"Apple said its earnings per share were $9.32 on revenue of $35 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson One Analytics predicted earnings per share of $10.36 on revenue of $37.19 billion."
It doesn't matter how much money you actually make when you are as big as Apple, it matters what you make compared to what people (analysts) think and expect you to make.
You said "their estimates" which I took to mean Apples own estimates. Isn't it tradition for Apple to beat their own estimates, fail to meet analysts estimates, and having their shares drop for a period of time afterwards? I'm not a trader though so correct me if I'm wrong.
They're usually pretty good about their own estimates, but they don't manage "expectations" very well. By way of contrast, Microsoft seems to do this much better, leading to fewer surprises.
These analysts have their heads up their asses, though, as that's the only place you could get numbers like this.
It is a tradition. Manipulation of Apple's stock price by people looking to make a quick buck goes back at least a few years now, with even some big names openly admitting to having done unscrupulous things to make it happen.
The market was trading on a belief that Apple's numbers would be about $2 billion higher than they were. Therefore the stock will fall as people digest the number and re-evaluate where Apple should be trading.
Since they reported numbers that were in the neighborhood of 6% below what was expected, their stock fell about 6%. Which is a pretty large drop.
To start with, the 13" model (the only one available in 2008) isn't even that (ultra)portable; it is sure thin, but in comparison to that FSC Q2010 it is a monster: it is 50% heavier with an additional inch of width and half an inch of depth.
In exchange for being more consistent in its thickness (despite having almost identical thickest points), the FSC Q2010 ends up with a plethora of ports: in addition to an ethernet port (although one that requires an adapter), you had ExpressCard, an SD card slot, an external microphone jack, and two USB ports.
Now, looking back to the Air, one of the interesting design choices they went with in 2008 was to get rid of the ethernet port entirely. This is not as much of a problem with the later Airs, and not for the reason you might think... (it isn't just that WiFi became more plentiful).
Instead, the MacBook Air 2010/2011 came with two USB ports, and the 2012 model adds a thunderbolt port: it is totally fine to use an adapter on a random extra port. Instead, the 2008 MacBook Air had a single USB port; this, combined with the mini display port, was the only extensibility on the device.
In essence, everything you could possibly attach to this device but the monitor had to go in to the one port, so if you wanted 1) cellular or wired internet and 2) an iPod/iPhone, you couldn't do it. I had a friend that was travelling and ended up sitting outside of a hotel in his car trying to steal enough WiFi just to upgrade his phone to the latest firmware.
However, it isn't just these external inconveniences that defined this device; to get an idea of just how spartan the 2008 MacBook Air was, you have to realize that they didn't even manage to get stereo speakers into it: yes, the thing had only one mono speaker. This was fixed in the 2010 versions. ;P
While the RAM configuration on the 2008 MacBook Air trounces your FSC Q2010 (a device that, despite its name, seems to have been sold in 2006?), it still couldn't go past 2GB, which even at the time (the contemporary MacBook Pro took 4GB) limited your options as a developer, or even a browser of many websites. In 2010 they upped it to 4GB maximum.
Looking at the 2006 specifications for this FSC Q2010, it is ludicrous just how much stuff they stuck in it.... I mean, you had a 2G cellular radio... the people I know who travelled with the Air had to carry around a massive USB dongle to accomplish that (as in 2008, phone tethering wasn't yet that common or convenient).
In essence, no: I'd argue that the MacBook Air, in 2008, was a horrible device that was mostly based on some kind of weird design fetish of "how thin can I make a computer housed in a metal case". It was not really attempting to be a usable system: it was at best a proof-of-concept for what, after two years of re-engineering effort, they might be able to make into an awesome machine.
The result at the time was then large (width/depth), underpowered (RAM/CPU), under-featured (mono speakers), and unextensible (a single port); this is even in comparison to computers that had come out years earlier (the 2006 FSC Q2010) that were significantly lighter (2.2lbs vs. 3.0lbs).
If they were doing fashion, they would change to a new look every year. Remember the disappointment when the iPhone 4S kept the iPhone 4 design? Apple doesn't care about fashion, they care about good design.
People said that Macs were glorified toys until Windows made GUIs commonplace. I don't know what the future holds but I'm pretty convinced that it is not a hybrid OS like Windows 8.
I still use my Chumby as an alarm clock, and it works really well. I hope that it will be possible to keep it running without the chumby servers through some hacks.
