The holiday orders and the record-setting sales of its Macs and iPhones helped Apple post its best ever quarterly earnings and revenue during the first quarter – with its profit increasing from $2.26 billion, or $2.50 per share, to $3.38 billion, or $3.67 per share.

While the sales at Apple jumped by 32 percent to $15.7 billion; despite the fact that Macintosh laptops and desktops had to “go up against the Windows 7 launch,” as Gartner analyst Van Baker put it.

Specifically speaking, the overall first-quarter sales numbers for Mac computers and iPhones stood at 3.36 million and 8.7 million respectively; which indicated a 33 percent and 100 percent respective increase for Apple’s two popular products.

The quarterly revenue of the company increased from $11.9 billion in the same quarter last year to $15.7 billion this tome round. The first-quarter revenue also beat the figures of the earlier quarters probably because a change in the accounting system of the company.

Apple’s sales projections for the second quarter lie between $11 billion and $11.4 billion; while its profit estimates fall in the range of $2.06 to $2.18 per share.

Terming the projections as Apple’s “typical conservatism,” analyst David Bailey, of New York’s Goldman Sachs Group, said that analysts expect the company’s second-quarter sales to touch $11.7 billion and its profit to be $2.34 per share.