Order online at Apple's website

Search as you will for the deals from Apple’s retail outlets on Friday. The supplier advertises special deals on its products for the day after Thanksgiving, and the retail store pricing on Wednesday appears was as it’s always been on products at its retail outlets. The iPad, for example, was at $499 rock bottom. The retail outlets clambered onto the Black Friday bandwagon with slight discounts, matching those online.

The Apple Store online posts discounts only on Nov. 25. Apple’s got iPad 2s at $458 (plus tax) through the end of Friday (looks like they’re running that sale through midnight PST, judging from when they updated the store page early Friday), as well as the iPod Touch, the Nano, the iMac, Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air. The Air has the steepest discounts at $101 off the regular $999 price for the 11.6-inch model. That Air is a great alternative to the iPad if you need a keyboard — and the more recent models have a backlit keypad, too.

Check the Apple Store webpage for details. Shipping is free.

We’ve found the iPad for about $21 less, at $473.99, at MacMall on a Friday only sale. You have to call and talk to a sales rep to buy the iPad 2 at MacMall, mostly so they can offer you an upsell of a protection plan (which is a pretty good investment). MacMall’s at 800-622-6225.

Settlements range from the cost you paid to replace the adapter (within 1 year of replacement) down to $35. What’s more, if your MagSafe from that era is showing signs of wear, Apple has a Adapter Replacement Program. You get your adapter replaced for free by taking your adapter and computer to an Apple Retail Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider, or by contacting AppleCare.

Apple says that adapters which show “Strain Relief Damage” are eligible. Strain Relief Damage “means fraying, melting, straining, sparking, weakening, discoloration, bubbling, overheating and/or separation of the Adapter’s strain reliefs.”

You can apply for your cash compensation online at www.AdapterSettlement.com or by calling 888-332-0277.

I had a brush up against his darkest era while I was a journalist nearly two decades ago. He’d been exiled from the company he created and so went out to found Object-Oriented pioneer NeXT and then Oscar-snatching Pixar. I had a near-miss in getting to interview him while he was toiling away at NeXT. At PCI, where we published and I edited the HP Chronicle, we were starting up NeXT World, and he was to be the interview for our inaugural issue. I left the company, ultimately to start our other HP newsletter, the The 3000 NewsWire, and NeXT then withdrew the interview access. It was a matter of timing, but now it’s a time for some personal regret. feel like I’ve lost a bigger brother today. He was maddening and a lightning rod for criticism and never somebody you wanted to ride in an elevator with — unless you had a great answer to “what are you working on today?”

Nobody ever missed NeXT World, or even NeXT. But for the computer world, a big disturbance in the force opened up today. He never took more than $1 a year as a salary, instead compensated in stock, shares whose value rose from below $15 each to form the largest capitalized company in the world this summer. A CEO who takes that compensation, and then leaves in a golden parachute that’s drifting as high as his ideals and ideas, may not grace our industry for a long time to come.

In 2009 he had a liver transplant to treat a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, his mortal diagnosis that he outlived for an extra two years. But even earlier, in 2005 when his doctor had told him to go home and get his affairs in order, he gave a now-legendary address to the Stanford graduating class entitled How to Live Before You Die. It’s up on TED, that nexus of brilliant talks about humanity and technology and science. (Being a brilliant writer, Jobs had this words worked out on paper before he talked, and the transcript is online, too.) His own words on that day serve as the best epitaph, and the brightest light forward, now that his own searchlight has gone dark. There’s advice in there for anyone who’s still distilling a future in their computing life. You can only see how the dots of your life connect looking backward, he said, not forward. but faith is essential to doing good. “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Getting kicked out of Apple may have had the same sting as watching anything you love taken away. “It was awful tasting medicine,” he said of losing Apple. “But I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. Don’t waste a minute of your life,” he says in that speech. His own achievements and leadership, from a man who built a computer “for the rest of us,” are a marker for the rest of us and what we might do so long as we believe in what we love.

Looks like the B&N Nook may be the $250 slab we have discussed. Given recent software upgrades and a cottage industry into making them full Android slabs, the Early Majority market seems to be defined as under $250, powerful enough to read, surf and play a few games.

