Apple managed to prove that you can fool most of the people all of the time if you have slick marketing and cut costs by using an Asian manufacturer who thinks his staff need to be treated like animals.

The outfit announced that it has had record quarterly revenues of $46.3bn powered by the sale of 37m iPhone devices, giving the company nearly $100bn of cash in hand. For those who came in late the sales figures in question were were the iPhone 4S which was a slightly uppowered version of the iPhone 4 with some talking search software which only worked in the US.

The Silicon Valley group reported record net profits of $13.06bn in its December quarter. Apple shares jumped nearly 10 per cent in after-market trading.  Shares had been down since the death of Steve Jobs. Wall Street had expected revenues of $38.8bn with sales of about 30m iPhones, Sales of models including the 4S in the December quarter were up 128 per cent on a year earlier, while Apple also sold 15.43m iPads, representing sales growth of 111 per cent.

Tim Cook, chief executive, said Apple had ended the quarter with a significant order backlog for the iPhone.  He had bet that fanboys would be dumb enough to queue for a phone which was practically the same as the one they owned and ordered his Chinese manufactures to crack the whip and turn out more of the things. He was right.

Apple said it expected revenues of about $32.5bn in the current quarter and earnings per share of about $8.50. Wall Street analysts forecast $32bn and $8.00 in earnings per share.