Apple for the day

Matt Vella has a Time article about news from Apple:

Tech titan Apple is announcing its earnings Monday afternoon after the market closes. Despite a number of other high-profile earnings— including US Steel and Caterpillar— Apple’s is likely to make the most news. Not only will the company be revealing what kind of holiday it had, activist investor Carl Icahn has put a spotlight on the firm by relentlessly pressuring it to boost its stock value.
Icahn has been nagging Apple to reshape its finances, most recently on Twitter. Despite resistance from the company, he has been aggressively pushing for a bigger stock repurchase program. His most recent entreaties:

The billionaire’s letter to Apple shareholders explains why he believes the firm is undervalued and outlines steps the board can take to remedy the situation. Icahn recently told Time that he thinks Apple may also one day make an ideal suitor for PayPal, the payments division of eBay which he is trying to force the online auctions company to jettison.
Apple CEO Tim Cook will likely be asked about Icahn, but it remains to be seem if he will say anything of note. (The two have, by all appearances, a cordial rapport.)
Analysts, meanwhile, expect Apple to report fiscal first-quarter earnings of $14.09 a share, according to a consensus survey by FactSet. Piper Jaffray senior research analyst Gene Munster, who polled twenty investors, believes the company will announce sales of about 56 million iPhones, 24 million iPads, and 4.6 million Macs. Revenue estimates from most analysts hover around $46 billion.

Rico says he no longer owns even a single share of Apple, thus all this is, alas, moot to him...