If it weren’t for the blasted “take up all the supply” deals that Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook negotiated for tablet components, maybe Lenovo could afford to build a sub-$250 tablet. It’ll happen one day, and the people who waited will be glad to pay less. For the next year, the cheap tablet is something like what we call a jackalope here in Texas, a mythic cross of jackrabbit and antelope. You can imagine one, but that’s as far as you’ll get.

Guy is reading from Crossing the Chasm to get that Early Majority Market label. The book was written 20 years ago and has not been refreshed in this century. But even by those aged measures, the Nook won’t be measuring up. While people are “rooting” their Nooks to turn them into Android tablets, they’re playing with a toy that doesn’t have a strong future. It’s the old Windows world dream of getting some big part of $500 worth of value by spending $250, just because there’s a lot of demand. This chestnut is the “nice try Apple, and very clever: but cheap, primitive copycats will overrun you.”

No product is perfect, but it will take bigger treads than the Nook’s to do that running. I’d be betting on something besides any book reader that needs its users to slap a new operating system into it. There are some other Nook problems, and all of them point to strengths in Apple’s tablet model.

– Barnes & Noble, the Nook’s maker, was hoping for a buyout this summer and had to settle for about $200 million in fresh investment. This sounds a lot like Palm, which was building the iPhone killer WebOS until it got bought out by HP. And then got killed by HP in the wake of the TouchPad debacle.

– About 270 people comprise the Nook technical team. Apple probably has more than that in California alone.

– Barnes & Noble is suing the content providers who stock the Nook with many of its books. B&N hates the $9.99 or better pricing Apple negotiated with the top six publishers. Apple negotiated, while B&N pushes back with a lawsuit.

It might be worthwhile to see what tablet Amazon brings out this fall. But compared to a real tablet, it is likely to be a primitive device that performs the browse and email and listen and watch functions that make up the biggest part of iPad ownership. It takes passion about a product — not an operating system like Android or just the content — to give a tablet purchaser lasting value.

Crossing the Chasm devotees assume that nothing changes about technology markets, at least not since the book was last re-written in 1999. Guy notes, “Companies who dominate the Innovator and Early Adopter phases of the technology adoption life-cycle are rarely those who dominate the Early and Late Majority.” It all is so much chaff in the face of a product that only succeeds with a meld of content and software and hardware. Plainly, if you’re reading from Chasm to figure out the mobile success story, you’re on the wrong page.

Chasm worked great for the 1990s, and even for the computers which didn’t need a content ecosystem to succeed. The book predicted a healthy final act for Hewlett-Packard’s HP 3000 minicomputer, calling it “Late Main Street.” (You gotta love those snappy labels.) It was a good label until HP decided that it would gobble up Compaq for its PC business, then jettison some older product lines which were still profitable. HP turned its 3000 business into Too Late Main Street. That computer’s market is surviving, but declining.

The Kindle is going to rewrite that last-century silicon strategy. I was an Early Adopter of the Kindle. I needed an iPad, and Apple had only built the iPod Touch up to then. Bought mine at $369, ouch. But the Kindle is hanging on and even is rumored to be getting Android inside. Amazon believes in hardware, but only as much as it needs to sell content, all those books. If they’d get serious about selling apps, music or movies, they’d make a worthy competitor. Nevertheless, that innovator has become an Early Majority Market product doing well in the e-reader space. (No need to point out the innovative Sony ebook devices. They never had a content storehouse, and so as products they languished on shelves.) Looks like the Kindle is about to become pretty entrenched.

If you’re seizing on B&N to break the ice on sub-$250 tablets, set aside some budget. You’ll be buying something else soon enough. Buy three of these cheaper tablets and you’ve spent enough to get an iPad.

But maybe not; maybe consumers won’t cast off their cheaper tablets, and instead will use them for several years. My iMac is now 3.5 years old. I switched out my MacBook Pro after six. My iPhone 3GS will probably see three years of service, put it could last much longer than that.

Cheaper copycats don’t win for anybody but the makers of them. I define “win” for the consumer as being able to afford anything beyond “primitive.” Nothing I’ve mentioned above is “primitive.”

