• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 25, 2012

Even without the iPhone 5 -- or thriving TV and mobile ad strategies -- Apple’s sustained success continues to amaze. 

“There are plenty of impressive stats in Apple’s December quarter earnings report, such as 37 million iPhones shipped, $46 billion of overall sales, and $13 billion of profit,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “But Apple's most impressive stat continues to be its growth rate.”

“It turns out Apple didn’t need an iPhone 5 to bolster sales,” remarks The New York Times.

Indeed, “any notions that Apple's iPhone 4S was a lame duck were erased with Apple's quarterly earning,” writes CNet.

“It almost defies words in terms of the strength across all products,” Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, tells NYT. “Everything about it eclipsed even the wildest expectations of analysts.” 

"This is more than spectacular," Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, informs MercuryNews.com. "They had a record-setting blowout quarter with incremental upgrades to the iPhone and the Mac. Imagine what 2012 will be like with a new version of the iPhone, the iPad and maybe even an all-new Mac." 

As such, “analysts expect that Apple will have a strong year of new products,” reports the  Los Angeles Times. As it stands, “Apple Inc. is selling a whole lot of just about every product it makes.” 

As VentureBeat recalls, “Apple notably missed Wall Street’s expectations for the first time in a long time during its last earnings report.” Even for Apple, however, expectations at the time were simply too high.

Apple now claims a cash hoard of $97.6 billion, and, as The Verge reports, doesn’t plan on letting it "burn a hole in our pockets." In fact, CFO Peter Oppenheimer says Apple is having "active" discussions about spending it.