Steve Jobs, Apple CEO announced Monday it had its best quarter earnings and revenue in the history of the company.  The Macintosh laptops and desktops did much to help this record setting quarter.  The Mac did very well in spite of the Windows 7 launch in the fall.  The iPhone had a 100% increase in sales, but Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner said, “We expected more.  The China launch of the iPhone wasn’t as good as Apple thought it would be.”   Expectations aside, 87 million iPhones were sold and 3.36 million Mac computers were sold in the 4th quarter, a 33% rise for Macs from the prior year.  iPod sales are on the decline.  21 million were sold, but unit sales were down 8%.  The iPod iTouch sales went up 55%, actually bringing up iPod sales up 1% because iTouch’s are in the iPod category.  Apple’s revenue for the4th quarter was 15.7 billion and earnings were 3.4 billion.  Those numbers were up from last year, 11.9 and 2.3 billion, respectively.  Yesterday,  Jobs introduced the  iPad to the world in a much anticipated and media frenzied press event.  Like  iPhone’s big brother, the iPad, a multimedia touch screen wireless device,  does everything iPhone does,  but has  a Kindle-like library component and space for large photo files.  I’m sure I’m only touching on the basics.  Once on the market in March, the price of the iPad will start out at $499.  Not too bad on the wallet either.