And thus were the unbelievers smackethed down: yesterday His Fredness revealed the news to the breathless masses, and lo, it was good. Yes indeedy, people, it's just like the days of old... as confirmed in the company's official press release, Apple positively pummelled the analysts' consensus quarterly profit estimate of a penny a share, instead posting a net profit of $43 million ($40 million not counting one-time losses and gains). That's a recurring profit of eleven cents a share, or a full dime higher than the First Call consensus. Heck, it's even four cents higher than the highest analyst estimate-- and whatever sourpuss in a thousand-dollar suit was betting on a loss of eights cents per share probably feels like a real jackass right about now.

All in all, Apple has a lot to be grinning about. First of all, there's the Street-beating return to profitability made all the more delectable by an economic climate that has most computer companies contemplating sticking their heads in the oven. Then there's the fact that Apple shipped three-quarters of a million Macs last quarter-- not bad at all, considering that consumer demand is supposed to be falling quicker than Bill Gates in a cage match with a starving leopard. Top that all off with a channel inventory down from twelve weeks to four, gross margins up to a surprisingly high 26.9%, and a whopping $4.1 billion pile of cash, and things are looking pretty darn rosy these days. (MacNN has a nice summary of Fred's financial data, if you're an "Info McNugget" kind of person.)

In fact, pretty much the only bad news that penetrated our forty million-dollar euphoria was Fred's lowered guidance for the year's revenues. Back in January he told analysts to expect Apple sales of $6 billion in 2001, but now he's citing "continued uncertainty" about the economy and revising that estimate to $5.6 to 5.8 billion. Still, that's no reason to stop doing your Happy Dance. Remember, these are tough times for everybody in the industry-- and we're hard-pressed to name a single other high-tech company who not only didn't issue an earnings warning prior to its most recent quarterly results, but also trounced the analyst estimates and never announced widespread layoffs. And over $4 billion in the bank? Apple must be one of the healthiest tech companies out there in these troubled times.

So, once again, the doomsayer analysts have to eat crow. (Faithful viewer Nina Tovish even noted that the analysts actually ran out of questions during the Q&A portion of the evening's proceedings, so stunned were they by Apple's return to glory. Howya like them Apples?) Meanwhile, AtAT's viewers also returned to form this quarter, if the final results in the latest Beat The Analysts contest are any indication; not only did Big Winner Adam Jay Cohen nail Apple's reported $40 million profit to the penny (while Wall Street bigwigs were off by a measly, oh, $37 million), but the AtAT average was also lots closer to Apple's final numbers: you folks managed to form a notably accurate "AtAT consensus" of over $36 million. Too bad you're not getting paid for it, hmmm? Ah, well... it's probably just wiser to use your uncanny financial abilities to invest in Apple stock and pay yourselves. After all, we've all seen what working on Wall Street evidently does to people's brains.

"No bad news at the conference call?" we hear you asking. "But AtAT, surely you didn't miss that bit about how Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian models only comprised 20% of all iMac sales, right?" Why, no we didn't kiddies-- but we're not at all sure that we should consider that a bummer. In context, we think 20% is a pretty respectable sales percentage for two patterns that initially made the vast majority of Mac fanatics fight to hold down their lunches when the first images hit the 'net. We practically had to call the designs the cancer-causing, dog-kicking product of a secret alliance between Hitler, Satan, and Darth Vader before we finally goaded some people into rushing to Apple's defense and admitting that they liked the patterns.

Beyond that, let's think about this for a second: we're smack-dab in the middle of a nasty economic downturn, right? All we ever hear is that consumers are spending less and less on personal computer purchases. So given that harsh reality, isn't it fair to assume that of Apple's three iMac configurations, the low-end $899 entry-level model might account for, say, half of the sales mix? We think that's a reasonable bet; we can't imagine that in the current purchasing climate, more than half of the iMac buyers out there opted to spend at least an extra $300 for a "Faster" model (or an extra $600 for a Special Edition). Now, take another look at Apple's three iMac configs and tell us which model is not available in Flower Power or Blue Dalmatian. Uh-huh.

So if you look at it that way, if Apple's "funkyMacs" account for 20% of all iMac sales, they may well account for, say, 40% of sales of all iMacs that are actually available in Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian-- in other words, purely from a looks perspective instead of a features one, they may actually be selling about as well as Graphite and Indigo. That realization may be what caused the analyst who asked about the popularity of the patterns to sound pleasantly surprised when he heard Fred's "20%" response. (It's about 16 minutes into the call, if you'd like to hear it for yourselves.) Now, it's important to note that we're pulling these numbers straight out of our FireWire port, since Fred didn't give us any hard data on the iMac's price mix, but at this point we're reasonably confident that calling Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian sales "not horrifically bad" (as dailyMac puts it) may be understating things a bit.

What that would mean, however, is that Apple was probably right to unleash those two patterns upon the world-- and with the sales numbers to prove it, we wouldn't be terribly surprised to see Steve unveil some even more "way out" designs when he introduces the first Mac OS X-preloaded iMacs upon the world this summer. Personally, we're betting on patterns that will tie in visually with Mac OS X's Aqua look, but just in case, we're bracing ourselves for "Easter Plaid" and "Neon Swirly."

Sadly, we heard about Steve Jobs's probable appearance on CNBC last night too late to tune in and watch; if we had known, we may well have been willing to commit horrible crimes against society in order to be in front of a cable-fed TV when Steve hit the airwaves. You may well wonder why the AtAT staff would stage a home invasion armed with nothing more than a menacingly-brandished stop sign wrenched from the asphalt just to see the Stevester talk to a suit about Apple's quarterly performance, but those of you who recall the man's January 1998 appearance on that station know exactly what we'd be hoping for: sometimes drama strikes twice.

Yes, it was over three years ago that Steve agreed to be interviewed by CNBC's Bruce Francis-- on the condition that Francis never raise the thorny (and, to Steve, utterly tiresome) subject of whether or not he'd ever become Apple's permanent CEO. Francis chose to ignore that little agreement, and badgered Steve about Apple's CEO search on-air until finally he asked whether the interim CEO sitting before him would ever drop the "interim" from his title-- to which Steve reportedly replied, "we weren't going to talk about this" and then simply got up and walked out, right on live TV. And we missed it! So now you can understand why word of an imminent Steve interview on CNBC would have sent us scurrying for the nearest TV while frothing at the mouth.

As it turns out, we didn't miss much. The Mac Observer has kindly posted a full transcript of Steve's brief appearance last night (complete with the "uh"s), and there isn't much drama there worth noting. In fact, Steve spends most of his time talking about his crystal ball and how gosh-darned "foggy" it is: "My crystal ball is pretty foggy in that regard... we have some visibility as to demand, but I don't think it goes out that far... anyone who says differently may have a better crystal ball than ours... certainly our crystal ball is pretty foggy right now about the global economy." Well, it's not the get-up-and-leave-in-a-snit high drama we were hoping for, but at least we can get some early Christmas shopping done; we're getting Steve a case of Madame Zola's Fog-B-Gone™ Crystal Ball Polish. Hey, anything to help the cause.