Wall Street Journal:

The iPhone maker sold $6.5 billion in bonds on Monday, including a round of 30-year debt that will pay 3.5% annually. That is even lower than Apple’s $17 billion bond sale in April 2013, when a 30-year bond yielded about 3.9%.

Apple’s deal is the largest U.S. high-grade corporate-bond sale so far this year, according to S&P Capital IQ LCD. Apple tapped the debt market less than a week after reporting a 38% jump in its latest quarterly profit.

Why is Apple trying to raise money?

Apple in a prospectus said it plans to use proceeds for general corporate purposes, including share buybacks. Bond investors are typically wary of companies that sell debt to buy back shares, because it effectively means a company is taking cash from bondholders to pay shareholders.

But in Apple’s case, investors said those concerns are assuaged in part by the company’s record-setting profit in the latest period, the gangbusters sales pace of its latest iPhone release and its significant cash reserves.

Adding to the attraction of the Apple bonds is the vast number of them outstanding, which makes them easy to trade when banks generally are cutting back on bondholdings and making trading more difficult.