Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) bucked a trend of year-over-year earnings declines that were seen by many of its tech-giant peers recently. Despite significant foreign-exchange headwinds and an extremely tough year-ago comparison, the tech-giant's fiscal fourth-quarter revenue and earnings per share both increased year over year and beat analysts' average forecasts for the two metrics. Even more, management guided for more top-line growth in fiscal Q4.

Here are eight metrics capturing the company's strong performance in the face of a difficult macroeconomic backdrop.

Apple's top line for the period was higher than any fiscal fourth quarter in the company's history, coming in at $90.1 billion. This translated to 8% year-over-year growth and beat analysts' average forecast for revenue of $88.9 billion. The company's top-line growth was also ahead of management's expectations for the quarter, even though foreign-exchange headwinds for the period turned out to be worse than expected.

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Source Fool.com