In a highly anticipated announcement & analyst/investor conference call later this afternoon, Apple Inc. will disclose their second quarter financial numbers and answer long-standing questions about the performance of the company’s business under the most challenging (external/marketplace) conditions in the company’s history even as it offers its strongest line-up of products in that history.

AT&T has already posted their Q2 results, and among other interesting tidbits we’ll dig into later on, announced that they have activated 1.6 Million iPhones in the just-completed quarter; this dovetails closely with the grapevine’s expectations and strengthens our confidence in the “insider” picture we’ve been given regarding sales numbers across all of Apple’s product lines.

Overall, we’ve been led to expect by many reliable sources and industry power players, analysts & so on that this quarter’s AAPL financial results will out-perform the vast majority of standing Wall Street estimates.

Although those leading estimates have become generally more optimistic in recent days, for a wide range of very good reasons including hands-on numbers crunching of observed sales volume at Apple’s retail operations around the USA….we believe that even the rosier of these will be out-shined by the real numbers.

We aren’t expecting anything truly dramatic as such, but a definite and clear-cut outperformance of Wall Street expectations by several cents per share.

Most estimates hover around or just under a $1.10 per-share profit, versus $1.16 in the year-ago quarter; we aren’t quite so optimistic as to posit an actual improvement over the year-ago quarter — but our most reliable sources on financial matters & sales numbers at Infinite Loop tell Rumors that it could come close.

Suggesting an exact number is nothing short of begging to be wide of the mark by at least a few cents, but based on an averaging of dozens of predictions by sources, we are thinking that $1.15 is not an entirely unrealistic target, and see $1.12 as a fairly safe bet inasmuch as any prediction can be.

Stay tuned for in-depth reporting & analysis on the financial numbers this evening and ongoing coverage of all things Apple as the rubber of Cupertino’s 2009 roadmap really begins to meet the road in the days ahead! If you’ve got something to share or just want even more dirt that you won’t find anywhere else, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, drop us a line by email, or simply submit a comment using the form below.