An expected Apple posted an 18 percent decline in profit and slowing revenue growth for the quarter ended in March, but it also reported earnings of $10.09 per share on revenue of $43.6 billion. That’s above the $9.98 per share on revenue of $42.3 billion analysts had predicted, and at the higher end of Apple’s own range of guidance for the period: Earnings of between $9.23 and $10.23 per share on sales of $41 billion to $43 billion.

Commenting on Apple’s Q2 performance, Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson told AllThingsD, “Jiminy.”

And there was plenty more good news where that came from:

• Apple sold a ton of iPhones and iPads. This time last year, the company shipped 35 million iPhones and 11.8 million iPads — double the number it sold the year before. During the quarter reported today, Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads. Analysts were looking for 36.5 million and 18.3 million, respectively. That’s a nice bump in iPhone sales, but it’s a spectacular leap for the iPad. In the year ago quarter, Apple sold just 11 million. As Ironfire’s Jackson said, “The biggest story here is iPads: 19.5 million up from 11 million a year ago. Apple is going to be a screen and service company from here.”
• Apple authorized a $60 billion share buyback plan, and raised its quarterly dividend to $3.05 per share.
• And it said it would make a “significant increase” in its capital return policy, totaling $100 billion by 2015. That’s a $55 billion increase over the previous plan.

“We are pleased to report record March quarter revenue thanks to continued strong performance of iPhone and iPad,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the company’s earnings release, adding that there’s some “amazing new hardware, software, and services” in the pipeline.

The lone speck of disappointing news in an otherwise good report: Apple’s guidance for next quarter, perhaps the most closely watched data point of all today. The company said it expects revenue of between $33.5 billion to $35.5 billion in the June quarter, and gross margins of 36 percent to 37 percent. Analysts had been looking for revenue of $38.6 billion and margins of 38.6 percent.

Still, a good showing overall, and one that the Street seems particularly happy with. Shares of Apple rose 4.6 percent in after-hours trading following the report.

Notes from the call …

• Cook: “In the first half of the year our net income was over $22 billion. During that time, we sold 85 million iPhones and 42 million iPads. These are very, very large numbers.”
• Cook acknowledges that Apple’s growth rate has slowed and margins have decreased.
• Cook: “The decline in Apple stock price has been very frustrating to all of us. … The most important objective will always be creating innovating products.”
• Lots to look forward to later this year: “We are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014.”
• Cook on Apple’s plan to return $100 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015, largely via share repurchases: “We concluded that investing in Apple was the best.”
• Oppenheimer on iPad: 65 percent more iPads sold year over year. Sales more than doubled in Greater China and Japan. “We sold significantly more iPad minis in the March quarter than the December launch quarter. The market suggests iPad mini purchasers are first-time iPad customers.”
• Yow. iTunes revenue rose 28 percent year over year.
• More on iTunes: Quarterly billings over $4 billion.
• Cumulative app downloads: More than 45 billion.
• iCloud now boasts 300 million users — up about 20 percent from the 250 million the service had in January.
• Retail revenue $5.2 billion, up 19 percent year over year.
• Oppenheimer says Apple’s cash pile now totals $145 billion, up $7.6 billion sequentially.
• On the share buyback program: “This is the biggest by any company. … We believe in Apple strongly and we think this is a great investment.
• Cook on China: “This was our best quarter ever in China. Revenue came in at $8.8 billion. That’s up 11 percent year over year. … iPad sales in greater China grew 138 percent year over year. … Our Greater China revenue was up approximately 18 percent, so it’s a bit better than it first looks. … we still see a significant opportunity in China, it’s a great market. We expect to double the 11 stores there in less than 2 years. This number is obviously too low, currently. … China has an unusually large number of potential first-time buyers, and that’s not lost on us.”
• Cook on competitive landscape: “We have tough competitors, but we feel we have the best products by far. We continue to invest in innovative products and feel confident about our product pipeline. We have the best ecosystem by far, and we’re just going to keep making it better and better.”
• Cook: “We see an enormous number of first-time smartphone buyers coming to market in certain countries around the world. We started last quarter making the iPhone 4 even more affordable, and that has made it more attractive to first-time buyers.”
• Cook on the five-inch iPhone: “My view continues to be that iPhone 5 has the absolute best display in the industry. … we always strive to create the very best display for our customers. … Our competitors have made some significant trade-offs in many areas in order to ship a larger display. We would not ship a larger display iPhone while these trade-offs exist.”
• Questioned directly about new product categories, Cook said explicitly that Apple is considering them.
• Cook on Mac cannibalization by iPad: “It’s certainly true the iPads cannibalized some Macs. But I don’t think it’s a huge number. … It’s probably extending the upgrade cycle. I don’t think the PC market is a dead market or a bad market by any means, and we’re going to keep innovating.”
• iPad now being tested or deployed in 89 percent of the global 500.

