Apple blew analyst projections out of the water this week with quarterly earnings that not only topped its own expectations and not only broke its own record -- it was the highest-earning quarter of any company, ever. Apple recorded $18.04 billion in profit in their last fiscal quarter, which TechCrunch translated as generating $8.3 million dollars of profit per hour, every hour.

The market-shaking report belies doubts about the iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus's popularity as well: Apple reported that it sold 74.5 million iPhones during the holiday season, beating analyst predictions by several million dollars and over 10 percentage points.

On top of that, Apple reported quite a lot of growth in key markets. Growth of sales in China, most importantly, was around 70 percent over the previous year -- totaling 16.1 billion in sales from the country. Apple currently only has four stores open in China, but according to The Washington Post, the company plans to have 10 times as many by mid-2016.

"We saw more new customers to iPhone than we'd ever seen before," said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a conference call with media and analysts. He went on to brag about how the iPhone 6 has converted a "higher rate of Android switchers than in the three previous launches" of earlier iPhones.

The earnings report is especially impressive for the iPhone 6 because of the broader changes in the marketplace that Apple was coming up against: The first being the saturation of the tablet market and slow iPad sales in particular (people tend to upgrade tablets less often than smartphones), and secondly, the state of the global premium smartphone market.

Considering that the last two years have seen the high-end market crowded by premium competitors like the HTC One and fast-growing upstarts like Xiaomi, all while simultaneously downshifting in overall growth, Apple's record-breaking quarter being based mostly on iPhone sales is outstanding news for the company. And that's with strong sales of the iPhone 6 Plus, which is even more expensive than Apple consumers are used to paying.

Apple stock unsurprisingly jumped Wednesday morning, already up about 10 percent in pre-opening trading. And it appears some of the Apple doubters out there (yours truly included) will have to reassess the strength of their positions. But that doesn't mean Tim Cook is out of the woods yet.

Apple has a lot of positive inertia going in its favor. Being the most valuable company in the history of the world isn't a terrible place to start. Neither is the global cachet it has with consumers and the industry it dominates, built up through more than a decade of innovation, largely attributable to extraordinary leadership of its founder.

But that doesn't change the fact that Apple's Watch was unveiled (unfinished and unavailable) more than a year after the market had already established itself, and won't be in the hands of customers until a full eight months after that. Neither does it change the pre-launch skepticism surrounding the Watch's battery life.

Those arguments might sound like nit-picks, and they are in a way. One product launch won't determine the fate of any well-established company -- much less the world's top-earning, most valuable company in history.

The arguments do, however, point to a weakness in the one central quality of Apple that's important. The one trait that used to be so synonymous with its name -- it was even the company's slogan for a time.

It's the almost magical characteristic that now seems difficult to associate with the company, and yet it made Apple so remarkable and created the years' worth of momentum that eventually propelled it into the market dominance Cook enjoys today: Thinking different.