Regardless of what does or does not happen onstage during Greg Joswiak's "feature presentation" at the show tomorrow, at least we're guaranteed one press release from Apple: tomorrow is Quarterly Results day, and all eyes are on Money Czar Fred Anderson as he gears up for the big conference call, wherein he gets to reveal just how well (or how poorly) Apple did last quarter, after which he'll answer forty-five minutes' worth of questions from analysts with his patented "I can't talk about unannounced products" spiel. Good times will be had by all, and you can listen in even if you aren't some high-falutin' Wall Street bigwig with a $3000 suit and a head full of tepid oatmeal; all you need is and Internet connection and QuickTime.

For what it's worth, them thar analysts are apparently expecting good ol' Fred to pull three cents per share out of his sleeve for the quarter. And while three cents isn't tough to hide up a sleeve, three cents per share comes out to nearly $11 million, so here's hoping that Fred has either some really large bills or some really big sleeves. And if you're thinking that, regardless of how tough it might be to stuff up one's arm-coverings, $11 million really isn't that much for a multibillion-dollar corporation to be scraping together in three months' time, well, we agree. But hey, times are tough, and what with Power Mac sales probably hovering in the single digits for the past few months while visions of G5s danced in our heads, eleven mil doesn't sound all that bad to us. It is, after all, just slightly more than we made last quarter.

And let's look at the bright side: Apple's making money, not losing it. Probably. We won't know for sure until tomorrow, of course, but considering that not a single analyst thinks Apple's in the red and Apple never issued one of those scary earnings warnings, we think it's a pretty safe bet to take. Now, we've got a computer company that, in an atmosphere in which computer sales are apparently pretty much globally in the toilet, keeps on releasing innovative new products at a furious pace and opening new retail stores. For that company to show any kind of profit given the circumstances sounds like a pretty nifty feat to us. So as long as Fred announces a number written in black ink instead of red, we'll be cheering.

Of course, if it does turn out to be a loss, prepare for the heavens themselves to tremble. Yea verily.

Meanwhile, why not participate in the running gag known as our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest? Heck, we'll tell you why not: even before our lives got turned upside down fourteen and a half months ago, we frequently took a month or more to report each quarter's outcome; since then, we haven't reported the results of any BTA contest at all; and last quarter we were completely MIA, so the contest didn't even happen in the first place. And yet we're running it again, as a sort of tribute to unflagging optimism in the face of insurmountable odds. Besides, it costs you nothing to slap down a guess, so what do you have to lose?