Is this getting old, yet? Apple announced their quarterly financial results in a press release after the market closed, and surprise, surprise-- they beat the Street yet again. The analysts were expecting a profit of about $89 million, and Apple delivered $203 million instead. This is, by our count, not only Apple's seventh consecutive profitable quarter, but it's also the seventh consecutive quarter in which they've managed to outperform the analysts' consensus. (And yet, you know full well that we're still going to see news coverage claiming that "serious questions still remain about Apple's return to health." We figure they'll need, say, eighteen or nineteen Street-beating profits before that stuff ends.) For more analysis, CNET's got a decent summary.

Now, it's never clear to us whether analysts include one-time charges and gains in their estimates (probably not), and a huge chunk of Apple's profit came from the sale of ten million shares of ARM stock, but even once you subtract that $89 million, Apple still beat the estimates by $25 million. That's nothing to sneeze at. It's even more impressive when you look at the results from a year ago; Apple made $101 million then, so this is a nice improvement in profits. Better yet, for the third straight quarter, Apple's showing year-over-year revenue growth; revenues this quarter were $1.56 billion, up 11% from a year ago. And amazingly, gross margins are up, too-- 27.4%, compared to 25.7% in Q3 of 1998. Evidently margins on the iMac are still nice and juicy. In fact, just as you'd expect, the iMac is definitely the star of the Q3 show... heavy sales this past quarter drove Apple's unit growth up 40% from a year ago. That's a growth rate almost twice as high as that of the overall computer industry itself-- which means market share is on the rise and the installed base of Mac users is expanding.

The good news just keeps on coming: $3.1 billion in cash on hand, the "successful conversion of $661 million of debt into stock," and, of course, the now-standard announcement that Apple has once again beat Dell with an ending inventory balance of "less than one day." And while we love to see Apple doing so well (especially after having seen them come about two inches away from a nasty, twisted death a couple of years back), we have to admit, these quarterly results are getting a little boring. Remember those touch-and-go days when the red ink ran like blood through the hallways of the Overlook hotel? Now that was drama. But we at AtAT are doing our part to make things a bit more exciting-- namely, our Beat the Analysts contest. We're happy to announce that Phil L. Welch and John Corbin are our co-winners-- go check out the results for the details. And thanks to everyone who entered. Now start warming up for next quarter!