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.

What works in Apple’s favor it that the iPhone has plenty of competition, but no direct knock-offs. It’s the Apple product most likely to introduce the company’s computer solutions to a first-time customer. The second most likely product? The Mac itself. Apple said about 300,000 Macs sold at the Apple retail stores during Q2 went to customers who had never owned a Mac before.

Apple cites a “stronger product mix” including more iPhone sales while explaining how it beat analyst estimates by more than 2 percent for margins. Then there’s the $47 billion in cash the company reported for the period ending March 31: A lot of clams to toss at whatever research and development opportunities emerge.

Apple pointed at its “first mover” opportunity with the iPad as one place where it intends to exploit its advantages with fresh investment. Apple expects to release iPad units in 9 overseas countries by the end of May and ship the 3G versions by the first week of May.

One analyst said the iPad has a chance to become “the Mac of the masses.” In the 1980s Apple called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” Many analyst questions during the Q2 conference Q&A covered the iPad. As of this week, one tracking site estimates more than 1 million iPads in use: An introductory rate that outstrips the adoption of the iPhone in its first quarter of sales. Perhaps what the iPhone has done for Apple is a sign of what the iPad might add in several years.

Quicken Essentials has a chance to change that perception that is not hard to spot in the marketplace. But the release rolled out this week to the Mac community won’t be confused with a business tool soon, even though some people will still be stubborn enough to run a business using it. When we heard that Essentials was based on the new blood from Mint.com, acquired by Intuit last year, Essentials was at least worth a look.

The look of the software is one of the biggest changes from the Quicken Mac 2007 and 2005 releases. Seeing your major expenditures in a cloud presentation is cool, but only useful if there’s a wide range of spending levels. Reporting and planning tools got an update, with a nifty feature to help you plan for savings by tracking your spending. We’d use it as a cash flow estimator, but we’re full of imagination here. That’s not usually something that a finance tool inspires.

Unfortunately, Essentials has stripped away some things that worked well enough to call Quicken for Mac a very small business solution. Rapid data entry is an essential all by itself to keep your books, but Essentials reduced the number of keyboard shortcuts and added clicks. This did not quicken the financial chore for us.

Then there’s the issue of data conversion. Nobody would be caught dead re-entering data to move to a new tool, and there’s a two-step process to bring your old data forward. But in our testing, the existing Quicken for 2005 file got orphaned and unusable during our conversion. It’s a simple save-as, but Intuit hasn’t understood simple, sometimes.

I never want to learn that my original data file has now become a “file that needs a newer version of Quicken” than I had before my conversion. Alas, my 2005 data was tagged as a Quicken for Mac 2007 file. It’s simple enough, I’d think, to simply save my old data in a renamed file.

An interview with the Quicken for Mac product manager Eddy Wu, during a live demo, told a story of a product line in transition. Quicken for Mac 2007 is not being put to pasture, even as Essentials emerges with some very good ideas from Mint.com. Intuit is putting some fresh wood behind the arrow of Mint, a solution some users saw as salvation from an Intuit that had strayed far from acceptable value in Mac users views.

There are people running businesses on Macs who would cringe at the thought of using QuickBooks, even though it’s got invoicing, AP and AR ledgers, all the standard and essential tools for real business financials. (Okay, the payroll solution is miles behind the Windows QuickBooks software, but that’s not as damning for a small enough business to have no payroll, just 1099 contractors.)

Wu said that there will be other versions of Essentials to come, improving on things like investment reporting. The company is listening, having acknowledged the pain of its Mac customers and hoping some Mint ideas might help. Unfortunately the pain isn’t throbbing from the need for smoother interfaces. “I had such high hopes last year,” said a user commenting on Amazon, “when you were promising new good Mac versions, but alas, both Quicken and QuickBooks are missing essential features, which render them unusable.”

Not as unusable as a 2005 file that won’t open anymore, but you get the idea of the rejuvenation task that remains in front of Intuit. At a $69.95 by-over (can’t call it an upgrade), Essentials is still missing enough improvement to spark our new investment in simple business accounting.