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The Money Man Speaks (1/18/00)
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And here we are, mere hours away from the revelation of Apple's most recent end-of-quarter financial results. Frankly, our enthusiasm's a bit dampened; for one thing, everyone pretty much already knows that the numbers are going to look fantastic. Steve dropped some very broad hints during his last keynote-- biggest Apple unit sales quarter in history, and all that jazz-- and so, given history's tendency to repeat itself, we're not expecting any big surprises. More black ink, and lots of it. Probably a bigger profit than the analysts expect, given Uncle Steve's Street-beating tendencies; according to AAPL Investors, consensus is for $155.3 million excluding one-time charges and gains. We'll know when Money Guy Fred Anderson drops the numbers in his 2 PM PST conference call.
The other reason we're not all that terribly excited is because the flu scotched our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest; by the time we were in good enough shape to get it going, there would only have been two days in which to enter, which would have been a royal bummer. We felt our energy would be better spent digging through our 200 accumulated email messages instead. Next quarter we'll have to do something a bit special to make up for things. Meanwhile, scribble your prediction on the back of one of the six thousand AOL CD-ROMs that undoubtedly showed up in last week's junk mail, and if you guess within $10,000 of the final announced profit, treat yourself to a Pop-Tart or two.
There is one thing for us to get excited about, though-- Apple's live broadcast of the event. Through the magic of streaming QuickTime, you, too, can listen in as Fred spouts off about earnings, revenue, one-time charges, cash on hand, and all those other figures that red-blooded Mac users find so thrilling. But if, like us, this kind of dry financial data just doesn't get your heart pumping, remember: it's a live call, and anything live has entertainment potential. We're kinda hoping that Fred gets the hiccups, ourselves.
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SceneLink (2038)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/18/00 episode: January 18, 2000: It's end-of-quarter finances time, and you can join in the fun via live QuickTime streaming. Meanwhile, rumors swirl about spring and summer unveilings of that hardware we all expected two weeks ago, and leaving the settlement talks behind, Microsoft leaps back into the fray on "Redmond Justice"...
Other scenes from that episode: 2039: To Those Who Wait (1/18/00) See, we knew if we could just keep blathering on and on about the mysterious lack of hardware announcements at Macworld Expo, eventually someone would float us some info just to get us to shut up about it already... 2040: The Sleeping Giant (1/18/00) Wow, and here we were losing hope in "Redmond Justice" because we thought we saw hints that Microsoft was getting ready to throw in the towel. Think about it-- the trial itself was a riotous comedy of errors, with the government scoring hit after hit against the Redmond Giant amid evidence of faked Microsoft videotapes, Microsoft witnesses being tripped up by their own email, etc...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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