The day draws ever closer-- in a few weeks, Apple will announce its Q2 financial figures, and we'll all see just how they did in what is historically their worst quarter of the fiscal year. Despite Apple's insistence early on that people should not expect a profit this quarter to follow the surprise black ink from Q1, many analysts seem to be ignoring that advice and are in fact predicting a small profit this quarter. Strong sales of the Powermac G3's seem to be the biggest factor in that vote of confidence.

To add fuel to the fire, a Mac OS Rumors source states that not only will Apple post a profit, but that profit will be larger than Q1's $47 million, possibly in the range of $60-$80 million this time around. Whether this is the start of a recouping of the $2 billion that Apple lost over the last few years still remains to be seen, but any black ink is a nice start. As for Q3, things so far are looking good: the AIO (Artemis) is finally available as of yesterday, though only to the educational channel; new Powerbooks (which we've been waiting for since the beginning of time) should finally surface by the end of next month; and Rumors continues to report that a sub-$1000 G3-based Mac will possibly ship before July's MacWorld New York.

All this is prologue to our quarterly "Beat the Analysts" contest, in which AtAT viewers can win fabulous (cough) prizes by guessing Apple's final numbers before they're posted. We expect to start the contest later this week, so stay tuned for details.

Wintel manufacturer Dell made history on Thursday, as they were slapped with the largest fine the Federal Trade Commission has ever ordered against a mail-order company. The $800,000 fine is punishment for a 1995 violation of the Mail Order Rule, when the company sold software that didn't exist. A ZDNet article has more.

Apparently, back in 1995, Dell advertised Dimension computer systems as being bundled with a "Dell Software Suite," which didn't actually ship with the computers themselves. Customers instead found a coupon for the software which they could trade in for the goods when they actually became available. The FTC frowns on mail order companies advertising a product that it doesn't expect to be able to deliver on time. "There has to be a reasonable expectation that you can ship it to the customer," says an FTC staff attorney.

We at AtAT wonder how that applies to all these mail-order catalog resellers who regularly advertise products that don't exist yet. For instance, most of them have been selling the Mac version of the game Diablo for literally months now, despite the fact that the game still hasn't been released. (Whenever you ask the companies about such a product's availability, they routinely answer that the product is "on backorder" and will be available in "two weeks.") Just something to think about.

In other Wintel news, it seems like Digital Equipment Corporation may go the way of the dodo, following its recent buyout by big hungry customer Compaq. Originally it looked like Compaq planned to run DEC as a wholly-owned subsidiary, which probably would have allowed DEC to run things pretty much how they wanted to on a day-to-day basis-- think of the relationship between Apple and the erstwhile Claris corporation. However, according to the Boston Globe, now it seems increasingly likely that instead, Compaq will swallow DEC whole.

Compaq originally bought DEC to gain that company's inroads into corporate sales. Following the acquisition, speculation ran rampant about the future of DEC's Alpha processor, which was one of the few desktop competitors of Intel's Pentium line of chips. DEC had previously sold the Alpha to Intel with the condition that Intel continue to make the chip available for a number of years. As a subsidiary, DEC would probably have continued to make its Alpha-based workstation and server products. But if Compaq really integrates DEC instead of running it as a separate company, it's not entirely unlikely that Compaq could just tell Intel not to bother with the Alpha anymore. And some faithful viewers may recall the conspiracy theory about all this we mentioned a few months ago.

Competitive elimination conspiracy theories aside, the absorption of DEC into Compaq would likely result in layoffs of DEC personnel, as well as possibly the forced relocation of some DEC personnel to Compaq's Houston headquarters. Ah, the drama of corporate mergers continues unabated...