You're actually wrong and misunderstanding the profit numbers. I wrote in another thread where this came up and you were quoted:

Strategy Analytics was estimating Apple's operating profit on the iPhone for the September quarter. Whereas the profit Apple reported for the same quarter (and that you're citing) is its net profit.

So you're comparing apples and oranges. The operating profit is calculated before taxes and interest payments are deducted. The net profit includes the deduction of taxes and interest. Hence the net profit is a smaller number than the operating profit. Who knows what Apple's entire operating profit for the September quarter is, but it's much larger that 1.67 billion and whatever that larger number is would be the relevant number to compare to the operating profits for the iPhone alone.

Here's the Reuters story on Strategy Analytics announcement: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/200911...us_apple_nokia. It came out of November 10. Apple announced it's net profits twenty days earlier on October, 19: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/19results.html. So obviously Strategy Analytics knew what Apple's net profit announcement was. In fact, they needed Apple's September quarter results announcement, to get the figure for the number of iPhones sold and make their estimate in the first place. So they would have certainly caught any such gross error. Also, obviously any halfway decent news organization, like Reuters, would have caught such an error as well.

Here's the wikipedia article explaining net profits, for those who don't know what it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_profit.

And here's the articles on operating profits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_profit, also called EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning...rest_and_taxes.