We admit it-- we didn't actually tune in to the mammoth four-hour analyst meeting yesterday. We know, we know; "bad AtAT, no donut." But it's one thing to hang on Steve's every word for, say, two hours during one of those awesome Stevenotes (especially when there's actually some video accompanying his spiel to satisfy our demand for eye candy), but four solid hours of audio geared solely for financial analysts? Somehow that just didn't sound like a particularly fun use of our incredibly valuable time. (Well, okay, our time is actually utterly worthless, but still, our local cable channel shows "Saved By The Bell" reruns at 4:30 PM EST, and people just have to have priorities.)

We also didn't expect any real drama during the meeting-- certainly nothing as engrossing as Screech's voice changing, at any rate. Imagine our dismay, then, to have to read over at MacCentral that Steve's presentation to the Wall Street types was actually quite exciting because it was marred by technical difficulties. (Insert jarring and ominous chord here.) Anyone who's ever seen Steve work the stage at Macworld Expo knows that the man wields a remote control like a Jedi knight wields a light saber. He cues up his own slides and keeps the show moving forward with the pacing of the master showman he is. Timing is everything, and while trying to RDF a room full of analysts, Steve needs all of his charms firing on all cylinders. So imagine the terror that must have ensued when Steve's clicker didn't function. Aiiiieeeeeee!!

Once we heard about this nailbiter of a predicament, we had the impetus we needed to brave the financespeak and fire up our QuickTime Player for the rebroadcast. After all, we wanted to hear how His Steveness handled himself when faced with the nightmare of having to address a roomful of big, scary analysts without his trusty clicker. Our first nice surprise was that, for the QuickTime rebroadcast, Apple had broken up the four-hour presentation into three easy-to-digest chunklets: Steve's "Vision, Strategy, Q & A," Phil Schiller's "Hardware Update," and Fred Anderson's "Financial Update." So we were able to zero right in on Steve's demo thrills and spills without having to worry about wading through a sticky morass of gross margins and one-time charges and gains.

So we've since heard Steve's harrowing twenty clickerless minutes, in which he initially sounded a little off his game as he had to move some of the Q & A up front. In between fielding questions from analysts, Steve lobbed queries back to "Wayne," the A/V tech who was presumably sweating hard as he tried to restore the power of Steve's remote. All told, though, Uncle Steve handled the situation deftly and emerged seemingly unscathed. Wayne, for his part, emerged with his job intact-- and thousands of witnesses who heard Steve confirm that fact. Eventually Wayne got the "backup backup clicker" working, and Steve was once again armed to forge ahead with his song and dance, in full control of his-- and Apple's-- own destiny. Whew. When's the movie of the week coming out?