Here's the good news: when Fred Anderson announced Apple's first quarter financial results yesterday, it turned out that the company actually lost less than a quarter of a billion dollars excluding one-time charges and gains. Only $247 million of red ink? Woo-hoo! Break out the Yoo-Hoo and the Chex Party Mix, throw some bass-heavy generic dance music on the stereo, and get down and funky with your bad self!

Just kidding. But we admit, we were rather taken aback when we saw the effect that Apple's sizeable loss had on its stock price in after-hours trading: it went up. Why, if only Apple had managed to lose, say, half a billion dollars this quarter instead of that paltry $247 million, we bet that AAPL would be trading above $20 a share right about now. Sadly, it wasn't meant to be, and worse yet, we can't even expect it to happen next quarter; Fred flat-out told the analysts that when he does this again in three months' time, he expects to report an actual profit. Geez, maybe we should sell now, before that black ink sends our shares into the toilet.

Of course, some people who pretend to know about this big-business, high-finance stuff will tell you that Apple's stock is on the rise after that massive quarterly loss due primarily to three factors. First of all, yes, Apple lost money-- but no more than it said it would, which, to the typically Apple-hostile investment world, may have come as a pleasant surprise. Secondly, Apple's cash position actually appears to have gotten a bit better; the company's got over $4 billion of mad money to play with. And then there's the channel inventory, which was hovering at a staggering eleven weeks at the beginning of December, and which is now reportedly in a much saner five-and-a-half-weeks range. There's also that little thing about a return to profitability in the current quarter, which, for some reason, some people insist is a positive thing. But after seeing Apple's stock rise following its first quarterly loss in three years, we know better, right, people?

Actually, do you want to know the real reason Apple's stock went up? It's because of who wasn't present at the conference call: one mercurial mutha who goes by the name Big Steve. If you recall, Steve sat in on the last two conference calls in an effort to spin the bad news in a positive direction. Instead of calming people, though, the very fact that Apple felt Steve had to be there in the first place made Wall Street jittery. This time around, since Fred didn't need to call in Big Steve for backup, heck, how bad could things really be?

So that's where we stand: Apple blew $247 million in three months' time, but inventory is down, cash is up, and the company still expects a small profit in Q2. Meanwhile, faithful viewer Bob Nies won our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest, and while Apple's mopping up all that red ink, Bob will soon be basking in the radiant light of the prize of his choice from the Baffling Vault of Antiquity™. Congratulations, Bob! And the rest of you should check out the contest results for factoids, tidbits, and an interesting lesson in AtAT Viewer Optimism.

As we've said before, what those analysts are really waiting for is a slew of new iMacs to hit the shelves and start doing some serious retail damage, consumerally speaking. Everyone who obsessively follows every minuscule development in the world of Apple as if the future of the free world depends upon what Steve Jobs had for breakfast on Tuesday (Hey, doesn't everybody? And we're told it was cantaloupe, incidentally) already knows that the current line of iMacs has been designated "end of life" in most resellers' inventory systems, and that the CD-RW drive is the current winner of the "Likeliest New Feature" award as far as the replacement systems are concerned. Yesterday we noted that Mac OS Rumors had a big, heapin' bowl of dirt on the other potential enhancements to Apple's consumer desktop Mac-- including the possibility of a G4-powered iMac DV Special Edition. Finally, gigaflops for the masses!

Well, hang onto your Velocity Engines, because the iMac G4 rumor has been confirmed! (We mean "confirmed" in the AtAT sense, of course, which means that we saw it mentioned at another rumors site. So don't go all swoony just yet.) As faithful viewer David Triska pointed out, AppleInsider's sources are reporting that, yes indeedy, the iMac will soon be the latest citizen of G4ville. And get this: it won't just be the high-end DV Special Edition boasting a G4 processor. Apparently the entire iMac line will be making the G4 move, with the exception of the entry-level $799 model-- which will also keep its lowly CD-ROM drive while the rest of the line-up goes CD-RW. That makes good sense, since a cheap basic iMac is the best fit for penny-pinching schools looking to fill up a lab or two.

So let's think about this for a moment... if the iMac DV goes G4 and gains a CD-RW drive, that puts an enormous amount of pressure on the Power Mac G4. After all, what does the extra several hundred dollars for the pro model get you? PCI slots, sure, and a higher RAM ceiling-- but you don't even get a monitor. If AppleInsider's version of events comes to pass, we have a feeling that the Power Mac line is going to feel a little bit like the Pismo PowerBooks did once the last iBook revision made the scene; the new iBook's enhanced feature set sent sales of the low-end PowerBook skidding to an abrupt halt, as customers decided that a $900 price differential was just too much to justify the PowerBook's extra features. Hopefully Apple has a plan to keep low-end Power Mac sales chugging along, even in the face of G4-powered iMacs. We'll see how this all pans out-- maybe in just a few weeks.

There are definitely times when we, your friendly AtAT staff, wish that our operations were based in sunny California instead of here in the frozen tundra of New England. For one thing, we'd be lots closer to all that Apple action, and stalking Steve could make for a relaxing hobby. For another, we wouldn't have to shovel snow, or wonder whether the two inches of glass-smooth, wet ice covering the front steps might just pose a minor hazard to the life and limbs of our FedEx guy. (Our new FedEx guy, we mean-- our old one is in traction or something.) And then there's the time difference; when it's 9 AM out there, it's a nice, languid "noonish" here in Boston. Sure, they say you adjust to the shift after a while, but those first few weeks of getting up in the morning would be sweet!

Other times, however, we're glad to be right where we are. Take this whole energy crisis thing; while Californians are so strapped for electricity they've taken to toasting their bread with BIC lighters (mmmmm-- butaney!), we New Englanders are burning through kilowatt after kilowatt with reckless abandon. Heck, sometimes we toast a whole loaf of bread just to watch the heating coils get orange. Efficiency, shmefficiency; no matter what anyone says, there's no more satisfying way to heat a three-bedroom home than by running the electric oven at 475° with the door open. Right about now, we bet Apple's considering packing up shop and heading out this way to brave the snow and ice, because a little frozen precipitation is nothing compared to the horrors of scarce power.

See, as faithful viewer Bobby Warren noticed, CNN is reporting that things are evidently so bad out there that the power companies actually induced blackouts that "cut off electricity to homes, schools, businesses, factories, and even street lights and traffic signals" in neighborhoods "on the Pacific Gas and Electric system." And how do our friends in Cupertino fit into this nightmare? Well, "Apple Computer in the San Francisco Bay area" was "among the first to be hit" by emergency rolling blackouts yesterday. But fear not, because the lights came back on when "power officials found a 'small parcel of additional electricity.'" (You know the situation is dire when the power officials are scrounging for loose wattage under the sofa cushions.) Hopefully someone will figure out a happy resolution to this whole power shortage soon, because we're betting that Apple's engineers don't do their best work by candlelight-- at least, not their best engineering work...