Technology juggernaut Apple reported blowout earnings results Tuesday, but the news was overshadowed by the company's disclosure Monday that CEO Steve Jobs, who has battled pancreatic cancer, has taken medical leave.

The iconic Cupertino, California–based company said it earned $6.43 per share last quarter on revenue of $26.7 billion, a 71 percent increase over last year. Wall Street had been looking for quarterly earnings-per-share of $5.38 on revenue of $24.4 billion.

"This is a monster quarter," analyst Vijay Rakesh of Sterne Agee told CNBC. After-hours trading of Apple shares was halted briefly as the numbers were released. When the stock resumed trading, buyers drove the price up more than 4 percent to reach a new record high. Apple recently became the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world, behind Exxon.

Apple said it shipped 16.2 million iPhones and 7.3 million iPads in the last three months, cruising past Wall Street expectations of 15.5 million iPhones and 6.2 million iPads. The iPad, less than a year old, generated $4.4 billion in revenue for Apple during that time.

"We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales," Jobs said in a statement. "We are firing on all cylinders, and we've got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year, including iPhone 4 on Verizon, which customers can’t wait to get their hands on."

On a conference call with analysts, Apple COO Tim Cook said there is still a "significant backlog" in iPhone 4 orders. In other words, Apple literally cannot produce the devices fast enough to meet market demand.

Cook also took a shot at the current crop of 7-inch tablets running Google's Android operating system. He described such devices as giant smartphones and said they are a "bizarre product." Cook said that most consumers, when presented with a choice between an iPad and a current Android tablet would choose an iPad.

"We're not that worried about those products," Cook said. When asked about the next generation of Android tablets, Cook dodged the question, saying the products didn't yet exist.

And then, for good measure, he called them "vapor."

International sales accounted for 62 percent of Apple's quarterly revenue. The company is also now sitting on nearly $60 billion in cash and long-term investments.

Apple investors will be pleased to know that the company forecast $22 billion in sales for next quarter, nicely ahead of Wall Street's $20.6 billion expectation.

After plunging as the markets opened Tuesday following Monday's announcement of Jobs' medical leave, Apple shares worked their way back up throughout the day, suggesting that fears over the impact of Jobs' illness on the company may be somewhat overblown.

But there's no denying that the possible loss of Apple's visionary and revered leader would be a major blow for the company.

At the same time, Apple has a deep bench of executives, starting with Cook, who will take over the management duties in Jobs' absence, just as he did with Jobs' last absence in 2009.

"Investors are slowly coming to grips with the fact that he will not be with the company forever. There is no way to sugarcoat the news," John Lutz, senior research analyst at Frost Investment Advisors, which owned 164,968 Apple shares at the end of 2010, told Reuters.

"But we think he has surrounded himself with an extraordinarily talented group of executives, all of whom probably don't get enough credit for the success of the company over the past number of years," Lutz said.

Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004. He took a six-month medical leave two years ago and returned noticeably thinner, but feisty as ever, after a liver transplant.

The 55-year-old CEO is widely credited with saving Apple from oblivion in the late 1990s when he returned from exile to the company he co-founded.

Since 1997, Jobs has led Apple on a decade-long journey that represents one of the greatest business success stories of our lifetime.

It's rare for any entrepreneur or executive to disrupt, let alone revolutionize, a single industry. Jobs has personally upended three of them. He rocked the music business with the iPod and iTunes. He catalyzed the smartphone revolution with the iPhone. And he created an entirely new product category with the iPad.

And that's not even counting the company's continuing success selling high-end computers, while the rest of the world's computer makers have seen their margins collapse as Windows-based computers became largely interchangeable.

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Photo: Steve Jobs on Sept. 1, 2010.

Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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