Yesterday’s reports from the market research firms IDC and Gartner showed conclusively what pretty much anyone paying attention had already suspected — that the bottom has finally fallen out of the PC business. During the first quarter of 2013, the combined shipments showed their worst year-on-year decline ever.

Reversing that trend is probably not an option, which means that a fundamentally new chapter in the history of the personal computer industry is unequivocally here. Shareholders in those companies will start making value judgments accordingly. That was in evidence in the premarket trading this morning.

With a few minutes to go before the opening of markets in New York, shares of market leader Hewlett-Packard were down by nearly 6 percent. Dell, still the subject of an ongoing fight over its proposed $24.4 billion plan to go private in a leveraged buyout transaction, was down only slightly.

Chipmaker Intel was down nearly 3 percent. Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s one remaining rival, was down 2.7 percent. Microsoft, the primary supplier of operating system software to the world’s PCs, was down 3.5 percent.

Apple, the maker of the iPad, which arguably has disrupted the PC industry, but is also North America’s third-largest supplier of PCs, was down by $2, or less than half of a percentage point.

As you might expect, there’s good news for any company in the business of building tablets and mobile phones, and lousy news for those building PCs. Worldwide sales of “devices,” a category that combines PCs, tablets, mobile phones and ultramobiles (tiny notebooks, presumably), will approach a combined three billion units by 2017, representing growth of 34 percent from 2012.

Growth will be led by tablets, which are expected to grow by 70 percent, to 467 million units. Phones will break the two-billion-unit mark in 2017, Gartner says. Traditional PCs, on the other hand, will decline by fewer than 300 million units by that year. Obviously, this is bad news for the PC players, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell, who are both struggling to get their PC divisions back on track, while at the same time trying to kick-start mobile device plays. (Click the chart below to make it bigger.)

Another nugget in the Gartner report: Google’s Android devices will dominate, accounting for nearly a billion and a half unit sales by 2017. Its nearest competition will be Microsoft’s Windows, and Apple’s combined portfolio of Mac and iOS devices, which will split about a billion devices between them.

Over the past couple of weeks, I explored a variety of options for extracting files from my old floppy disks and getting them onto my current computing system. I shipped disks out across the country, and called around to public libraries with the fervor of a college student looking for a textbook. I even found an 11-year-old in San Francisco who does disk transfers for family and friends for a small fee.

I spent about $100 to get hundreds of files off of more than a dozen disks, and another $25 on an external drive that would let me transfer the files myself. It was worth it to me to recover these files, but there are also cheaper ways to do it.

The first step is to make sure you know what kind of floppy disks you have — whether Mac or Windows PC disks, 5.25-inch floppies or 3.5-inch. I found that 3.5-inch disk drives, while not exactly common, are still more prevalent than older 5.25-inch disk drives or equipment for reading eight-inch floppies.

It’s also important to understand that not all of your floppy disks may be readable. They may have degraded over time, and even if the files can be read, you may no longer have compatible software with which to read them. For example, most of my files were old Microsoft Word documents, but there were also Final Draft screenplays that I couldn’t open without that software.

Using File Transfer Services

As I do when I’m looking up a new restaurant or researching every possible cause for a headache, I turned first to the Internet. Throughout my research, references to the same two websites kept coming up: RetroFloppy.com and FloppyDisk.com (which also operates as DiskDuper).

RetroFloppy, run by a man named David Schmidt, has been online and operating since 2006. It works mostly with 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch disks, though the company does work with older 800k Mac discs (Since the company started, Schmidt has received only three requests for eight-inch disk transfers.)

