Ahhh, now that's more like it! If you've been tuning in regularly, you know that we've found it a wee bit unsettling that Apple's stock has been performing so well over the course of the past week; the price rose following the miniPod/GarageBand announcements (despite all those people who had been expecting an 80 GB iPod that fits completely inside the ear canal and costs $8.99), it rose again after the HP-branded iPod revelation, and kept right on rising in the wake of positive analyst sound bites and even a couple of upgrades. The upshot was that in the week following a Stevenote, AAPL came within spitting distance of its 52-week high, which is, quite frankly, completely and utterly unnatural. But we're feeling much more comfortable now that Apple has posted better-than-expected quarterly results and its stock price has consequently fallen off a cliff. Wheeee, familiar territory!

We admit, we were a little nervous when the price of AAPL closed up another 8 cents on Wednesday, but once the markets had closed, Fred Anderson let the good news fly: Apple had raked in $63 million in profit, beating analyst estimates, and revenue for the quarter was over $2 billion, the highest it's been in four years and up 36% from the same quarter a year ago. And that, of course, did the trick-- the price of AAPL cratered by a buck-twenty in after-hours trading. There's nothing like good financial news to devalue a stock. Why, it works almost as well as bad financial news! If Apple really wants its stock price to increase, it should really cut it out with the whole "quarterly earnings report" thing altogether and just let people guess.

To be fair, the quarter's numbers weren't all good news, what with Apple's gross margins having dropped from 27.6% to 26.7% over the course of a year. True, some other computer manufacturers with much higher market caps would gladly kill or die for margins that high, but a decline is a decline, and thus it qualifies as, in official financial terms, a "bummer." Couple that with what Bill Snyder at TheStreet.com refers to as "a somewhat slower-than-expected transition to the fast new G5 Macs" and you apparently get a pack of "disappointed" investors dumping AAPL after the bell. And maybe it's just us, but we suspect that Apple finally acknowledging some quality control issues (remember PowerBook Leprosy?) in the form of higher warranty expenses for the quarter-- and the accrual of a "reserve" to pay for repairs moving forward-- may have had a little something to do with it.

So there you have it: in spite of (or is that "because of"?) higher-than-expected sales and profits and Apple's best quarter in years, the company's stock is probably going to open on Thursday about 5% lower, having erased pretty much everything it's piled on over the past week. Order is restored, the stars are back in the heavens, and we can finally all relax. All we need now is for someone in the media to call Apple "beleaguered" and all will be right with the universe.

Wait, aren't we the media? Sort of, right? Okay, here goes: "Apple is beleaguered." There. Doesn't that feel better?