This constant chaff of “it was clever while it was early, but it will be irrelevant” is just fantasy — the desperate hope sold to mobile device makers who don’t want to work so hard, so they can sell primitive products. Netflix is another example of a company not the very first in the market (streaming), but the one that made a product everybody needs to have. The company’s name has come to stand in for the term “streaming content.”

That’s what innovation will do — reward shareholders, plus establish the leadership in the market. You don’t have to open a new market like Apple did with tablets. You can deliver success just by finding the best value for the consumer, not the lowest price. Then marketing it expertly, and then do your groundbreaking with content. Like Apple wresting phone freedom from carriers’ control. Or iTunes, dealing to sell legitimate music when Napster was stealing it. Or Amazon, which outstripped the Sony ebooks by leveraging e-book deals with all major publishers.

The Nook is the best of the non-Kindle devices, and it seems both these products want a lower price point with fewer features to compete with the iPad. Great. To call them tablets, however, does more than drop the price point. It cheapens the concept that HP tried at and failed — or the one where the Lenovo products are showing great promise. (Lenovo even has one model aimed at business and another at consumers.)

Meanwhile, Nice try on the Nook. Barnes & Noble has been for sale all summer. From Publisher’s Lunch:

Liberty Media CEO John Malone said, “It would be a bit of a flier for us, on whether or not Barnes & Noble can play competitively with the likes of Apple and Amazon in the digital transformation,” he said. “That’s really the bet.”

So Liberty decided to bet its $204 million on B&N, rather than buy the company out. The buyout is said to have stalled because Reuters said “the two sides could not agree on how to value the Nook, with recent volatility in the stock market making it harder to figure out valuations.”

There’s a lot to value in the Nook’s success. Pub Lunch: “A dramatic strategy to design and build quality ereading devices, leverage their large store bases to sell ereaders, and provide in-store extras in ways few other physical retailers can, and expand the digital content universe in such areas as kids’ ebooks, digital magazines, and color newspapers.” 630 B&N College Bookstores will now sell the Nook. More than 60 percent of eTextbook purchases were made at B&N College stores.

Meanwhile, B&N’s Nook app that’s been selling content on 20 million iPads had to dump its in-app purchasing during July, just like everybody else’s app. You now gotta head to the B&N website. But that’s a matter for B&N’s profitability, not Nook prospects. Unless profits have anything to do with growing the Nook empire.

Nook is doing well, now that it’s moved beyond selling books. My brother has rooted his Nook, and loves the fact that he didn’t have to pay the $499 for an iPad — or the $369 for a refurbished, full warranty iPad 1. You get the idea. Some people are not gonna pay a lot for that muffler. How many? It might tell you a lot about the scope of “mass adoption” that a $204 million Liberty investment is supposed to move the needle for Nook’s mass market. That’s about 180 days budget for just advertising the iPad and iPhone.

We just saw HP fail at a tablet. That Compaq buyout has run its course. After 10 years of flogging a low-profit PC business, HP can’t afford the dead weight on its other computer operations. It’s announced that its PC business is not really something it wants to continue, and so keep its stock in the range that makes it an attractive takeover target. When you’re trading at 5.2x earnings and your share price is $25, a majority chunk of your company can easily fall into competitors’ hands. (Especially somebody like Oracle, who now sees HP as a competitor it can bully easier than ever.)

Guy explained that he believes the Chasm buzzwords are essential to being a part of conversation at Silicon Valley cocktail parties. This century’s market parties use fresh intelligence to replace the Chasm chatter about mobile computers. For any that don’t, it’s closing time at the bar.

The Great Presenter, in his element in earlier days

Steve Jobs, 56 years old and on his third medical leave, has resigned from his job at Apple as CEO. He also left the company with a heritage and credo that can only be compared to Walt Disney’s. Jobs did Walt’s exit even better, naming Tim Cook as successor to the CEO position. Jobs is also remaining as Apple’s Chairman of the Board and a director.

Cook doesn’t have to move anything into a new office, because he’s been running Apple as CEO in fact for much of the last three years. Cook, 50, has been performing CEO duties since the start of this year. He’s been a constant presence in the Apple analyst briefings about the spectacular quarterly results the company has posted for more than six quarters by now. As Jobs’ resignation letter confirms, Apple had a succession plan in place for this day. The succession was swift, unlike the last three changes to the CEO position of Hewlett-Packard. Cook’s election to the CEO post was immediate by the Apple board, based on instructions in the brief letter Jobs used to file his resignation.