RetroFloppy charges $6.95 per standard floppy disk file extraction and conversion — which means he takes the time to locate compatible software and put old files in a format that’s readable on your current system. Specialty disks or ones that require a little surgery may cost more.

Usually, customers will put in an online or phone request, and then Schmidt himself will get in touch to find out more about the disks and see if RetroFloppy can extract the files. If the job can be done, you mail the disks to North Carolina in a protective cardboard box.

The company promises a turnaround time of two business days at most. In my experience, Schmidt was professional and a fast responder to my email inquiries, and a few days after I shipped my eight disks, I had received an email that included a downloadable zip drive with my files. By the next day, my floppy disks had arrived back home. Then I received an email invoice, powered by PayPal.

Unfortunately, RetroFloppy was expensive. The total for my eight disk extractions and file conversions, plus a CD transcription and return shipping, was $70.50.

California-based FloppyDisk.com, on the other hand, offered a more reasonable price for my disks, which were old Windows disks: $1.95 per 3.5-inch disk transfer. Mac-formatted 3.5-inch disks are $4.95 a transfer, as are 5.25-inch Windows or DOS disks.

Again, I filled out an online form, and then spoke with Tom Persky, who runs FloppyDisk, to explain my needs (no automated tellers at these one-man shops). This time I had to pay upfront, through PayPal. Then I headed to the local shipping center to mail seven more floppies.

Less than 48 hours later, I received a downloadable YouSendIt file, through email, that included almost all of my old files. Unfortunately, one of the disks couldn’t be read. But my total for the disk extractions, plus sending the disks back and a USB flash drive (included in the return shipment), was $23.60.

Overall, my experiences with these two services were positive. Afterward, I spent a good chunk of time poring through photos, cringing at old journal entries (in which I devoted entirely too much digital ink to unworthy love interests) and shaking my head at what passed as a college paper.

Buying an External Drive

If you have dozens of disks you want to tap into, it might be more economical to purchase an old external diskfloppy drive that connects to your computer via USB, and try to transfer the files yourself. These range in price from around $10 to $25, and can be found on online retailers like Amazon and eBay.

This might sound daunting, but in my research I was referred to an 11-year-old in San Francisco who, using his software-engineer-father’s equipment, transfers files off 3.5-inch floppies for a dollar a disk. So I figured if he can do it, many other people probably can, too.

I actually purchased an old Dell drive from FloppyDisk for $24.95, but I unwisely didn’t think about the fact that I now use Macs. When I plugged the external drive into my MacBook Pro, my laptop recognized the drive but couldn’t read the disks. I would have to plug into a Windows-based PC to see and move the files.

Calling Your Local Library

If you really want to transfer your floppy files for no cost, you might want to call your local library. While budget cuts have hit libraries pretty hard in recent years, one tiny silver lining is that some haven’t upgraded to brand-new computers.

The Boston Public Library, for example, has more than 60 computers available to the public, and the majority of them still have 3.5-inch floppy disk drives. The San Francisco Public Library has a limited supply of external drives that people can check out and use in the building.

The New York Public Library and the Washington, D.C., public library, however, no longer have computers with disk drives, so will require some research. But if you want to save a few bucks, the library might help you get the job done.

Slower-than-expected shipments in China brought on in part by the timing of the Chinese New Year holiday, plus government budget reductions, cut into sales in January and February, the firm said. The market is now expected to decline by 7.7 percent, which is 2 percentage points worse than previously expected. And it could get still worse. The firm won’t rule out a further drop into a double-digit percentage decline before a possible recovery mid-year.

The latest assessment comes only a few days after IDC released figures showing unabated growth in the market for tablets, which have been cutting into PC sales for years now.

Also, IDC’s dour outlook on PCs doesn’t mention the sales of Apple’s Macs. As it happens, another research firm, NPD, today put out its latest look at Mac sales, and they’re up by 14 percent year on year for January and February. One reason, said analyst Gene Munster of PiperJaffray in a research note to clients today, is that Apple has firmed up its supply of iMacs. Tight supplies knocked shipments down by about 700,000 units in December, Munster said. Even so, Munster expects Mac sales overall to trend down by about 5 percent in the first quarter.

Totally making this up — not an active user — but Path seems like the Mac of social networks vs. Facebook/Windows. (But what’s the iPod?)

