Well heck, we at AtAT are still recovering from the cardiac arrhythmia induced by last month's surprise announcement of an Apple Q1 profit, yet everyone else seems to have recovered pretty fully. Some people are so recovered, in fact, that they're already thinking about the next quarterly results. And some people are so completely, fully, and unbelievably over that last little miracle (oh, for such a constitution) that they are actually trying to predict Apple's Q2 financials, despite Apple's warnings against expecting a profit-- and their historical weakness in this quarter. One such shining specimen of unsinkable intestinal fortitude is Eric Yang of Macintosh Evolution.

Eric has actually gone all out in his analysis, considering Apple's expected margin, revenue, interest, other income, and cost of operation and tossing them all together to duke it out in an Excel spreadsheet. After a lot of speculation, he's determined that Apple has a pretty good chance of beating the current analysts' estimate of a $19 million profit. In fact, his personal guesstimate actually puts our favorite troubled and beleaguered computer company at a $61 million profit for the quarter. Does that seem too optimistic for you, despite Apple's current stock price which keeps climbing? No problem-- just download his Excel spreadsheet, tweak the input values to your liking, and see what pops out the other end. Eric's been commendably conscientious in this effort; our own personal predictions of Apple's quarterly results are based on an arcane combination of a suction-cup dart thrown at our Marvel Comics Superheroes wall calendar, the cost of the daily special down at the corner sub shop, and whether or not the X-Files is a repeat that week.

We at AtAT encourage all of you to start thinking about Apple's Q2 results, because once we get a little closer to the end of the quarter we'll be running our quarterly Beat the Analysts contest, in which you can win fame and prizes beyond belief by registering the closest guess to the actual posted results. So start pondering: soon you'll have your chance to show those analysts who's boss. (Not that we're rushing you. We don't think we'll be braving that task for another couple of weeks yet.)

Okay, someone please confirm that we aren't seeing things. When we visited O'Grady's PowerPage earlier today for the latest info in the world of Apple laptops, the day's entry consisted of nothing but a sleek, stylish black-and-white graphic of a Powerbook and a question mark, not linked to any URL and bearing no descriptive text. "Oooooooooo" was our first response. "Aaaaahhhhhhh" was our second. "What the hell is this?" was our third.

Given that AtAT staff has a collective attention span that rivals a two-year-old's for brevity (we blame the superfast arcade action of Ultra-United's Battle Girl-- darn twitch games), three reactions is our limit for any single given task, and we moseyed down the 'net in search of further informational junk-food sustenance. Later, when memories of the stark and puzzling image poked at our raw and tortured psyche, we returned to the PowerPage in hopes of finding some explanation for the graphic. When we arrived, however, we found that the entire image had been removed. Not a trace remained. In fact, the page had reverted to Saturday's trivia entry, with nary a hint that anything had changed for a couple of days.

So, uh, are we nuts? Did we imagine the whole thing? Or is this a deliberate attempt to make us doubt our obviously tenuous grasp on our sanity? Until we know, we'll stick with the most likely explanation: Aliens.

MacReview has reprised their investigative journey down to the local CompUSA to check on the progress of the Apple store-within-a-store therein. On Mark Starlin's first visit, he found a lot of style but no substance; while everything looked great, there wasn't a soul to be seen. Unfortunately, on his return, it seems that not much had improved.

Just as he had found on his last visit, and just as countless AtAT viewers have told us, you can stand in the Apple section looking clueless for twenty minutes and not a single CompUSA employee will approach you. Obviously this isn't the case in all CompUSA stores, but it's a frighteningly common occurrence as far as we can tell. In addition to the lack of trained Apple-savvy staff, Mark also found display Macs that were off or not running any reasonable demo software. And perhaps most disturbing was his inability to find much Mac software in the Mac section; he had to go into the PC software area to find a Mac copy of F/A-18 Korea. There's certainly some room for improvement here.

Our own petition, which aims to persuade CompUSA to start advertising Apple systems more heavily (or, in fact, at all) is now in its last day, and we'll send it off tomorrow. We are hoping, as many people are telling us, that the continuing problems with CompUSA's Apple support, such as no advertising and no sales presence in the Apple section, are simply due to the relatively short time elapsed between the team-up announcement last November and the completion of the Apple stores. To be sure, CompUSA's accomplished a lot in a very short time, and for that they should be commended-- but we hope we won't be waiting long for the last of these remaining problems to be corrected.