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

The markets were skittish about this news in after-hours trading, just as analysts predicted they would be. It will take a few more product introductions to convince investors nothing essential is just about to change, simply because a temporary medical leave became permanent.

In the tone of Jobs’ letter I heard an echo of another that I saw him write. This one was to the employees of NeXT Computer, celebrating the birth of his daughter in 1992. Simple, direct and hopeful. This voice is what’s going to echo through the near future in Cupertino and beyond. It’s the voice that banished doubts about whether simple computing would succeed against popular PCs, and so carve out a future where Apple would become the largest creator of technology in a world that’s still hungry for magic — the kind that Walt gave us.

My wife and I were on a get-to-know-you trip to the Redwood City HQ of NeXT, setting up a relationship between our employer and this brainchild of Jobs’ wilderness years. We took the tour of the campus and saw sleek courtyards and impossibly simple offices and even reception flowing out of hardwood floors, and then sat down in front of a sleek black computer with keyboard to match. What amazed us was a demonstration of email, fully realized even by today’s standards. No baffling addresses to recall and type; they flowed out of an address book. Music and photos were embedded inside the message.

And there on the NeXTstation glimmered the object of Steve’s latest joy, Not the computer, but a newborn daughter. One of her earliest photos that served as the birth announcement, shared with the NeXT staff, underscored by Mozart. Our own lives had three children in them, from age 9 to 19. We instantly understood how life’s important moments could be shared with grace, by using well-built technology. We didn’t meet Jobs on that trip, but came away thinking about the then-37-year-old as a father and a man, as well as a creative genius. The commonalities connected us, because in the end all we have to share that lasts is the love we express.

I came to the meeting that helped to launch NeXT World carrying a fan’s ardor for Jobs’ creations. I lusted after a Mac in 1984 after using a Apple II since 1978. I helped start a writing and publishing company with the Mac SE, lashed to a monitor larger, heavier and more expensive than any my daytime employer (who funded NeXT World) could afford. We created tabloid-sized newspapers at my employer with the Mac Plus at that company, a team of editors squinting into the 9-inch Mac screens to use Pagemaker 1.0. Four of us would hit the same shared disk at once, until the whole network seized up. We’d have to restart. But on our computers this wasn’t remembering a finger combination on the keyboard. We pulled down a menu, so much simpler than the Ctl-Alt-Delete of MS-DOS. Our employers had invested in Apple’s products because they were the best of the time, many years ahead of the PC world’s best desktop publishing of 1987.

Somehow, we saw at the NeXT tour, he had topped what he’d done with the Mac at Apple before they ousted him. The NeXTStation — even the name spoke about his ideals of forward movement through life, leaving your best behind to become better — purred along with Unix. It’s hard to describe what an oxymoron that was in 1992. Unix was becoming a powerful business environment, but geekhood was essential to using it. Engineers used Unix workstations. PCs were dominant, and Macs were for the rest of us. The NeXT environment took the best parts of object-oriented computing and Unix flexibility and hid them under beautiful icons, arrayed in color or sketched in greyscale on different NeXTstation models. The built-in dictionary pronounced words. We saw the Dock in use and wondered how we’d adjust. All of it was carried back to Apple when Jobs returned in 1996. The result was OS X, which is now a decade old and merging with the magic of the iOS mobile world.

By 2005 in his Stanford commencement speech he was talking about how to take the leap towards magic, courting risks. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

With so many stories that I’ve created on Steve Jobs’ products, I feel sad about his resignation. But what a stellar legacy. Now he leads Apple’s board. I compare him to Walt Disney because he is able to inspire the same aura of creativity in his employees. In a poll on the employee satisfaction website Glassceiling.com, Jobs posted a 97 percent approval with the company workers. He’s known for being mercurial and a tyrant at times, but so was Walt.

