Okay, now we're starting to get just a little annoyed; has Apple perhaps forgotten that it's starring in a soap opera, here? Back at the dawn of time, when AtAT first crawled its way out of the virtual primordial soup, the company understood what financial drama was all about: gushing red ink, and lots of it. "Will Apple survive?" That was the question on everyone's lips. Now that was the "we'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge" kind of drama that soap fans were looking for.

Not long after, though, Apple changed the schtick to keep the audience interested; after all, a solid year's worth of financial strife starts to wear a little thin. There was Steve's first surprise profit, and suddenly we found ourselves immersed in a comeback story, rooting for the underdog to succeed against overwhelming odds. The stuff of legend! And every quarter, Apple pulled it off-- Street-beating profit after Street-beating profit. But now we have to ask: doesn't Apple seem to be in a rut, financially and dramatically speaking? Here we are, looking at the numbers for Q2/2000, and frankly, we're heard this story before. Many, many times. Oh, sure, the numbers are slightly different-- this time it's a recurring net profit of $160 million-- but the plot's the same: Apple made money, and beat the analysts' consensus. Read Apple's press release; doesn't it seem oddly familiar?

Alas, what with all the growth and the kick-ass product line and the competent money-management of Fred Anderson, we fear that Apple's numbers may well be consistently excellent for years to come. That means that, financially speaking, we'll have to make our own drama. So it's lucky we still have the Beat The Analysts contest, right? The results have been tabulated, and the winners have been determined: three cheers for Bryan Robbins, Justin Hallman, Rick Sutcliffe, and Eric Gowans, all of whom nailed Apple's Q2 profits "right on the money." After what was a very unsurprising conference call from Apple, we feel we really have to thank everyone who entered our contest to help keep things interesting. Go check out the final results if you haven't already.

If all you were looking for was the bottom line, then Apple's conference call was dull in the extreme; the company made $233 million ($160 million if you ignore the sale of more ARM stock) and trounced the analysts for, what, the thirteenth quarter in a row or something? Been there, done that. But while we at AtAT admit to having a collective attention span ranking somewhere on the scale between "gnat" and "can of condensed soup," even we found some of the other facts that got thrown around to be noteworthy. So you can either tune in to the QuickTime rebroadcast of the call and try to extract the fun bits for yourself, or you can take the "Cliffs Notes" approach and read The Mac Observer's blow-by-blow coverage of the event. Whassamatter, are you the type who wishes that Cliffs Notes weren't so darn long and thorough? Then maybe you'd be better off skimming one of the many summaries posted to the web, like CNET's. For crying out Pete's sake, at least read the freakin' headline.

See that? "Apple beats expectations, splits stock." It's the last two words there that we'd like you to focus on. Ignore all that great news about continued growth, increased "professional" Mac sales, etc. and try to take in just this one little fact: Apple's board of directors has approved a 2-for-1 stock split as part of a proposal to increase the number of AAPL shares from 320 million to 900 million. That means, as long as the shareholders approve the plan at Thursday's annual meeting, everyone with Apple stock will see their shares doubled on May 19th. Trading at the "split-adjusted" level will start on June 21st, according to MacNN.

The reason that this is interesting is because Apple hasn't split its stock in thirteen years. It's a move widely accepted as a sign of stability, growth, and out-and-out success. More importantly, we're going to go out on a limb here and say that it's exceedingly rare for a "beleaguered" company that's on the verge of financial collapse to announce a stock split. Basically, what we're getting at is this: you know that guy who, three years ago, bet you a sawbuck that Apple would never climb out of its hole before it drowned in red ink and died a sorry, soggy death? If he still hasn't forked over the cash, now's probably the time to hit him up for it. Maybe he could weasel his way out of paying when all you could use as evidence was sketchy stuff like profits and year-over-year growth, but a stock split is undeniable proof that Apple's back in a big way. The moral? Never bet against a horse with a Reality Distortion Field.

Is it just us, or do things seem a little slow in Rumorville? More specifically, we're noticing a distinct drought of so-called "inside information" these days-- and so have some of you, judging by the questions you folks send in. Faithful viewer Brian Moon has been "wondering whatever happened to Robert Morgan, the Apple Recon for Investors guy." And faithful viewer Todd Ray wonders "why [we] haven't commented on the absence of Mac The Knife... no new columns in weeks." Are strange things afoot?

Here's what we know. Mac The Knife has, indeed, been very spotty lately; what used to be a weekly spew of obscure pop-culture references revealing juicy Apple leaks has turned into an alarmingly infrequent dribble of obscure pop-culture references usually revealing something like details about minor features in the upcoming version of QuarkXPress. While the article currently posted does feature inside Apple info, it's not exactly timely-- it's predicting what'll happen at last February's Tokyo expo. As for Apple Recon, that hasn't been updated since early January. Morgan's a prolific writer (and one who, we're sure, would hate to be lumped together with admitted rumormongers, but he does have access to inside info, so we include him in the mix), but even his MacWEEK column has slacked off of late, with the most recent article having been posted over a month ago. And being a spiel about DRAM prices, it only mentions Apple in passing.

But how about the other big traders of Cupertino secrets? Well, Apple Insider's last update was a month and a half ago, and it only served to note that Apple's still working on an iBook-inspired "clamshell" PowerBook enclosure-- not exactly news. Mac OS Rumors, on the other hand, is more or less still updated on a daily basis, but a quick glimpse through the posted content for the past couple of months turns up a lot less "secret" data and a lot more vanilla stuff like the current edition, which summarizes Apple's quarterly results and then discusses some kind of high-speed RAM that might someday be used in Power Macs or something. (We lost interest by then.)

Now, these observations are not meant to be taken as criticism of the sites we mentioned, or of the proprietors of said sites. All we want to do is draw your attention to the fact that Apple leaks seem few and far between these days-- either that, or Apple's managed to find some other way to keep the rumors sites quiet. (Need we mention that Mac The Knife is published by MacWEEK, who recently wrangled a positive iReview from Apple? Hmmmm...) Frankly, without uttering the five-letter "n" word (hint: rhymes with "schminja"), let's just say that we're a teensy bit concerned for the welfare of these entertaining and enlightening sites. Of course, if we really wanted to know, we suppose we could just ask all these people what the real deal is. But of course that's nowhere near as fun as rampant speculation...