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If Steve Jobs is walking around Apple's Cupertino campus with a smug grin on his face, he can be quickly forgiven. After all, the company he founded and over which he presides has just reported its best ever earnings for a single quarter. And that's just the start of the story.

A recent BrandChannel survey put Apple at No 2 in its list of the world's most recognised brands, behind the mighty Google. When the geographical area was limited to the US, Apple came out on top. In the last year, the company has grown more quickly than Google and, for a couple of days in January, it was worth more than Dell. Those are impressive statistics and give Jobs and his fellow board members every reason to be satisfied.

Then there's Jobs' other company, Pixar. Disney recently bought Pixar, and Jobs will now become the corporation's largest individual shareholder, with about 8% of the stock. The deal valued Pixar at $7.4 billion. That's not bad for a company that has only six full-length feature films to its name.

All of that is great news for Jobs and his bank manager. And it's pretty good news for Apple, too. iPod sales are through the roof - 14 million last quarter. Music downloads from the iTunes Music Store show no signs of slowing, and sales of music videos and TV shows have taken off at a rate that has surprised everyone. Even if the assumptions of some journalists and bloggers that a seat on the Disney board will give Jobs the ability to twist a few arms regarding Disney content on iTunes are wide off the mark (and, due to potential conflicts of interest and the way Disney is structured, they are), Apple will benefit from the relationship.

Happy days, then, at Apple -but what about the Mac? The transition to Intel is under way, and while Apple warned shareholders

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that Mac sales might suffer during the period it switches from PowerPC to Intel, the sales figures for October to December showed few signs of customers holding off. With the move due to be complete by the end of the year, many of Apple's own applications already available as Universal Binaries and lots of developers about to release Intel versions of applications such as QuarkXPress, Office, and Cubase, it would seem all is rosy in the Mac garden, too.

That may well be the case, but there are dangers ahead. The first of these is the speed with which Apple has released its first Intel Macs. I said in this column in November that I thought Apple would hold off releasing Intel Macs until later in the year. I was wrong, but my reasoning was sound - and still is. What I neglected to factor into my argument was that Apple rarely acts entirely reasonably. In this case, it's easy to argue that it jumped the gun, causing unnecessary damage to the platform.

One piece of evidence for a rush job is the fact that the only Intel Mac available immediately after the announcement is the iMac. This is a machine that was upgraded and substantially improved only a couple of months ago. Indeed, the improvements in the October revision were arguably more significant than those this time around. Did Apple know then that it would launch an Intel iMac in January? I don't think so. Why risk upsetting all those people who bought iMacs in the run-up to Xmas by rendering them obsolete immediately afterwards? Surely it would have been better to keep the improvements, such as the slimmer case and the addition of the iSight and Front Row, until the new Intel iMac?

Perhaps the engineers at Apple just worked their socks off and got the iMac ready unexpectedly quickly, or perhaps Apple intended to release it later, along with, say, the much-rumoured Mac mini and iBook Intel machines. If Jobs planned on launching some whizzy new digital-hub appliance or iPod gizmo and it fell through at the last minute - Jobs is known to exclude products at a moment's notice if he feels they are not ready - the iMac would have made a strong enough replacement to paper over the gap. Add in a MacBook Pro (there's a hastily named product if ever there was one), which will ship several weeks after the announcement, and there is enough meat in the speech to hide whatever was missing.