Many people are writing about the resignation as if it’s Jobs’ obituary. This much is true: the end of one kind of era in the life of this man, and perhaps the end of one generation of CEO brilliance. But after being compared to Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Robert Noyce of Intel and other icons, Jobs represents the new generation of computing giant. He’s put Apple into orbit around our lives, as difficult to ignore as the moon circling our skies.

One of the best essays about the resignation is from Walt Mossberg, one of the deans of technology journalism who writes for The Wall Street Journal. In a column in the WSJ’s All Things Digital website, Mossberg says that now there’s talk of Apple reinventing TV, a keystone of our lives that Jobs once called the most corrosive element in the world. “But at its best, it’s magic,” he added.

In the only instance I saw him at the Reality Distortion Field of Macworld Expo, we sat on the floor in the Moscone Center, waiting to be admitted to the keynote as devotees and customers in 2006, and we dreamed out loud of an Apple bigscreen TV, wired with Mac technology. It didn’t come to pass that year — the Intel uprising was announced instead on that day, and the iPhone followed. Of course, we’ve since learned that the iPhone was just the warmup for the touch technology that the iPad would deliver. I’d be glad to buy any Apple reinvention of the TV. After the Air, the iPad, the iPhone, the iMac, through the dark years, back to the Mac Plus and even to the Apple II, his company’s ideas and ideals have enriched my life.

Pogue and his boys review the newest iPad

The only iPad you can buy today is the original generation’s models. Apple sold out its first build of the product in less than a day over the kickoff weekend. Apple built up less than enough inventory to immediately satisfy customers hungry for the iPad 2. Delivery times at 1 AM Pacific were quoted at 2-3 business days, regardless of model. By mid-morning the deliveries were 5-7 business days. Now the orders placed will be fulfilled through Apple’s online store in 3-4 weeks.

That’s right; it means that unless you were up ordering at early morning, the soonest you will receive a new iPad model will be April 1-2. That’s one week after the device goes on sale outside the US. Analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray estimated the company sold 500,000 across retail outlets and Apple’s online stores. The first edition of the tablet sold 300,000 units.

Despite the simultaneous outlets of Best Buy, Walmart, Target and the two phone carriers in the US, nothing was available to purchase one hour after the iPad 2 went on sale in retail settings. The tablets disappeared in 37 minutes at a local Verizon shop here in Austin. The ATT outlet across the parking lot had only four on hand to begin with. At Verizon, they were eager to order one, to arrive in the official monthlong waiting period.

The prices at retail outlets are no better than those at the Apple Stores, and an online order costs the same. Free shipping is part of every order now — but the Apple Store online offers free engraving.

The most fun review that I’ve seen so far comes from the New York Times’ David Pogue, who employs his two young sons in explaining what’s improved while we see the boys goof and cavort and even drop the new iPad. They demonstrate the most sizzling apps on the new device, Garage Band and iMovie. The latter obviously has more business uses than the former. Also mentioned is the new gyroscope, which when developers tap into it, gives app users the chance to observe a product in 3D and manipulate moving parts. Great prospect for an interactive sales catalog.

To start, the iPad now supports FaceTime, using its new video cameras. CEO Steve Jobs said in a presentation today that “the iPad is the ideal size for video conferencing.”

FaceTime now allows a user to flip the front and rear facing cameras of both the iPhone and the iPad 2.

The iPhone 4 includes tethering, to deliver a 3G connection to a device.

iMovie for iPad (a new app) has a precision editor, multitrack audio recording, new themes and AirPlay to work with Apple TV. Apple has created a full-featured video editor on a mobile device that can play videos created with the product.

The iMovie app is available at the App Store for $4.99.

Led by an appearance from its CEO Steve Jobs, Apple today announced the specifics of its new iPad 2, still priced starting at $499. All of the prices are the same as the original iPad, running up to an $829 model including 3G and 64GB of storage. All models ship on March 11, the first day anyone can order the device. Models that add 3G will be “Coming Soon,” the same advice Apple is supplying for the wi-fi model. It appears that there will be no delay in getting 3G on the new iPad, unlike the original model. Ordering will be online and in stores on the same day. Overseas, in 26 countries, the wi-fi device ships on March 26.

It’s up to twice as fast, with graphics 9x faster — but same 10-hour battery life, relying on the new A5 processor. The design of the new device will give 9 hours of video watching time using 3G, according to Apple’s specs.

