Is this getting old, yet? Apple announced their quarterly financial results in a press release after the market closed, and surprise, surprise-- they beat the Street yet again. The analysts were expecting a profit of about $89 million, and Apple delivered $203 million instead. This is, by our count, not only Apple's seventh consecutive profitable quarter, but it's also the seventh consecutive quarter in which they've managed to outperform the analysts' consensus. (And yet, you know full well that we're still going to see news coverage claiming that "serious questions still remain about Apple's return to health." We figure they'll need, say, eighteen or nineteen Street-beating profits before that stuff ends.) For more analysis, CNET's got a decent summary.

Now, it's never clear to us whether analysts include one-time charges and gains in their estimates (probably not), and a huge chunk of Apple's profit came from the sale of ten million shares of ARM stock, but even once you subtract that $89 million, Apple still beat the estimates by $25 million. That's nothing to sneeze at. It's even more impressive when you look at the results from a year ago; Apple made $101 million then, so this is a nice improvement in profits. Better yet, for the third straight quarter, Apple's showing year-over-year revenue growth; revenues this quarter were $1.56 billion, up 11% from a year ago. And amazingly, gross margins are up, too-- 27.4%, compared to 25.7% in Q3 of 1998. Evidently margins on the iMac are still nice and juicy. In fact, just as you'd expect, the iMac is definitely the star of the Q3 show... heavy sales this past quarter drove Apple's unit growth up 40% from a year ago. That's a growth rate almost twice as high as that of the overall computer industry itself-- which means market share is on the rise and the installed base of Mac users is expanding.

The good news just keeps on coming: $3.1 billion in cash on hand, the "successful conversion of $661 million of debt into stock," and, of course, the now-standard announcement that Apple has once again beat Dell with an ending inventory balance of "less than one day." And while we love to see Apple doing so well (especially after having seen them come about two inches away from a nasty, twisted death a couple of years back), we have to admit, these quarterly results are getting a little boring. Remember those touch-and-go days when the red ink ran like blood through the hallways of the Overlook hotel? Now that was drama. But we at AtAT are doing our part to make things a bit more exciting-- namely, our Beat the Analysts contest. We're happy to announce that Phil L. Welch and John Corbin are our co-winners-- go check out the results for the details. And thanks to everyone who entered. Now start warming up for next quarter!

My, my-- over three billion dollars in cash on hand. Whatever will Apple do with a bankroll that thick? We'll tell you what they'll do: they'll buy back a sizeable chunk of their own stock. In a second press release, Steve Jobs announced that "Apple's Board of Directors believes that the Company's stock is a good long term investment." To that end, Apple plans to spend about a half-billion dollars buying up shares of AAPL.

Maybe this announced stock buy-back plan will help bolster AAPL's price even further. While it's currently trading at levels close to the highest it's seen in six years, we have to assume that when a company shows enough confidence in its own performance to invest $500 million in stock, investors will sit up and take notice. After all, no one really knows the details of what Apple's going to be doing over the course of the next year, except Apple-- and if they think their own stock is a good investment at this time, well, we personally are going to have to believe them. Could this perhaps counteract the dreaded "post-profit deflation" that seems to happen every time Apple posts better-than-expected earnings? (According to a Reuters story over at CBS MarketWatch, Apple's stock price did indeed dip slightly in after-hours trading once the financial results were made public, continuing the long, strange streak.)

So Thursday's market activity ought to be fun to watch, just to see what the profit and the buy-back will do to AAPL. In fact, the entire next week will be fun, too, given the roller-coaster ride that Apple's stock often takes during a Macworld Expo. We don't know what exactly is going to happen, but we can say this with a pretty high degree of certainty: Apple's shareholders are probably wearing some big silly grins right about now.

Enough of the rosy financial news-- let's leap back into the world of rumors and half-truths where we feel right at home. Specifically, we find ourselves unable to stop thinking about this whole Apple-Palm thing. The history's been building for ages, now; first, Apple pioneers the PDA/handheld computer market with the Newton MessagePad. It's a nifty gadget, but it gets roasted in the press because its handwriting recognition isn't all it's cracked up to be. And while Apple spends five years and kajillions of dollars trying to get it right, lots of other companies rush in and flesh out the market-- Microsoft releases Windows CE, the Pilot makes a big splash, and the competition gets pretty heavy. In the end, the Palm Pilot seems to be the clear winner; people like the size, the weight, and the price. Sure, the last Newton devices were incredible-- speed-demons capable of solid Internet access and handwriting recognition that was eerily accurate, but they were too big and costly to be anything other than a niche product. It was sad, really.

So Apple first spun off the whole Newton project as a separate company, hoping that the relative freedom and distance from Apple headquarters might let the products flourish. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, Apple reeled Newton back in-- and shut it down. And they've been very unwilling to sell the Newton off to interested third parties, which always made us go "hmmm." We assumed that Apple was holding onto Newton like grim death in hopes of resurrecting some of its very compelling technology in future non-Newton handhelds. Fair enough. But now we know that Steve Jobs has a real thing for Palm devices. He tried to buy Palm and was rebuffed. He tried to buy Handspring (the consumer-oriented Palm licensee started up by Palm's founders) and failed at that, too. So we figure all that's left is for Apple to buy its own Palm OS license and start building its own Palm clones-- hopefully, with a bit of Newton thrown in.

There's a nifty article about this whole Palm thing over at MacWEEK. After delving into the background and coming right up to rumors about Apple's Palm developments and Palm's own claim that Palm OS-based clones would be available by October or so, the article ends by hinting strongly that we may find out a lot about Apple's Palm plans at next week's Expo. Of course, it's all just more speculation, but we have to admit: a major Palm announcement seems likelier and likelier the more we think about it. Here's hoping we have more to drool over next week than the P1...