So how'd you do when playing the Beat The Analysts home game? We made out pretty well; our guess of $190 million only missed the mark by $7 mil, so we won a Pop-Tart. (Well, actually, the vegan equivalent-- a frosted cherry Toast-N-Jammer.) That means we're happy. Guess who else is happy? Well, Apple is, for one: a massively Street-beating $183 million profit, a 45% increase in earnings for the quarter (when the industry overall only grew 17%), the biggest Mac unit sales quarter in the company's history-- yeah, they're happy. The analysts seemed pretty happy, too, judging by the tone of the questions asked during the conference call. And you know the stockholders must be happy; they'll probably be even happier if all this great news pushes AAPL even higher. (At broadcast time, AAPL was up almost eleven points, a hair short of its all-time high.) Apple's got a press release highlighting the happy news, and MacNN's got a nice summary of the whole conference call in case you missed it.

Now, considering the whole conference call thing, this was the first time we've ever heard one. Our QuickTime stream was a little choppy, which was annoying, but everything said was pretty much understandable. Or, at least, it was intelligible; it was only "understandable" if you comprehend all that stuff about deluded shares and year-over-year channel gross cash operating whoozis. Sadly, nothing particularly goofy happened to liven up the proceedings-- there was no point at which a flock of syrup-coated geese was released into Fred Anderson's office and sticky honking chaos ensued, for example. Maybe next quarter. Still, we were most amused by the analysts' repeated attempts to get Fred to talk about Apple's unannounced products like the MIA Pismo PowerBook. "Maybe if we ask him enough times, he'll tell us just so we'll shut up" seemed to be the plan. But Fred held his ground; "Apple doesn't comment on unannounced products." Good boy, Fred. Have a cookie.

All in all, it was a shiny, happy event indeed; big profits, big growth, lots of cash on hand, and a team ready to take things to the next level. Oh, sure, there was that niggling little point about Apple's decline in gross margins-- it dropped to 25.9%, down three percentage points from a year ago-- but given those RAM price increases and the shipping costs Apple incurred to keep product on the shelves over the holidays, we're not really worried. Next quarter won't be nearly as jaw-droppingly terrific, if history's any indicator, but we're confident we'll all be looking at a tenth consecutive Street-beating profit in any case. And here's hoping for some wacky barnyard noises during the next conference call.