“We’ve done things with this iPad that we never could have done before,” Steve Jobs told the crowd of analysts and media at the Yerba Buena Events Center in an hour-plus unveiling.

The iPad 2 will ship in both white and black models. The resolution of the screen on the new device is the same as the original model.

Apple has full specs on the new iPad online at its website. It also has a business-focused roundup of the new product’s features at http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/

The device supplies HDMI graphics out through a new $39  accessory cable. Output is up to 1080p. This can mirror what’s on the iPad screen.

Front and back-facing cameras have been added, video-capable. In another improvement, Apple has returned the ability to use the outside switch as either a way to mute the sound or lock the screen rotation.

It’s 33 percent thinner, 8.8 mm, thinner than the iPhone. Its weight has dropped from 1.5 lbs to 1.3, but it still uses a metal case.

Speaking of cases, the new iPad case has microfiber to clean the screen, starts up the device when you open it, and acts as a stand while it protects the screen. Apple has built magnets into the iPad, along with magnets on the case’s hinge cover.

Cases, perhaps to the consternation of the vast case industry, will sell in both leather ($69) and vinyl ($39). And come in a raft of colors.

Apple has replaced its original iPad with the new model, having pulled down the ability to order the older devices from its online store. It has added a free engraving feature along with the usual free shipping offer.

Although the number of vendors selling solutions, apps and hardware is below the gaudy days when this show spanned both North and South Moscone halls, plus Moscone West for sessions, a rough survey of the 2011 show revealed a bigger share of business-ready help: in apps, in hardware, in Mac software and in advice. Macworld 2009, Apple’s last, had more of everything except business: especially iPhone cases and iPod accessories. Those were still on display last week, along with a wave of iPad holders.

But 2011 was the year when Apple business users could find a Macworld supplier a-selling with no effort at all.

Two years ago, the Enterprise Software Alliance was about the only booth where Windows-friendly Mac software for business was showcased. This year a veteran firm from the Windows virus battlefields, ESET, was selling antivirus and giving away security training. The company said it has muscled antivirus maker Intego out of Apple’s retail store slots with NOD Antivirus 4. It’s called the Business Edition of antivirus for endpoints — what you’d call Macs, but now ESET uses the enterprise-savvy terminology, and perhaps technology, too.The tone of the conference has rolled away from Mac-centric and barreled on to mobile, since those iPhones and iPads have led the charge into businesses for Apple. This year there was an Indie section for Mac software and solution companies, smaller spaces with smaller firms doing novel things. One of the most clever, Dolly Drive, makes Time Machine a most flexible and stronger backup solution for Macs, by adding off-site storage (disks in the vendor’s cloud) plus the ability to create a bootable backup drive when crashes take out a disk. Dolly Drive gives a business user better control over what Time Machine backs up, too, and it sends only changes to files instead of 52 full copies of your Quickbooks file per year.

Backup, security: these are the things that keep computers working for your company so you can focus on your business, not the computers. Schlage showed off a remote lock and lighting control system to secure buildings, including your home office, using an iPad or iPhone as your controller. Schlage includes security camera options, but another security system supplier also delivered video straight to Macs.

HP had a fine quarter in its last report, announced in late November. But the company needed more than 300,000 employees to sell $33 billion and post $8.7 billion in profits. The new CEO Leo Apotheker warned that profits would take a hit on increased R&D at HP. Apple’s R&D has been built-in to its profits, at levels HP hasn’t seen in a decade. At its flashiest, HP can point to a fall tablet from its Palm labs that could deliver hardware innovation to draw people to the brand. (The Topaz renderings, at left, show a 7-inch device sporting WebOS, innovation HP bought last year, rather than built.)

Apple’s new numbers put the company within 25 percent of HP’s sales and a $3 higher profit per share. There’s something special in any computer vendor’s sauce that lets it change the rules, as with the iPad, while it cranks out 71 percent higher sales than one year ago.

But it’s the combination of innovation and integration that Apple’s COO Tim Cook talked up the most in the company’s quarterly analyst call yesterday.

