If you ask about sales in the quarter that just ended, you get two very different answers

Click to enlarge. Data: Apple 2.0, Thomson Reuters. Chart style: Adam Bushman

How did Apple (AAPL) do in the quarter that ended Saturday?

That depends whom you ask.

The consensus among nearly four dozen professional analysts, according to Thomson Reuters, is that Apple will report record earnings of $9.83 on record sales of $38.17 billion, up 52.8% and 42.7%, respectively, from the same quarter last year.

No way, say the amateur analysts who follow the stock just as closely — if not more so — that the Street.

Over the weekend, we polled our regular panel of independent analysts and got estimates from a dozen of them, including Asymco‘s Horace Dediu, Bullish Cross‘ Andy Zaky and Posts At Eventide‘s Robert Paul Leitao.

The independents, as usual, are even more bullish than Wall Street — $5 billion more bullish. Their consensus for Q1 2012: Blowout earnings of $11.94 on massive sales of $43.24 billion — up 85% and 61.7%, respectively, year over year.

If you’re wondering on whom to place your chips, the amateurs as a group outperformed the pros for 10 quarters in a row until they got clobbered in Q4 2011. That’s when Apple surprised everyone and reported sales 23.5% below the bloggers’ consensus and 5.8% below the pros’. (See here for why that happened.)

For the record, the guidance Apple issued in October for the quarter that just ended was for earnings of $9.30 on sales of $37 billion. As high as those numbers are, nobody — not even Apple — believes the company won’t beat its guidance.

UPDATE: Asymco‘s Horace Dediu has turned three years of our analysts’ data into a fascinating  interactive bubble chart (Flash required.) If you select Motion Charts and hit play you’ll see at a glance what an anomaly Q4 2011 was.

Filed under: Apple 2.0

And in the Apple market, Lion is still trailing two-year-old Snow Leopard

Data: NetApplications. Graph: PED

In its final monthly report for 2011, NetApplications offers a window on the shifting fates of the various flavors of Microsoft (MSFT) Windows and Mac OS X that show up at its 40,000 clients’ websites.

As a rule, creaky old legacy systems dominate.

Windows XP, which Microsoft introduced in August 2001, is still the single most-present PC operating system, with a 46.5% share of global Web traffic.

And Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which Apple (AAPL) launched in Aug. 2009, still has a 3.1% market share to Lion’s 2.0%

But despite the persistence of aging OSs, there was a lot of rapid movement in 2011. Lion’s Web presence went from 0% to 2% in just over two months. And Windows 7, for its part, went from 21.7% to 37% in the space of a year, a 71% increase.

It was not a good year for Vista or “Other,” however. Both experienced significant share drops in 2011.

For a summary of NetApplications methodology, see here.

Filed under: Apple 2.0

Ranked by Internet market share — rather than unit sales — Google is now No. 3 

Data: NetApplications. Chart: PED

From the perspective of NetApplications, which has been measuring browser usage data since 2004 (currently monitoring the activity of 160 million users on 40,000 sites):

• Apple’s (AAPL) iOS is the still reigning champion of the World Wide Web among mobile operating systems (including tablets)
• Google’s (GOOG) Android made a strong showing in 2011 but has started to fade
• Oracle’s (ORCL) Java ME is now the world’s fastest growing mobile OS, having retaining the No. 2 spot it lost briefly to Android in October.

Java ME?

Yes, Java Micro Edition, the Java platform designed by Sun Microsystems and acquired by Oracle in 2010. It’s used primarily in embedded systems, such as the low-cost feature phones (A.K.A. “dumb” phones) sold by the hundreds of millions to people all over the world who can’t afford or don’t want a smartphone.

And according to the NetApplications report issued Sunday,  it’s making a comeback.

Filed under: Apple 2.0

Two reasons: Jobs’ birthplace and, reportedly, a speaking invitation he blew off in 2009

Ive and Jobs in 2002

The news that Jonathan Ive, Apple’s (AAPL) chief wizard of industrial design, has been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) and should henceforth be addressed as Sir Jony, raises once again the question of why his boss and closest collaborator was never so honored.

According to a story that surfaced in the British press 10 months ago, Steve Jobs nearly got his own KBE a year before Ive.

In March, the Telegraph reported that Jobs was put forward for an honorary knighthood in 2009, but the proposal was blocked by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown because Jobs had declined an invitation to speak at the Labor Party’s annual conference.

The Telegraph‘s source, an unnamed former senior member of Parliament, claims Apple (AAPL) was aware of the proposal, which reportedly reached the final stages of approval before it was rejected by Downing Street.

Jobs, however, would never have been Sir Steve, even if his honorary knighthood had gone through. Recipients who don’t have the British monarch as their head of state can append the letters KBE after their name, but not style themselves “Sir.”

This is the second time Sir Jony has made the Crown’s honors list. In 2005 he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE), a cut below KBE in the Empire’s hierarchy of  chivalric orders. (See See the Wikipedia entry Orders, decorations, and medals of the United Kingdom for further detail.)

Previous American KBEs include Bill Gates, Billy Graham and Rudolph Giuliani.

Filed under: Apple 2.0