It's that time again-- time for Apple's quarterly 10-Q filing with the SEC, and thanks to the magic of the Internet (long may its light illuminate our path to new and creative forms of work avoidance!), you lucky fans get to read the whole thing online if you're so inclined. Personally, our attention spans are freakishly short, so trying to forge through 5000 words peppered liberally with terms like "interest rate hedge positions" and "income and expense associated with derivative instruments" is likely to throw us into a coma. Instead, we skim, and try to find the juicy bits before we get distracted by a dust mote or one of those baffling "Urge To Herbal" commercials showing up on TV. (Somebody please conjugate that adjective!)

Wait, what were we talking about again? Oh yeah, the 10-Q. Well, as veterans of this game are all too aware, the real joy in any 10-Q is the "Factors That May Affect Future Results And Financial Condition" section, since it's always a real downer. For reasons beyond the grasp of our teeny little financial minds, 10-Q filings are always notoriously negative, as the company in question tries its hardest to list every conceivable future scenario that might cause worse-than-expected results; it's probably some kind of cover-your-butt thing so the CFO can say "don't say we didn't warn you" if the unthinkable happens, the stock tanks, and the SEC starts poking around looking for evidence of insider trading or what have you.

So, without further ado, here are just a few of the factors and "uncertainties" that Apple considers risks to its still-expected return to profitability:

• "industry wide pricing pressures and downward pressures on gross margins"
• "Internet devices that are smaller and simpler than traditional personal computers may compete for market share"
• "competitors have introduced or announced plans to introduce products that mimic many of the unique design, technical features, and solutions of [Apple's] products"
• "competitors have greater financial, marketing, manufacturing, and technological resources, as well as broader product lines and larger installed customer bases"
• "continued or worsening worldwide and regional economic conditions"
• "risks associated with product introductions and transitions, including the planned introduction of Mac OS X"
• "risk that [Apple] will forecast incorrectly and produce or order from third parties excess or insufficient inventories of particular products" (yeah, like that ever happens!)
• "the availability of certain components... including PowerPC RISC microprocessors developed by and obtained from IBM and Motorola"
• "risks associated with international operations, including economic and labor conditions, regional economic problems, political instability, tax laws, and currency fluctuations"

And that's nowhere near all of 'em. Talk about a closet full of nightmares! We bet money dude Fred Anderson occasionally wakes up screaming in a cold sweat, plagued by night terrors in which he's pursued relentlessly by currency fluctuations and new titanium laptops from Dell. Heck, we don't even work for the company, and after scoping the 10-Q, we figure we might not be sleeping all that soundly tonight...

Another day, another several hundred email messages to sift through. As usual, the obvious spam goes right in the trash-- we don't need a low-cost merchant account, we don't want a million email addresses so we can send spam ourselves, and we've got some real college degrees that obviate the need for any cheap fakes (as tempting as a couple of PhDs from "Harvarf University" may be). Then the press releases get the once-over, the listserv mail is scanned for interesting subject lines, and each and every bit of AtAT feedback is carefully read, considered, digested, and filed. (Yes, we actually read it. Coulda fooled you, right?)

Finally, the best for last: personal and business email from known and trusted correspondents. And what's this? One of our consulting clients has sent us email with the quizzical subject heading of "Here you have, ;o)"; inside is a message that simply says "Hi: Check This!" Oh, and look, there's an attachment! Gee, a text file named "AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs." Clearly this woman has thoughtfully forwarded us a JPEG image of the attractive young tennis star, which has mysteriously morphed into a text file en route and had the Windows filename extension for a Visual Basic script tacked on at the end. Strange. Sadly, all of our efforts to rename the file, de-binhex it, change its type and creator codes, etc. still haven't yielded an actual viewable JPEG image of Anna Kournikova. This is most frustrating.

What's that? You say that CNET is reporting that this is actually a virus? Well, don't that just beat all. It's a darn good thing that we use Macs, because despite the fact that we weren't expecting any email from our client (not to mention the fact that she has a reasonable command of the English language, has never used an emoticon in her life, and is about as likely to send us a picture of a Russian tennis star as she is to ask us to reshingle her roof in the nude), we blithely opened that dangerous attachment right up in hopes of scoping out a cute Russian chick. Boy, is our collective face red. Had we been using Windows and Outlook instead of our trusty Macs, we'd be just another carrier of this dread disease that is reportedly spreading "twice as fast" as the "Love Bug" virus that wreaked such havoc last year.

So, Mac folks, if one of your Windows-using friends happens to send you something which almost looks like it should be a photo of Ms. Kournikova, don't fret, since your Mac is immune from the virus's effects (barring the use of VirtualPC, of course); by the same token, though, don't waste any time actually trying to extract a real photo, because it's all just a cruel, cruel hoax. (sob!) Given the "success" of the virus, evidently the Windows/Outlook-using community still hasn't learned its lesson about opening unsolicited attachments-- either that, or the author of this virus has discovered the fine art of "playing to one's audience." Remember, kiddies; nasty things often come in pretty packages.

Do you ever tune in for a beloved TV show at its regularly-scheduled time and find yourself staring at the last two minutes of a football game, instead? We do. And foolishly, we stay tuned, hoping against hope that when the game is over and the program finally comes on, the network will start the show from the beginning and just push the whole night's schedule forward to accommodate the game having run long. Instead, of course, we generally find that when the last two minutes of the game finally expire some twenty minutes later, we're faced with that dreaded phrase, "we now join our regularly-scheduled program, already in progress." If we had only known that sooner, we could have just cut our losses and spent half an hour playing Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab instead.

Our point is, the last thing we want to do is give any of you people false hope, so we figure we'd better clarify our previous statement that build-to-order PowerBook G4 systems from the Apple Store wouldn't ship until February 24th. The fact of the matter is, several BTO PowerBook customers did receive email from Apple stating that their orders would ship "by February 24th"-- but several others did not. And among those people who didn't get the February 24th apology, there are some (such as faithful viewers Mike McHargue and Sunflower) who just received similar letters from Apple-- only their scheduled ship date is March 3rd.

Now, you can't necessarily read anything into this, but personally, if we had ordered a BTO PowerBook from the Apple Store and we hadn't received either the February 24th or the March 3rd email messages, we'd be waiting for notification of, say, a March 10th or 17th ship date any day now. You may choose to be more optimistic, of course. All we're saying is, if Apple didn't email you with a specific delivery date, don't assume you've been lumped in with others who did get email. Life's too short for false assumptions. And on the plus side, no matter how late your PowerBook turns out to be, at least you know it won't be completely pre-empted by a sporting event.