We have just one thing to say to those of you who were complaining that Apple hasn't been surprising us enough lately: Surprise! How's lower-than-expected quarterly earnings grab ya? And if an earnings warning after two straight years of better-than-predicted results isn't enough to shock that jaded expression off your face, how about Apple's stock dropping eleven points in after-hours trading? See? The fun never stops when Apple's involved. Faithful viewer Tim Rzeznik was the first to send us the bad news, in the form of a Bloomberg article detailing Apple's warning that the company would miss estimates for the quarter ending September 30th by a long shot, due to problems getting enough G4 chips from Motorola.

If you find that explanation a little suspect, we're right behind you. After all, the G4 was a surprise product, unveiled only a month before the end of the quarter and the analysts weren't expecting it to show up until next year. So why would constrained supply of G4 processors be affecting estimates formed long before the G4 was even announced? We think it comes down to the fact that the G4 basically sent demand for the Power Mac G3 into a death spiral. After all, the pricing on the G3s has barely budged; sure, you can get free extra RAM or a free printer, but we imagine most people would rather have the latest and greatest. The supercomputer on the desktop. Graphite-grey instead of Blueberry. Gigaflops. All that. So people are waiting for G4s, and Apple's waiting for Motorola.

In the big picture, though, we've got to say-- if we had a few grand stuffed in the mattress, now would be an excellent time to pick up some AAPL. After all, the shortfall isn't due to an overstock of inventory and a lack of demand; it's due to 150,000 people ordering Power Mac G4s that Apple can't build because they can't get the chips. That demand should carry over into the December quarter quite nicely, and assuming that Motorola gets its butt in gear (which they've promised to do), Apple might have a lot to be thankful for: G4s that are actually shipping, iBooks in the channel, and a new iMac to refresh the revolution. It could be a very merry Christmas indeed.

We know what a lot of you are probably thinking: "If Apple could get PowerPC chips from someone other than Motorola, they wouldn't be in this mess right now." Well, yeah, that's probably true, but sadly, Apple's got a million-horsepower hype engine cranking away, customers with cash in hand ready to buy G4s by the dozen, a ton of positive press on its side-- and a chip supplier squeezing out processors at a rate so slow you need a time-lapse camera to record it. The result? Lower-than-expected earnings and a stock price that "plummeted." (Plummeted to levels still wicked high compared to a month ago, that is.)

What about IBM, you say? Well, the "I" in the AIM alliance makes PowerPCs, to be sure, but they sort of parted ways with Motorola when it came to the PowerPC roadmap. See, IBM likes PowerPCs for its server products-- and servers apparently don't have a lot of use for vector calculations, and therefore AltiVec (dubbed the "Velocity Engine" by Apple) isn't a technology they plan to incorporate. So while Apple could get G4s from IBM (in theory, at least-- we haven't a clue if IBM's even producing their version yet), without the Velocity Engine, all those cool Pentium-crushing demos go right out the window. When last we heard, IBM was opening up to the possibility of including AltiVec in its chips, probably once they saw the world's reaction to Steve's G4 unveiling, but right now, Apple's only got one place to go: Motorola.

And this is the exact reason there's a subset of Apple Watchers who still say Apple should port the Mac OS to Intel-compatible x86 iron. That would certainly kill the chip shortage problem, since Apple would finally have multiple sources from which to get its processors, but from a PR standpoint, we're hard-pressed to think of a move more befitting the term "public relations suicide." After all, Apple's been claiming for years that PowerPCs are faster than Pentiums; imagine what fun the press would have if Apple suddenly announced it was switching to PIIIs. No, we doubt such a drastic move is necessary, and while the tensions between Apple and Motorola seem high (just check out the soap opera drama in the CNNfn article that faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil pointed out), we bet everything will get ironed out, G4s will be plentiful, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Of course, before Apple's earnings warning surprise and the subsequent stock collapse, we figured the big news would be the latest doings in Apple's lawsuit against Japanese iMac cloners K. K. Sotec. While it certainly can't claim top billing anymore, the Sotec case is still dirt worth dishing, especially since it represents a bright spot in what otherwise turned out to be a fairly dark day for our favorite computer company. If you can pry your eyes away from the gazillion reports of Apple's "stumble," you might recall that Sotec is the Japanese company that makes the eOne, a Wintel-based iMac clone only slightly less egregious a direct rip-off than the first Future Power copycat. Apple sued Sotec for violation of intellectual property rights-- a lawsuit that's one of three filed against Wintel manufacturers who opted to copy the iMac's distinctive look and feel instead of coming up with their own.

While as yet nothing's come of the U.S. lawsuits against Future Power and eMachines, perhaps the wheels of justice in Japan are just that much more efficient, because less than a month later, a judge has granted Apple a preliminary injunction that prevents Sotec from "manufacturing, selling, displaying, exporting or importing its eOne product," according to an Apple press release. While a preliminary injunction is just a temporary measure put in place until the actual case is resolved, it's a pretty big win for Apple in its struggle against those who would besmirch the iMac's good reputation with cheesy rip-offs.

This is cool in a lot of ways. First of all, several people had warned us that the Japanese courts tend to side with Japanese companies, so we shouldn't have expected much to come of the suit against Sotec. That only underscores the point that preliminary injunctions are granted when the judge feels that the plaintiff stands a good chance of proving its case. Plus, we think we read somewhere that the Sotec eOne actually held over 6% of the Japanese market, and now that the system is at least temporarily barred from sale, we imagine a good chunk of that 6% will revert to the iMac. Finally, don't forget that eMachines was not only too lazy to come up with an original design, but also too lazy to make their own iMac rip-off-- they're selling Sotec's eOne here in the U.S. So since the injunction prohibits the further export of the eOne until the case is resolved, eMachines might see their supply dry up, as well. Now lets hope that Apple's legal luck continues in Japan, and that the U.S. judges follow suit.