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

I was so delighted to get your instructions last week on how to delete pictures from my iPad but it doesn’t work for me. I can check off the photos I want to delete and the red delete button does comes up — but it doesn’t delete. It’s dimmed. Any ideas on how to get it to work?

A:

I apologize that my answer last week was incomplete. You can only delete photos in the Photos app on an iPad if they were either taken on the iPad, received on the iPad via email and saved to the Camera Roll, or loaded using the iPad USB or SD card camera adapters. If the photos were synced to the iPad from iTunes on a computer, they can’t be deleted on the iPad. This is almost certainly why your delete button isn’t working. Apple says it bars such deletion because synced pictures are considered to primarily exist on the computer. If you want such synced pictures off your iPad, Apple says you have to go into iTunes and turn off syncing those particular photos or albums to your iPad, or turn off photo syncing entirely.

Q:

How do you create a new photo album on an iPad and get the pictures in the order you want?

A:

To do so, first use the Edit button, select multiple photos, and then use the “Add to…” button, add them to a new album and name the album. Once the photos are in the album you created, you can arrange them by hitting the “Edit” button again and dragging the photo thumbnails into the order you prefer.

Q:

I’m looking for a very light laptop to take on the road. Would it be possible to use an 11-inch MacBook Air on the road while using a PC in the office? All my files are on Dropbox or Evernote. Can I run Office apps like Excel on a Mac and modify files on both the Mac and PC?

A:

Yes. Microsoft makes a native Mac version of Office that uses the same file formats as the Windows version. And Dropbox and Evernote are available and access the same content on both platforms. Most other common file types, like JPG photos, MP3 music and PDFs, work interchangeably. And the MacBook Air is an excellent thin and light laptop. It can even run Windows itself — and the Windows version of Office — if you choose.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Twitter announced on Monday that it would soon kill off a few versions of its TweetDeck product in the coming weeks, ending support for the Adobe AIR, iPhone and Android clients.

It’s been the death knell many have expected, considering Twitter’s lack of pushing out updates for the three versions over the past year.

“To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Most of the efforts going forward, as Twitter has made clear, will be on the company’s other existing clients: The TweetDeck found on the Web, the Chrome-based app, the Mac client and the PC client.

Knee-jerk reaction: It’s a bummer for anyone using TweetDeck on the three platforms being killed. And it isn’t immediately clear as to why it’s happening.

But it’s there, in the blog post. Just read between the lines.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices,” the post states.

That means that — in part, at least — perhaps continuing to support the iPhone and Android versions of TweetDeck just wasn’t worth it compared to the number of people using it. Not only that, but Twitter is investing loads of time and effort into its official Twitter app for iOS and Android. It’s been pretty obvious which apps Twitter wants its users to install on their phones.

But then why kill the desktop-based AIR app? Twitter doesn’t say anything about decreased usage in the AIR version of TweetDeck, and there’s no real explanation of this in the blog post.

My best guess: To be frank, the TweetDeck Adobe AIR app just plain sucked. It required updates often and was shaky in how well it functioned even when fully up to date. It also seemed to be a major resource hog on a computer’s operating system, and it wasn’t the most stable app in terms of crashing.

So perhaps Twitter wanted to rip the Band-Aid off a crummy user experience inside another supported app, and shift its users over to the PC and Mac versions if they still want a desktop client. Twitter does, after all, want everyone who uses the company’s products to have a positive experience with them. Probably doesn’t help to have a rogue AIR app act up for some, whatever size the user base is.

Then there’s the advertising display argument, of course. Twitter could be deep-sixing its AIR, Android and iOS apps to better control the way users see Twitter’s promoted suite of ad products. Can’t say for sure either way on that one.

Whatever the case, personally I’m a bit bummed. For its many faults (and believe me, there were many), I’ve used the TweetDeck AIR app as a power user for years. It’s been the best way to keep me abreast of what’s happening on Twitter in a given moment.

But now, I’m curious to see how my transition to the desktop version of TweetDeck will be. And perhaps more importantly, how other power users will take the news.

Preorders will ship the week of May 13, and the device will arrive in U.S. Best Buy stores beginning May 19. It will cost $80.

