Technically it wasn't a Stevenote, exactly, but Tuesday's music event still dished out three-quarters of an hour's worth of Stevetastic product announcements saturated in Reality Distortion Field energy, so it's no surprise that we've entered the post-Stevenote doldrums just the same. All attention is on the iPod U2 Special Edition, the iPod Photo, and the nine new countries added to the iTunes Music Store, so any other potential drama has receded temporarily into the background. It's like Thanksgiving; after the calorie-fest, people need time to recline in a post-gluttony digestive coma, so don't expect much else exciting to happen in the Apple realm for a few days.

Except that people still seem to have mustered the energy to fire up their E*Trade accounts and grab a few more shares of AAPL, we see, because Apple's stock price shot up another $2.33 on Wednesday to close at over $50 a share for the first time since it drove off a cliff four years ago. We understand that Mac users generally get a lot more excited about spiffy new gadgets to play with than dry financial stats like market capitalization, but it's worth noting that if AAPL closes up another 80 cents or so, Apple will officially be a $20 billion company. It's just one of those milestone thingies that we have to point out, even if it's fundamentally useless to most of the customer base. It's a law or something. Blame the SEC.

So why the latest price spike? Well, as much as we'd all like to believe that Apple's stock price rises sharply every time the company ships a hot new product, we know deep down that price changes of more than a couple of bucks generally only occur when 1) the company announces new revenue projections, or 2) some analyst issues an upgrade or downgrade to the stock. This time it wasn't an upgrade, per se, but according to Forbes, Merrill Lynch has "raised estimates on Apple Computer after the company unveiled its iPod Photo-- earlier than the research firm expected-- and announced the iPod U2 Special Edition." The firm acknowledges the usual grumbling about high prices, but points out that "that was the initial reaction to the iPod mini," too, and we all know how much of a flop that turned out to be.

So with swanky new iPods available for the holiday shopping season, Merrill Lynch now expects increased sales to pump up Apple's fiscal Q1 revenue by an extra $100 million or so-- and increase the company's quarterly profit from 40 cents per share to 42. That's all it takes to send the traders scrambling for the "Buy!" button? Well, yeah-- let's put those numbers in more absolute terms: an extra 2 cents per share of profit is an extra $7.8 million, which isn't exactly pocket change unless you're a Seattleite with a penchant for bad sweaters and worse haircuts. And an extra $100 million puts the quarterly revenue projection at $2.95 billion; that's a 26 percent increase above last quarter's revenue (which itself was good enough news to have tacked a ten-spot onto Apple's stock price), and a 47 percent increase-- or nearly a billion dollars-- more than the same quarter last year.

No wonder Wall Street's happy; it's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas. Or money. Whichever.