Apple Down 2% After Q4 Earnings Beat, 33.8 Million iPhones Sold

Shares of Apple AAPL are down more than two percent after the company announced its fourth fiscal quarter results. The Mac maker reported a Q4 EPS of $8.26 versus the street estimate of $7.88. Earnings per share were down five percent from the year-ago period. Revenue arrived at $37.5 billion versus the Street estimate of $36.76 billion. Sales were up four percent year-over-year. Apple sold 33.8 million during the quarter -- a significant increase over the 26.9 million units that were sold during Q4 2012. Apple also sold 14.1 million iPads -- 100,000 units more than it sold during the year-ago period. The company managed to sell 4.6 million Macs, making it the year's best quarter for Mac sales. However, Apple sold more during the year-ago period -- 4.9 million units. Apple expects to report Q1 sales between $55 billion and $58 billion versus the Street estimate of $55.5 billion. "We're pleased to report a strong finish to an amazing year with record fourth quarter revenue, including sales of almost 34 million iPhones," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a company release. "We're excited to go into the holidays with our new iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s, iOS 7, the new iPad mini with Retina Display and the incredibly thin and light iPad Air, new MacBook Pros, the radical new Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks and the next generation iWork and iLife apps for OS X and iOS." Related: Apple Earnings Preview: Were Nine Million iPhones Enough? Investors have not been overly kind to Apple. While the stock experienced a tremendous amount of growth in 2012, Apple has been down more than four percent in 2013. Other prominent tech firms have performed much better. Hewlett-Packard HPQ, for example, is up nearly 60 percent year-to-date. Google GOOG is up more than 40 percent. Dell DELL and Microsoft MSFT are both up more than 29 percent. Cisco CSCO is up more than 10 percent. Sony SNE, the Japanese tech giant that was struggling in 2012, is up more than 67 percent this year. Nokia NOK, which sold its handset business to Microsoft, is up more than 69 percent. While Wall Street has shown love to all of those firms, it has been reluctant to support Apple. Today's earnings could provide a turning point for the company, but it hasn't happened yet. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report. Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at louis(at)benzingapro(dot)com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