Hands up, who remembers what happened the last time Apple issued an earnings warning? For those of you with memories almost as short as ours (is this Tuesday or March?), that happened last year, when the company blamed its shortfall on the lack of availability of G4 processors; presumably Motorola couldn't crank out enough G4s to fulfill Apple's demand because it was too busy replacing all of its corporate Macs with Windows systems running its competition's chips instead. Well, in addition to the expected drop in AAPL's price, all the Wall Street analysts rushed to revise their estimates for Apple's end-of-quarter results. And remember what happened? When the day came to make those quarterly results public, Apple surprised the Street by revealing a profit that wasn't quite as bad as it led everyone to believe. In fact, the company beat the analysts' estimates-- the revised estimates, sure, but hey, it still counts.

So here's the thing-- are we in for a repeat performance this time around? This quarter, the analysts had originally been expecting Apple to post a profit of 45 cents per share when the earnings warning hit; when the dust cleared, the consensus estimate for Apple's Q4 results had dropped to 31 cents per share. Apple itself claimed it expected to make between 30 and 33 cents per share. So far so good. But Mac OS Rumors claims to be hearing whispers that Apple's finances aren't nearly as dire as the company led everyone to believe. If the rumors are true, then "Apple's quarterly financial report on the 18th may not be quite so bad as the earnings warning sent out last month suggested." Hmmmm... that sounds oddly familiar somehow. As if, perhaps, a year ago, Apple stated it would make $75-85 million and then posted a profit of $111 million instead.

What do you think? Is it out of the question that Fred Anderson will once again surprise and "delight" the Street with a quarterly profit that exceeds the numbers in the earnings warning by a solid thirty or forty million? Is Steve playing the numbers game again, just to continue his officially unbroken streak of eleven consecutive Street-beating quarters? And if that does happen, will anyone ever trust an Apple earnings warning again? After all, you can only cry "wolf" so many times before the villagers let you get eaten alive.

In any event, it's time for the quarterly AtAT Beat The Analysts contest, so you can take an active role in speculating about Apple's financial shenanigans. Register your own guess as to how Apple's final numbers will look, and if your entry is the closest to the actual posted results, you'll either win a new Mercedes and a guest spot on an episode of Dawson's Creek, or a mention on AtAT, your name on the BTA page for a few months, and a goofy prize from AtAT's Baffling Vault of Antiquity™ (our choice). The contest closes on Tuesday night at 10PM Eastern-- so don't miss this terrific chance at fame and fortune!

Oh, thank the patron saint of drug-addled hairless mammals that our long, painful wait is at an end. We speak, of course, of the return of the Naked Mole Rat, that deliriously delirious reincarnation of a certain instance of serrated dinnerware who answered to the name "Mac" over at some now-respectable "serious news site." (Many thanks to MacEdition's CodeBitch for clueing us in to the Rat's safe return.) Even as The Knife, our favorite chemically-treated rumormonger was prone to extended leaves of absence for recuperative purposes, but we admit we were worried (and more than a little strung out) by the Rat's virtual disappearance from the face of the 'net since his last installment way back on August 2nd. After all, he doesn't exactly lead the safest, sanest lifestyle-- and with Steve's anti-rumor patrol setting their phasers on "kill" these days, we were nearly out of our minds with concern.

But banish those worries, for the Rat has returned-- and he carries with him insight and dirt on the ongoing embarrassment of "cracks" forming in some worldly manifestations of Apple's oh-so-chic, oh-so-pricey Power Mac G4 Cube. Rumor has it that those "mold lines," which range from barely noticeable to glaringly ugly from Cube to Cube, are a direct effect of Uncle Steve's unshakeable belief that his Reality Distortion Field gives him the power to bypass the immutable physical laws of the universe. Reportedly several of Apple's own "materials experts" repeatedly tried to warn Steve that the injection molding process "would most certainly result in such imperfections," but he was undeterred and ordered his plans for a crystal-clear polycarbonate sleeve to proceed as planned.

The result, of course, was one big public relations headache; while many Cubes came out looking great, some batches were molded at a temperature that was apparently just slightly too low, thus forming those unsightly "cracks" that have some Cube owners hopping mad. And then news leaked out that Apple would only replace the "cracked" units if the customers kept quiet about the problem... and when Steve himself called one irate Cube owner who threatened to go to the press, the whole situation collapsed into one big stinking mess. While we doubt that the mold lines issue really hurt Cube sales enough to account for Apple's recent earnings warning, it certainly couldn't have helped. In any event, it seems that several of those materials engineers who were vetoed by Steve have since left Apple for greener, less megalomaniacal pastures. What we want to know is, why didn't Steve skip the "clear sleeve" idea entirely, and simply use his powers to make each Cube levitate four inches above the table?

Heads up, people-- it's Friday the 13th, and you all know what that means: tomorrow is Saturday the 14th! Stay indoors, drink plenty of fluids, and avoid speaking aloud any words that contain the letter "E." But there's some good news, too; as faithful viewer Phil Pickering was kind enough to point out, Apple is taking steps to counteract its current sales slump by introducing a new mail-in rebate offer, effective immediately: buy a PowerBook by the end of the year and get $200 back, or purchase a Cube and any Apple display and get $300 instead. Such a deal!

Now, in addition to just being a pair of rip-roaring promotions, each of these deals provides fuel for speculation about Apple's product lines. Let's take the "Square Deal" Cube offer first. We already knew that Apple's gorgeous experiment in high-fashion premium computing wasn't selling terribly well, hence the earnings report which blamed Apple's woes in part on slow sales of the Cube. The fact is, even though your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff slavers like Pavlov's dogs every time we hear the opening chords to "Purple Haze," even we have to admit that $1799 is a bit too pricey for the Cube to reach its audience. An entry-level Power Mac G4 is lots more expandable, only slightly slower, and a full $200 cheaper; it's tough to spend the extra bucks just for the Cube's style. Maybe if the Power Mac G4 was some boxy beige thing we'd have an easier time justifying the leap to a Cube, but let's face it-- the standard Power Mac is a thing of beauty in its own right.

But with the $300 rebate, suddenly the net price of a basic Cube drops to $1499-- less than an entry-level Power Mac, which it actually beats in performance by 50 MHz. Now it's a whole new ball game. And as for the requirement that you buy an Apple display with the Cube to qualify for the rebate, well, personally we can't imagine buying a Cube without a cool new matching monitor. Hooking a Cube up to our old, beige NEC multisync would be a crime against fashion. So hopefully this new rebate will get fence-sitters off their butts and into the stores, mold lines or no mold lines.

As for the PowerBook deal, well, that's pretty revealing, isn't it? First of all it shows that the Cube isn't the only slow-running horse in Apple's stable. It's tough to imagine that PowerBook sales wouldn't have tapered off considerably once the new iBooks shipped a while back; an iBook Special Edition, with its faster processor, new DVD-ROM drive, FireWire port, and composite video-out capabilities, suddenly looked a whole lot more attractive than ponying up the extra $700 for a full-fledged PowerBook. The rebate now brings the differential down to $500-- still sketchy, but hopefully it'll keep PowerBook sales from bottoming out completely. By the way, did you notice that this promotion runs through the end of the year? We think that's a pretty safe indication that we won't be seeing any new models-- G4 or not-- before January's Macworld Expo. So if you're in the market for a pro laptop, now's the time to buy.