The tiny, three-inch Leap sensor is meant to be placed in front of computer keyboards and, using hyper-precise motion sensor technology, tracks finger gestures and reflects the movements on screen. It currently works with Windows 7 and 8, and Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8, on desktops and laptops. (For a visual of how it works, check out the video embedded here.)

Last month, the company raised $30 million in funding from existing and new investors, and also announced a partnership with Asus to distribute the Leap with select Asus notebooks and PCs.

Leap Motion today also divulged a series of app titles in development that will work with the sensor, including Cut the Rope, Wreck-It Ralph and Painter Freestyle Beta. The company’s app store has been named “Airspace.”

What really floats their bots, what hardens Apple’s resolve is designing, making, and selling large numbers of personal computers, from the traditional desktop/laptop Mac, to the genre-validating iPad, and on to the iPhone — the Very Personal Computer. Everything else is an ingredient, a booster, a means to the noblest end.

– From Jean-Louis Gassée, in a post entitled “The Next Apple TV: iWatch”

The Microsoft-owned service had said the feature is coming. Starting Friday, those with the latest version of Skype for either Mac, Android or iOS can send the messages (users of Skype on other platforms can still receive video messages).

Over time, Skype plans to roll the feature out to all its other platforms, but the company didn’t give a specific reason why Windows isn’t one of the first operating systems to support video messaging.

Update: Skype said it is working to have the ability to send video messages from Windows PCs by the end of April. “Video Messaging is in early release for testing in several markets for Android, iOS, and Mac with functionality to send and receive video messages,” said a spokesman. “Users in these markets across all Windows desktop and mobile platforms can receive messages, too. We will have send capability in Windows by end of April.”

The messages can be up to three minutes in length. The feature is available in a handful of countries including the U.S. and United Kingdom, and Skype is looking for feedback before fully turning on the feature.

An update to the Skype terms of service late last year spilled the beans that the feature was coming.

With a new software update, photos, contacts and other types of files can now be shared between phones and computers (both Mac and Windows). Bump tiptoed onto the PC nine months ago by allowing phones to bump photos to their computer.

“No one ever says ‘I sure look forward to syncing my phone with my computer!’” Bump said in a blog post. “We want to change that. Because really, it’s the year 2013 — we have self-driving cars, private space exploration, 3D printers — but most folks have a hard time getting a video taken on their phone over to their laptop.”

Bump has been downloaded more than 125 million times, but is still missing advertising or anything else that might generate revenue for the company.

“We’re still not focused on monetization,” CEO Dave Lieb said in an interview.

That said, the PC feature, as well as a companion cloud-sync service, could help change that down the road. With the latest update, users can store files in the cloud, a sort of virtual USB stick. For now, Bump is limiting the size of any one file to 30 megabytes, but offering an unlimited number of files.

Over time, this could migrate into a paid premium service of some sort.

“We are going to measure and see [if there are] a lot of people that want to do much bigger files,” Lieb said.

On the phone side, Lieb said, Bump remains focused on iOS and Android, though he is keeping his eye on BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

“We’re in the wait-and-see camp,” Lieb said. “A year ago, when we asked that question, I was thinking ‘absolutely not’ when I said ‘wait and see.’ Now it is a more honest ‘wait and see.’ There are a lot of interesting things happening.”

On March 1, an amendment to the EU’s Information Technology Equipment Safety Standard will go into effect, rendering the Mac Pro noncompliant. Evidently, the machine’s fan guards don’t meet the updated standard and, rather than redesign them, Apple has opted simply to stop shipping the Mac Pro to EU member states.

“Apple resellers can continue to sell any remaining inventory of Mac Pro after March 1,” the company said in a message to resellers first published by 9to5Mac. “Apple will take final orders for Mac Pro from resellers up until February 18th for shipment before March 1 2013. Countries outside of the EU are not impacted and Mac Pro will continue to be available in those areas.”

The Mac Pro has long been a niche product for Apple, so pulling it off the market in the EU will have minimal impact on the company’s bottom line. And the company has been working on its successor — “something really great,” in the words of CEO Tim Cook — with an eye toward launching it sometime this year. With that machine in the pipeline, it likely made far more sense to halt sales of the current Mac Pro than scramble to retrofit them into compliance.