And here we are, mere hours away from the revelation of Apple's most recent end-of-quarter financial results. Frankly, our enthusiasm's a bit dampened; for one thing, everyone pretty much already knows that the numbers are going to look fantastic. Steve dropped some very broad hints during his last keynote-- biggest Apple unit sales quarter in history, and all that jazz-- and so, given history's tendency to repeat itself, we're not expecting any big surprises. More black ink, and lots of it. Probably a bigger profit than the analysts expect, given Uncle Steve's Street-beating tendencies; according to AAPL Investors, consensus is for $155.3 million excluding one-time charges and gains. We'll know when Money Guy Fred Anderson drops the numbers in his 2 PM PST conference call.

The other reason we're not all that terribly excited is because the flu scotched our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest; by the time we were in good enough shape to get it going, there would only have been two days in which to enter, which would have been a royal bummer. We felt our energy would be better spent digging through our 200 accumulated email messages instead. Next quarter we'll have to do something a bit special to make up for things. Meanwhile, scribble your prediction on the back of one of the six thousand AOL CD-ROMs that undoubtedly showed up in last week's junk mail, and if you guess within $10,000 of the final announced profit, treat yourself to a Pop-Tart or two.

There is one thing for us to get excited about, though-- Apple's live broadcast of the event. Through the magic of streaming QuickTime, you, too, can listen in as Fred spouts off about earnings, revenue, one-time charges, cash on hand, and all those other figures that red-blooded Mac users find so thrilling. But if, like us, this kind of dry financial data just doesn't get your heart pumping, remember: it's a live call, and anything live has entertainment potential. We're kinda hoping that Fred gets the hiccups, ourselves.

See, we knew if we could just keep blathering on and on about the mysterious lack of hardware announcements at Macworld Expo, eventually someone would float us some info just to get us to shut up about it already. Such was our cunning plan, and we're happy to say, it worked. Of course, there's a potential problem with the "annoy people until they tell you something" school of rumormongering, which is that sometimes people will just make stuff up to get you to go away, but heck, we're willing to take that risk. It's not like we have any journalistic ethics to worry about. If you're looking for hard-hitting news that's been carefully researched from confirmed and reliable sources, you're surfing the wrong channel, bub-- we're just here to entertain you.

So here's the thing, though: the news isn't all that good, at least as far as release dates go. Remember when we discussed the possibility of Apple refreshing all four product lines at once sometime within the next few weeks? Not gonna happen. AppleInsider claims that the Mac OS 9.0.1 software update is now in "Final Candidate" stage, and if that were indeed the final piece of the puzzle (as rumored), then maybe it could all fall into place. But Mac OS Rumors claims that multiprocessor Power Mac G4s aren't likely to surface until this summer. An unnamed source wrote in to say that an iBook revision won't happen until spring at least. And another source who'll have to remain anonymous claims that the latest release date for Pismo and the "Mega-iMac" is "late March/early April." Sounds like we've got plenty of time on hand for the drumming of the fingers and the whittling of the sticks.

The good news, though, is that a very trusted source says, yes, the 17-inch iMac is real, it's coming, and it's going to be targeted at businesses who want easy-to-deploy work terminals with screens big enough for reasonably serious spreadsheet-crunching and the like. While we didn't get any details about pricing (heck, Apple probably won't really decide on that until the morning of the unveiling anyway), it's been described as "very competitive." Well, well, well... Apple's actually willing to mix things around a little. The consumer-oriented iMac is getting a business makeover. Is this the beginning of the end of the four-corner product strategy?

Wow, and here we were losing hope in "Redmond Justice" because we thought we saw hints that Microsoft was getting ready to throw in the towel. Think about it-- the trial itself was a riotous comedy of errors, with the government scoring hit after hit against the Redmond Giant amid evidence of faked Microsoft videotapes, Microsoft witnesses being tripped up by their own email, etc. Come on, at several points the judge was laughing. That's not a good sign during a trial. And once Jackson filed his "findings of fact," any ambiguity about how he felt melted right away. Microsoft holds monopoly power, and misused said power to extend its hold into other markets. That was pretty much a "settle or die" signal, and we fully expected Microsoft to take it.

Sure, we knew that earlier settlement talks between Microsoft and the government were fruitless-- no fruit for anyone. But after Jackson appointed another judge as a mediator and the talks kicked into high gear, we figured that Microsoft would deal, rather than face what appears to be a sure loss. Bill Gates has also been making noises in the press about his willingness to settle, and even to consider such drastic remedies as a court-ordered company breakup. And then last week we got that whole thing about Gates stepping down as Microsoft's CEO. What was that all about? It looked to us like preparation for big changes. A settled breakup, perhaps?

Fished in!! Yup, Microsoft was just playing possum. An Inter@ctive Week article described Microsoft's latest filing in the case, and now it looks as though the company's going to go down swinging. In its latest proposed conclusions of law, the company claims that "even accepting the court's findings of fact, the plaintiffs still have not satisfied their burden under the governing law on any of their claims." They're taking this one to the mat, folks. They may have been willing to settle that Caldera suit, but when it comes to their freedom to imitate innovate, "settlement" is a four-letter word. (Just ask Word's character count.) So dig in, because this fight ain't over yet. After the inevitable loss, there's the appeal, the appeal of the appeal... we've got plenty of Redmond Justice action lined up for 2000 and beyond.