Even when Apple does something wrong, it can do no wrong. Investors are willing to forgive the company for just about every mistake that it makes. And there’s probably good reason for that: Apple continues to beat expectations by raking in more and more money even as a few analysts predict the company’s downfall.

Case in point: the iPhone 4.

By now you certainly know about the buggy phone. If you hold the latest iPhone a certain way, then your call will get dropped immediately. You’d think that Apple would do just about anything to satisfy hipster parents sick of losing their connections while struggling to load the kids into their hybrid cars. For the longest time, though, Steve Jobs told complainers to just hold their phones differently. It was a wisecrack that ticked a lot of people off. The iPhones, after all, aren’t cheap. And people are willing to pay a lot of money for them specifically because they are supposed to be the best.

Within a month of releasing the phone, though, Jobs realized his mistake. On July 16 he announced that Apple would supply new cases to customers who complained about the dropped calls. Apple would eat the $30 per customer if it meant keeping the market happy.

Wall Street responded by bumping the price of Apple stock up a bit. The truly funny thing, though, is that the stock price never really fell during the whole debacle. Investors believed that Apple knew what it was doing.

Now that the company’s second-quarter results have been released, it looks like Steve Jobs really can do no wrong, even when he’s telling customers to go screw themselves. Analysts had expected Apple to generate $2.9 billion in profit. The company surprised everyone, however, by revealing a profit in excess of $3.25 billion. That’s profit, not sales. In order to make that amount of money, the company had to sell $15.7 billion worth of products and services. That’s a full billion more than analysts had expected them to sell during the quarter.

(Image via: Amazon)