Apple climbed to this peak of its business without any strategy, fabricated or real, to pursue enterprise software or networking or storage products. HP has a much broader strategy than what the press is guessing at this week, speculation on a new push toward those three sectors at Hewlett-Packard. Software especially is high-profit, but HP has a long way to go to earn a significant share in that sector. Apple’s software innovation lies in its operating systems, the Unix-based Mac OS and the mobile iOS too. Apple reported profits of $6.43 per share; analysts expected $5.38.

The numbers paint a stark contrast between a company that offers an integrated experience those that demand the customer do integration, whether on a smartphone, a tablet, or in the desktop and even the datacenter.

Apple has no hardware equivalent of the HP enterprise servers, but it has built its business from the ground up with its own flavor of Unix on the Macs and laptops. Even though it no longer sells server-sized hardware, it still sells OS X Server software. And by the looks of these numbers, it’s outselling HP’s Unix, even when you subtract the $10.5 billion in iPhones.

One area where enterprise-grade solutions have soared is in tablets. iPads sold more than 7 million units in those 90 days, up from 4 million in the quarter before the holidays started. Apple acknowledges that it’s had “no significant competition” in that space.

But its COO Cook said the company believes that its top-of-the industry satisfaction ratings, across desktops, laptops and iOS devices, comes from “an integrated approach that delivers better than the fragmented approach.” He referred to single payment system, single app store, and the highest number of mobile devices and computers on the latest version of the OS.

iPhones sold 15.2 million units against a wave of Android phones, including those from Verizon, of course. It might be a number to poke fun at, but since 2007, the company says it’s put 160 million iOS devices into the market. This, with just one carrier to support its efforts.

Cook had a cogent comment near the end that will resonate with the readers here. He was comparing the integrate-yourself vs. integrated-by-vendor experience. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t know very many people who want to be system integrators, like in a corporate enterprise.”

But Apple’s a consumer company, some might retort. Not as exclusively, and less all the time. Apple boasted of the iPad and iPhone’s 80 percent testing or adopting rate in the Fortune 100 IT. The enterprise message Apple wants to stress is that it’s passing the IT proving points, listing several companies like JP Morgan as wins for its iPad and iPhone.

Finally there’s the balance of trade to consider. $2.6 billion, or about 10 percent, of Apple’s Q1 sales came from China alone. I know that HP’s posting quarters overall of about 20 percent higher revenues, but Apple reported profit numbers to blow away HP’s per dollar sold. That’s tough to do in the short-margin consumer market; ask HP, which has clawed its way to the top slot in sales for PCs, printers and the like.

While every electronics and office store sells ink cartridges and printers, even laptops from HP, Apple has places to introduce its product to everyday businesses as well as consumers; 338 retail stores that generated nearly $4 billion in sales, almost double over last year’s holiday quarter. That included 850,000 new Macs, and Apple claims more than half of its retail customers never owned a Mac before buying one.

Perhaps it turns out that it doesn’t matter who sells the most — cobbling together a raft of vendors that coalesced on Android, or Windows — when you look at innovation and integration as your engines of commerce and profit. HP’s customers can only hope that that WebOS tablet coming from HP — in September, by some internal reports — shows the company the way back to integrated solutions.

An estimate of HP’s yearly budget on R&D runs in the 3 percent range of revenues. That would give HP about $ 2 billion in spending per half to innovate. Apple, with a cash hoard of $59 billion now, is so flush that it has placed a pre-paid order for components greater than HP’s 2010 R&D spending: $3.0 billion. By pre-paying, the company not only locks in a profitable pricing, but denies some parts to competitors.

This may be the highest point in Apple’s history, but the company sounded confident that it felt no worries about how its products might eliminate each other. The future of the Mac operating system vs. iOS, or the company’s laptop business vs. iPad tablets, don’t concern a supplier that seeks only a top customer satisfaction rating to succeed. “There’s not high walls between these product groups,” Cook said. “If this is cannibalization [of our products with the new], it feels pretty good.”

One example rang out in the soaring pep talk. If the Macintosh company and the iPad unit were separate companies, Cook said, what would the Mac company build to compete with iPad? The MacBook Air, he said, with instant-on and a light form factor. “We’re introducting a lot of people to Apple who didn’t know the company,” he said.