Gee whillikers. After hours on Monday Apple, the PC company people love to love, started behaving like Google. While its Q4 conference call was in progress its stock price went up almost $13 to over $187, a personal best, a position it then failed to hold.

Even if it pulled in its December gross margin and had doubts Mac could outdo itself, September was a scorcher and December promises to be better still, it said, projecting earnings of a whopping $1.42 a share on revenues of $9.2 billion, better than the $1.30 on $8.7 billion that the Street has been imagining.

In its fiscal fourth-quarter the company earned a record $904 million, or $1.01 a share, up a giggly 67%, on revenues of $6.22 billion, up 29%, with a higher-than-expected gross margin of 33.6%, up from 29.2% year-over-year.

Wall Street expected it to earn 85 cents on $6 billion in revenues.

In answer to everyone's burning question, Apple sold 1,119,000 iPods in the September quarter, the little widget's first full quarter out and pushed by the company's surprise $200 price reduction in early September, bringing fiscal 2007 sales to 1.389 million units. Apple recognized $118 million in iPhone revenues and deferred $336 million.

It will start seeing its first iPhone revenues out of Europe in November, followed by Asia next year.

Apple also shipped a record 2.164 million Macs in the quarter, up 34%, and iPods might have been light of expectations at 10.2 million units, still up 17% after it remade the line. It denied seeing iPhone cannibalize any iPods.

Apple said September was flat out the best quarter of Mac US educational sales and back-to-school sales ever. Although the new Leopard operating system goes on sale this Friday - and CFO Peter Oppenheimer said next to nothing about it - he thought sales this quarter might be sequentially lower because of Apple's September promotions.

Mac sales are, it repeated several times, growing more than the market, in part, it allowed, because of the iPod's halo effect. Actually that's been true for 11 quarters now. By Apple's count 50% of its retail customers never owned a Mac before, which means perforce that Windows is losing out.

Apple expects a gross margin of 31% this quarter, down sequentially because of factors like its reduced prices, increased component costs and more indirect sales.

The company is expecting to open another 40 Apple stores next year, including its first in China next summer in Beijing. It currently has 197 outlets, which contributed $1.25 billion to Q4 revenues

The company has $15.4 billion in cash and no debt.