Wednesday Apple Rumors: iPhone-Powered Earnings Boost AAPL Expectations

Here are your Apple rumors and AAPL stock items for today.

Wall Street Analyst Expectations Explode After Apple’s $46 Billion Quarter: Apple did well last Christmas. Very well. Where the company was expected to rake in around $39 billion in total revenue, it actually earned $46.3 billion over the holiday quarter. What pushed it over the top? The iPhone. Apple sold a total of 37 million iPhones during 2011′s final quarter. The Wall Street consensus was that it would sell 30 million. The company now has almost $100 billion in cash. With Apple’s earnings erupting, analysts across the board are raising share-price expectations for the company. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster put a price target of $670 on Apple shares. Morgan Stanley expects Apple to hit $600, while UBS’s target price is now $550. ISI Group’s Brian Marshall expects shares to hit $525, with an EPS of $41.50.

iPad Sales Stay on Target Despite New Competition: The iPhone isn’t the only device in Apple’s stable to beat sales expectations last quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPads, which, though not quite on par with the company’s crushing iPhone sales, handily beat Wall Street expectations of below 14 million. This figure is especially promising for the company as it faces off against low-cost tablet competitors like Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle Fire. When asked about the tablet competition during Tuesday’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook, digging at both the Kindle and Barnes & Noble‘s (NYSE:BKS) Nook, said that he doesn’t consider “limited function tablet and e-readers to be in the same category as the iPad,”

Apple to Hold Town Hall Meetings for Employees: A Tuesday report from 9 to 5 Mac offers tantalizing hints that Apple is preparing its workforce for the announcement of a new product. An email from CEO Tim Cook was sent out to Apple employees following Tuesday’s earnings call, congratulating them on the company’s successful holiday quarter. The email also said that a Town Hall meeting would be held through the company’s corporate Web portal on Wednesday to discuss “exciting new things going on at Apple.” Steve Jobs typically held these meetings prior to major product announcements, such as those for the iPhone and iPad. Did Apple workers wake up to news about the Apple HDTV? The iPad 3 or iPhone 5? We’ll know soon enough.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned stocks. Follow him on Twitter at�@ajohnagnello�and�become a fan of�InvestorPlace on Facebook. For more from the company, check out our previous�Apple Rumors�stories.