We're sure you've heard by now that Captain Steve gave his keynote address not via satellite as originally planned, but live and in person, which was a pleasant surprise for your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff. Following wild cheers and a standing ovation, Apple's "interim" CEO (hee hee, that just gets funnier every time we see it) proceeded to report on the State of the Apple, which consisted primarily of rehashing the strategies already laid out at last May's announcement, and taking every possible opportunity to hype the iMac. (As an aside, now that we've gotten to use one, we can personally assure you that the hype is justified. If you were even toying with the idea of buying one, you will want one. Trust us. Would we lie to you?)

Interestingly enough, though, other than Steve showing up in person, the biggest surprise of the keynote was that, well, that was the biggest surprise of the keynote. No announcement of any megadeal with Disney. No discussion of new "pro-level" G3's to replace the models that were quietly discontinued a couple of days ago. No details of any kind on next year's consumer portable. Sure, there were a few minor surprises, like the very cool new Apple PowerBook G3 DVD Video Solution (which allows PowerBook G3 owners with DVD-ROM modules to watch DVD movies, via hardware decompression of a new PC card) and the official renaming of Rhapsody as "Mac OS X Server," but certainly nothing earth-shattering. We knew the Q3 results would be profitable. We knew that Disney Blast will soon be Mac-compatible (free beta test at http://www.disneyblast.com/mac/). We knew that the iMac's modem would be 56K. Heck, we even knew that Internet Explorer is Steve's "browser of choice."

Was Steve's live presence intended to maximize the effect of his Reality Distortion Field® on the Expo crowd, injecting good vibes into all even though there wasn't much news to report? Is this keynote going to set off a whole new wave of "November 10th Event"-style speculation about what Apple expected to announce, but couldn't because the deal fell through at the last minute? Let those conspiracy theories fly!

Incidentally, for excellent coverage of the keynote in detail, we recommend Don Crabb's analysis over at MacCentral; he doesn't seem to have missed a thing.

As for Q3 being a profitable quarter, what Steve would not say was just how profitable. While he did say we'd all be happy with the results, we won't know the final numbers for another week; results will be posted on July 15th. Apparently Wall Street liked the comment, though, because Apple's stock shot up just over two points today, closing at a year-long high of just over 32 1/2 after heavy trading.

However, we at AtAT are a curious bunch (in every sense of the word, we're told), so we're not satisfied with vague statements of "profit" and "happy." We want numbers! Steve showed a bar graph depicting a green Q1 bar of $47 million, a slightly larger Q2 bar of $55 million, and a Q3 bar that was larger still, but labeled only with a question mark. And while faithful viewer Mark Simmons suggested that applying some basic algebra to the relative heights of the bars in the graph might yield the exact size of the quarter's profit, we think Mark may be working just a leetle bit too hard lately. (Of course, that doesn't mean we're not game to try. Anyone got a photo of that slide and a ruler?)

Since Steve didn't wreck our fun by announcing the exact results too early, we're going to go ahead and run our quarterly "Beat the Analysts" contest. Longtime viewers know the drill by now; guess the size of Apple's Q3 profit and win a prize from AtAT's Baffling Vault of Antiquity®. More details are available on the entry form. Enter now and make your voice heard...