ and will also be available for replay for approximately two weeks thereafter.

Second thing: I learned this via Twitter this afternoon, via fellow Twitterer Dave Martin, who was “re-tweeting” information he’d picked up via the Chicago CBS TV station’s Twitter account, which was passing along information it had received from CBS News.

Similarly, I am learning, via Twitter, that this amazing picture from Twitterer Janis Krums, who posted it to Twitpic, is the “first” photo of the airplane in the water. No idea if that’s true–was someone monitoring all news outlets simultaneously before they reached this conclusion?–but it is an extraordinary photo.

In the old days, this image might have taken hours or even days to make it to cable news–think of those terrible videos that people shot with their home cameras during the first few minutes of 9/11. Today Krums was being interviewed on MSNBC 34 minutes after he posted the photo, says Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider.

So: Did Twitter “break” news today? Did “citizen journalists” really ”beat” the bad-old MSM? It’d be great if we could skip that debate. Because it will be as boring as the one we had last month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

So let’s get it over with quickly: I learned that there was a plane in the water via Twitter, via a whole lot of people who live and work on the west side of Manhattan. But the people who told me what had happened after that, and the ones who are telling me why the plane ended up in the water in the first place–those are people who have full-time jobs as journalists. Like the six people who contributed to this excellent report for the New York Times (NYT) Web site.

So I plan on relying on those folks for my news for as long as there’s a business to support them. But I’ll be using Twitter and the Web to augment that coverage–to tell me something very quickly, or to pass along news gleaned from news reports in the first place. See? Easy. Now I’m going to listen to WNYC, the local NPR station, which has been going wall-to-wall with this story all afternoon.

One rumor that has yet to materialize, though: A cheap version of the phone priced at $99. Instead, Wal-Mart (WMT) will sell the phones at about the same price that everyone else does–the black 8GB iPhone 3G model will go for $197 and the 16GB black or white model will be at $297.

What will this do for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone sales? Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider does the math:

If each Wal-Mart store gets an average 200 iPhones as inventory, that’s 500,000 iPhone shipments Apple can recognize this quarter. Even if each store gets an average 100 iPhones, that will nicely pad this quarter’s numbers. (And if for some reason Apple waits until next quarter to recognize the shipments, they’ll help during a seasonally slow March quarter.)”

Kudos to our sharp-eyed former coworker, Dan Frommer, who has spotted what appears to be a nice new rollout at MTV.com: a place where you can–gasp!–watch a bunch of videos.

MTV Music seems to be what MTV.com famously should have had, but never really figured out how to do very well (actually, it’s one of several things, but that’s a longer story).

But it’s nice to see it now, regardless: clean interface, embeddable videos, social networky without actually trying to be a social-networking site.

Dan is calling this a “Hulu For Music Videos,” but that’s not the case, at least not formally. Hulu, you may recall, is an actual joint venture between GE (GE) unit NBC and News Corp.’s Fox (NWS), created in large part as a foil against YouTube, owned by Google (GOOG). (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

But the labels aren’t taking stakes in this site–MTV is just using the existing licenses in a smart way.

We’ve lobbed in calls to MTV and will report back if there’s more to say. But for now we can tell you that the site does have content from all four majors: Warner Music Group (WMG), Sony (SNE), EMI Music Group and Universal Music Group.

It does not have the video for the Killer’s new song, “Human,” which we can find on YouTube, though.

So we’ve asked our neighbor at Starbucks to pick a clip, and he’s taking responsibility for this one, which quite frankly, we’re sick of.

Enjoy: