Looks like we can chalk up one more Street-beating quarter for Apple, folks. Since we were stuck in post-Expo traffic, we didn't actually get to listen to the Q3 conference call live, but we finally had a chance to tune in to the QuickTime rebroadcast, and the financial state that Apple described is so rosy you'd swear it's been hitting the sauce. Check out the big picture in Apple's press release, which reports that the company posted a $61 million profit last quarter-- $67 million if you don't count a one-time restructuring charge. That's ten million more simoleons than the analysts had been predicting, which is, of course, always a happy occurrence.

But the real stuff to celebrate is the details. Compared to the same quarter last year, Apple's Mac unit sales rose 14% and its iPod unit sales rose a frankly ridiculous 183%. The money picture is even brighter: Mac revenue was up 19%, music-based revenue was up 162%, and Apple's overall revenue rose 30% to become, as Steve describes it, Apple's "highest third quarter revenue in eight years." If you listen to the conference call you'll hear even more good news. We understand if you don't think you can emotionally handle Apple's first earnings conference call without Fred Anderson, but while we miss him too, Pete Oppenheimer did great-- trust us. (It's far less jarring of a transition than the Steve-to-Joe handoff on Blue's Clues was.)

If you still don't think you can face it, you can always just skim through MacMinute's and MacNN's highlights of the call to get the bite-sized factoids and number breakdowns. The one fact that gives us more optimism than any other is that Apple's sales to the education market rose 16% last quarter, while the rest of the industry's had shrunk "by double digits." Some tidbits seem like bad news but are really good-- like the fact that eMacs outsold iMacs by more than three to one. If Apple can turn in such strong results when it's selling so few iMacs, imagine how well things should pick up once the new model ships in September.

Oh, and about that; Pete actually confirmed that the new iMac will be G5-based. Was revealing technical details about an unannounced product a rookie mistake? Nope-- he wanted the analysts to understand the iMac delay in context, and insists that constrained supplies of G5s from IBM was its primary cause (and not the heat issues rumored yesterday).

Speaking of interesting revelations countering recent rumors, Peter also revealed that the Office Depot arrangement only allows the company to sell Macs on its web site, and not in its retail stores as was recently reported-- so if you had been hyperventilating over the chance of yet another retail debacle, you can relax. Also, the pilot program evaluating the possibility of reinstating Best Buy as a Mac retail partner has ended with both companies concluding that Best Buy should stick to iPods, which we consider another bullet dodged.

But back to the numbers. The markets were closed by the time Apple posted its earnings, but Wall Street's reaction to the day's announcements ought to be pretty positive, given that AAPL is up over two bucks in after-hours trading. As you know, that's pretty rare; usually when Apple posts better-than-expected earnings, its stock price falls following the announcement, due to an obscure economic phenomenon that has something to do with albino chickens and Nestlé's Quik. We'll see what happens when the markets open, but we've got a good feeling about all this. Heck, who wouldn't, given all the warm fuzzies during that conference call?

Meanwhile, we should note that the winner of our quarterly Beat the Analysts contest was none other than faithful viewer Richard Hamilton, who was the first entrant to have guessed Apple's $67 million profit right on the nose. We'll be contacting Richard shortly to hook him up with his choice of AtAT apparel or something dusty but still shrinkwrapped from our Baffling Vault of Antiquity™. Many thanks to all who entered, and remember-- next quarter's never more than a quarter away.

Ladies and gentlemen, the word of the day is "staggering." You probably noticed that during Apple's earnings conference call, ExecuVeep of Worldwide Sales and Operations Tim Cook used that word to describe customer demand for the miniPod-- twice. And with good reason, we figure, since availability of the shiny little gizmos is still practically nil and we've yet to meet a soul who wouldn't trade in his own grandmother if he thought it'd get him a miniPod before everyone's tooling around in flying cars. In a way, it's the right problem for Apple to have (it's better than too much supply and no demand-- or rabies, for that matter), but the fact remains that lots of people would love to give Apple loads of cash, but Apple can't produce the goods to make it happen. That there is what we in the old country used to call "missed opportunity."

Worse yet, Apple apparently doesn't expect to be able to come close to meeting miniPod demand for the foreseeable future, so given that fact, what can the company do to start turning some of that pent-up demand into filthy lucre? Answer: channel some of that miniPod lust into a product that Apple can ship. In other words, Apple needs to make the vanilla iPod more appealing-- and less vanilla. Luckily, at least one report claims that the company is doing just that; faithful viewer William Vogel alerted us to the rumor, as reported by Think Secret, that "Apple will announce new iPod models in August" that will be "smaller, sleeker, and will come in a variety of colors." Gee, now what does that description remind you of?

Yes, Apple is allegedly taking the miniPod to maxi proportions for the fourth-gen iPod; while its feature set will still outpace that of the less expensive miniPod, it'll be "more compact" than the current third-gen model, "sleeker," and "will come in a variety of new colors, expected to include purple, orange, and yellow." If that's true, then these maximiniPods will indeed stand a decent chance of drawing some of the attention-- and dollars-- away from frustrated miniPod coveters. After all, why wait another six months for a miniPod when its similarly-styled but bigger brother will be available in August? It'll cost more than a mini, granted, but an extra fifty clams or so will get you probably at least four times as much storage capacity, and you still get all of the hip aluminum styling of the miniPod, only without quite as long a blast from the Debigulator.

Now, we know what you're thinking-- making the regular iPod more like the miniPod might simply create the exact same problem again: demand will skyrocket and Apple won't be able to slap together enough iPods to satisfy it. But while that certainly could happen, we suppose, let's not forget that the bottleneck in miniPod production is the eensy-teensy hard drive that goes inside. No such drought occurs for the larger drives that go into the iPod, so Apple might just get away with this one. We'll find out soon, we suppose; August is closer than you think.

Okay, one more scene on Macworld Expo Boston and then we'll shut up about it, we promise. It's just that after months and months of hearing how small and lame the Apple-free version of the show would be, we finally got to check it out first-hand today, so we thought we'd share our perspective on the situation. In a nutshell, yeah, the show was tiny-- but not quite as tiny as we'd been led to believe. Certain photos of the show floor make the active area look about as big as a largish throw rug, or possibly Rhode Island. There was a little more to it, however.

The first thing we should mention, though, is that Boston's new convention facility is freakin' huge. From the outside it looks like the new headquarters of the Legion of Doom, and once you're inside you find yourself looking through a glass wall, down upon a swimming expanse of empty space. Game geeks may get the picture when we mention that we were flashing back to the "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap!" level from Marathon. Indeed, just getting from the front door to the Expo itself was a three-mile hike through monstrous passageways that required hiring two donkeys and a sherpa. No wonder the Expo felt small in these surroundings.

Once we finally found the show floor and walked in, we were struck by another mental comparison. Are there any veterans here of the pre-1998 shows that used to have to be split between Boston's World Trade Center and the Bayside Expo Center? (That's pretty much why Boston built the new center in the first place.) Well, far from being absolutely tiny, this week's show floor looked about as large as the portion of those old shows that sat in the WTC-- not minuscule by any stretch, but a lot smaller than any Macworld Expo has a right to be. We got to the show at 3 PM, and by 3:20 or so we had covered the whole floor; since the exhibitors seemed mostly like those smaller, more off-topic and obscure vendors that used to get thrown way in the back of Bayside, it was pretty easy to take a quick sweep and, well, not get captivated or drawn in by too much of anything.

Still, we made the rounds a few times and tried to get into the spirit of the thing, but without a big ol' Apple pavilion as an anchor, we just really didn't feel attached to the place. At one point a woman stopped us and asked if there was another floor or something or if "this is it." It was heartbreaking telling her that what she saw was what she got. On the plus side, though, 1 1/8th-ounce bags of Baked Lays only cost $1.50 (convention center food is usually way more of a ripoff than that), and Anya had a lovely time bouncing on the springy carpet, collecting all the fallen leaves from the potted plants and putting them back in the pots, and occasionally deciding to lie down sprawled out on her tummy in high-traffic areas. But we're not at all sure that even that was worth what we paid to get in.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but we overheard a lot of grumbling in the two hours we were there. Maybe it's just time for big trade shows to go the way of the dinosaur; the Internet has really made the whole format seem superfluous and dated. It seems to us that before long, Macworld will be all about the conferences, not the show floor, and while that strikes us as sad, hey, things change.