Wow, it seems like no matter how well Wall Street thinks Apple is doing, they always end up doing even better. Apple revealed their first quarter financial results today, and for the fifth consecutive quarter, they not only posted a profit, but they outperformed just about everyone's expectations. This time the number scrawled in black ink at the bottom of the page is a whopping $152 million, or 95 cents per diluted share. The industry consensus was expecting a profit of 70 cents per share. Once again, Apple beats the Street. Apple's got their own press release, and as usual, Apple's turnaround is big news, so you can read more about it just about anywhere-- like in this CNET article.

But as exciting as the profit is, the real news is that Apple's showing some real signs of growth again. For example, revenues are up-- $1.71 billion, compared to $1.6 billion in the same quarter last year. So whereas much of the profit from previous quarters came from cost-cutting, Apple's really starting to make some money by simply selling more computers. Plus, their margins improved a lot; they were a very respectable 28.2 percent, up significantly from 22.4 percent the year before. (We don't know how Apple kept the margins so high when selling a computer as low-priced as the iMac-- by our calculations, given the new gross margins, the iMac construction cost must be somewhere around $4.68.) Then there's inventory, which Apple seems to have completely under control these days; it's down to only two days' worth. We're anxiously awaiting Wall Street's reaction to all this good news-- the results were released after the close of the market, with Apple's stock price at $46.5. Will it break $50 by the end of the month, as Apple Recon has predicted?

As for the Beat the Analysts contest, as usual, AtAT viewers came closer to predicting Apple's financial results than the analysts did. After omitting "Steve Jobs"'s prediction of a $10⁴⁷ profit, the average of all entries was $139,990,913.91. That's pretty darn close, as things go. There was a tie for closest guess, however: John Teti, Jr. missed it by half a million on the low side with his guess of $151.5 million, and Keith Lim overshot by the same amount on the other side with his entry of $152.5 million. So we're willing to be magnanimous and declare them both winners. We'll be contacting John and Keith shortly to let them choose their nominal prizes from the Baffling Vault of Antiquity™. Thanks to everyone who entered, and start thinking about next quarter!

So Apple's got their traditional inventory problems whipped into shape, what with only two days's worth of inventory in the channel. As Steve Jobs rightly points out, that's a phenomenally low number-- Dell is a leading force in the personal computer industry, and is typically lauded for their inventory control, but they have seven days' worth of inventory hanging out there. That's all well and good. But can Apple's inventory stay under control now that iMacs are shipping in five fruit flavors? What if everyone wants Blueberry but all that's available is Tangerine?

Not to worry, says Apple CFO Fred Anderson. Even though Apple is currently selling the colorful new iMacs to resellers in five-packs to start with an equal number of all colors in the channel, according to NoBeige, Fred's got secret "contingency plans" for dealing with any big disparities in color popularity. We have no idea what those contingency plans could be. Is it something as simple as cutting the price on unpopularly-colored models by $100 or so? Or maybe it has more to do with the fact that the iMac's colored polycarbonate shell is removable and replaceable? Apple's already selling colored shells to dealers for $70 apiece. Does this imply that a Lime iMac can be retrofitted with a Blueberry shell, given a Blueberry mouse and keyboard, and that's all there is to it? (By extension, does that mean that well-connected iMac owners could bribe a dealer for some service parts and transform their old Bondi blue iMac into a sparking new faux Tangerine model? Intriguing, isn't it? Apple should just sell a "color upgrade kit" consisting of a new shell, mouse, and keyboard for $200 and see how many people bite.)

Actually, Fred himself also said that Apple's current inventory levels aren't expected to stay this good through the second quarter; he stated that those two days of inventory were likely to spread out into six or seven days for the second quarter. It wouldn't surprise us one bit if his reason for the warning is the iMac's new colors. Still, seven days is a very good inventory level (it works for Dell), and while we don't know Apple's emergency plan if Lime doesn't sell, we're confident that they've got something workable up their collective sleeve.

Apple may not have the stranglehold on the education market that it once had, but it's definitely not out of the running, yet, either. The Racine Board of Education just approved a budget of almost a million dollars to spend on Apple hardware and software. But according to a Journal Times article, the decision to buy from Apple wasn't an easy one; debate at the board meeting was fierce, but after two hours of deliberation, impassioned pleas on Apple's behalf by at least nine teachers, and "personal attacks" against the board members who tried to squelch the deal in favor of buying Wintel, the motion was finally approved.

Apparently a few board members wanted to override the Facilities and Technology Committee's recommendation to purchase Macs, by insisting that the recommendation be sent back to be bidded on. That motion was defeated, after several school faculty members made it clear that buying anything other than Apple would place an undue burden on the teachers, who also need to function as de facto system administrators. If the Apple opponents were really making such ignorant statements as "You are cheating [the students] from using computers that are compatible with the rest of the world," well, then, those personal attacks were probably well deserved. Apparently these people aren't aware that you can use PC-formatted media in a Mac without any extra software. Or that VirtualPC allows a Mac to run any software or operating system available for the Intel platform. Not compatible? Please... Macs are the most compatible computers in the world.

The other thing that strikes us about this whole scenario, though, is that in Racine's case, it looks like everyone's fighting for Apple but Apple itself. Granted, we doubt that an Apple representative could be present at the meeting itself, and we don't know what kind of deals or support Apple provided prior to the meeting to help Racine County buy their Macs, but in the article, Apple seems very absent. Is this another case of Apple's best salespeople not working for Apple? And is Apple perhaps not as involved in these school deals as it should be? It's purely speculation on our part, but we suspect that Apple really has to start targeting those educational accounts now that its financial house is largely back in order. After all, Macs in the schools feeds Macs in the home.