Apple sold 51 million iPhones last quarter, but investors expected sales to top 56 million.

Investors punished Apple’s stock in after-hours trading on Monday after the corporate reported record – but less than expected – iPhone sales. Shares were down about 8% about an hour after the corporate issued its earnings statement.

Apple reported record quarterly revenue of $57.6 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion, or $14.50 per diluted share, for its fiscal Q1 2014.

While Apple sold 51 million iPhones, a quarterly record, expectations were higher still, at about 56 to 57 million. The corporate sold 47.8 million iPhones within the same quarter a year earlier.

“We’re really pleased with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products and the ongoing growth of iTunes, Software, and Services,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in an announcement. “We like having the foremost satisfied, loyal, and engaged customers, and are continuing to take a position heavily in our future to make their experiences with our services and products even better.”

Demand for Apple’s Mac computer line, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, proved to be surprisingly strong. The corporate sold 4.8 million Macs, in comparison to 4.1 million in the course of the same period a year earlier.

[Who’s up and who’s down? Read Android Surges, iOS Slips In 2013.]

During the company’s conference demand investors, company CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that Mac sales had grown amid a 6% year-over-year decline in PC sales, as measured by IDC.

Apple’s iPad continues to sell well. The corporate sold 26 million iPads through the quarter, a record. That’s up from 22.9 million within the same quarter a year earlier.

Sales of Apple’s iPod, made redundant by its iPhone, declined 52% in unit sales and 55% in revenue.

Cook pointed to corporate affinity for iPhones and iPads as a hallmark of future enterprise revenue. Ninety percent of tablet activations in corporations are iPads, he said.

“The line within the enterprise is a protracted one, but i feel we’ve done many of the groundwork … and that i would expect that it could have increasingly payback at some point,” said Cook.

To match investors’ high expectations for iPhone sales, Cook is relying on Apple’s recent give attention to China Mobile, which has more customers than some other mobile carrier on earth.

“We’ve been selling with China Mobile now for roughly every week and last week was the most effective week for activations that we’ve ever had with China,” said Cook.

Cook characterized the iPhone slowdown within the US market because the effect of a metamorphosis in mobile carriers’ upgrade policies. The revised upgrade rules, he suggested, limited customers’ ability to upgrade to new Apple devices.

Questioned about Apple’s inability to grow iPhone market share at or faster than the speed of overall smartphone market growth, Cook said, “Our objective has always been to make the perfect, not the foremost.”

Thomas Claburn is editor-at-large for InformationWeek. He was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications comparable to New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv. He’s the writer of a science fiction novel, Reflecting Fires, and his mobile game Blocfall Free is obtainable for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.

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