Apple on Monday reported strong quarterly earnings, boosted by record Macintosh computer and iPhone sales.

Apple recorded net revenue for its first fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 29, of US$9.6 billion, a 35 percent year-over-year increase, beating estimates of $9.47 billion from analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

The company posted quarterly net profit of $1.58 billion, an increase from the $1 billion net profit from the year-earlier quarter. The company recorded earnings of $1.76 per share.

Unit shipments of the iPod were 22.1 million units, a 5 percent growth over the year-earlier period. Apple sold 2.3 million iPhones during the quarter, a sequential increase from the 1.12 million iPhones it shipped in its fourth fiscal quarter. Apple shipped 2.3 million Macintosh computers, a 44 percent growth from the year-earlier quarter.

According to figures from IDC, Apple's PC shipments in the U.S. grew 30.9 percent to 1.06 million during the fourth quarter last year, with a 5.7 percent market share, behind Dell, Hewlett-Packard and HP. Apple was not among the top five vendors in PC shipments worldwide, according to IDC.

Apple this quarter announced Mac OS X Leopard operating system. It started off the new quarter with a bang, announcing a movie rental service for iTunes and a skinny laptop, the MacBook Air, which CEO Steve Jobs proclaimed was the "world's thinnest notebook" during a keynote address at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

A week prior to Macworld, Apple announced revamped versions of the Mac Pro workstations and Xserve servers powered by Intel's power-efficient Penryn processors.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.