Given our wacky Expo-shaken broadcast schedule, allow us to backtrack for a moment, okay? It looks to us like Apple may indeed be back in the groove when it comes to the time-honored practice of smacking down the analyst consensus like some kind of piñata filled with little dollar signs and happy faces. Well, okay, that may be a slight exaggeration, as far as Tuesday's conference call is concerned, but hey, Steve and the gang pulled off a good thing in some tough circumstances, and we're pleased with that fact. Is that so wrong? By now all of you have surely heard the good news: Apple announced that, in its third fiscal quarter, the company managed to squeeze out a profit of $61 million-- about seven big ones more than Wall Street was expecting. Go team!

There's just one teensy little catch; despite that larger-than-expected profit, ol' Fred also lowered revenue expectations for future quarters; as The Mac Observer deftly pointed out, Apple's stock dove into a tailspin in after-hours trading, prompted by the company's own negative outlook for future sales and Alan Greenspan's minor coughing fit caused by some grape juice going down the wrong pipe. (Or something to do with Greenspan, at any rate-- the Dow plunges whenever the man forgets to floss, for crying out Pete's sake.) Add a healthy dose of the usual media pessimism (despite a better-than-expected profit, the Associated Press headline was "Apple Profits Drop 70 Percent"), toss in a thoroughly less-than-exciting keynote address the following morning, and blammo! Instant stock death plunge!

Which is, sadly, pretty much exactly what we expected to happen. It's darn clear to us that Steve and the gang had a very specific plan for this Expo: unleash a stable of important and immediately available Mac OS X-native third-party applications, ship version 10.1 of that currently-not-quite-ready-for-prime-time operating system to make it fast and furious, and introduce a stunning new LCD-based iMac to mark the Mac's long-awaited shift to Mac OS X as its default OS, thus officially ushering our beloved platform into its Glorious Second Age. Instead we got the return of Snow and a preview of the sequel to a product almost none of us can use in the first place-- and iDVD 2, cool though it undoubtedly is, won't even be ready until September. If Mac OS Rumors can be believed, it's hardly a wonder that Steve said of his own performance, "we should have been ready; we flopped hard out there."

So things don't always happen according to plan. On the plus side, though, at least we can look forward to a slew of really cool stuff to appear in about two months or so-- and when that happens, it's go time, baby. (Assuming Plan B works out, of course...)