Philip Elmer-DeWitt, for CNN Money:

The cluster of green at the bottom of the chart at right tells the story: This quarter, for the first time since we’ve been monitoring them, the bloggers got clobbered. And not just by a little. The average miss in the categories that matter most — revenue and earnings per share — was 5.8% for the institutional analysts and a humiliating 23.5% for the independents.

Elmer-DeWitt’s running analysis of the accuracy of analysts is always an interesting piece to read after an Apple announcement. Two different graphs will give you a sense of which analysts were closer to Apple’s actual results. It’s worth poring over to help get a better sense of who to pay attention to next time.