Break out a bottle of your chosen celebratory beverage and get a-chuggin', folks, because Apple has done it again: according to the official press release, the company posted a profit of $63 million-- and even after subtracting $3 million due to an "after-tax investment gain," that means Apple earned a healthy chunk more than the $52-ish million Wall Street had been expecting. If nothing else, it sure beats that $8 million loss it ate in the same quarter a year ago.

Oh, but believe us, it gets better. Quit drooling over the profit for a sec and check out the revenues: Apple finally cleared that tricky $2 billion hurdle, with $60 million to spare. That's a four-year high, people, and a scorching 36% increase from a year ago. The bulk of the cash came from the sale of 829,000 Macs (up 12%), with a staggering 733,000 iPods (up 235%!) contributing nicely, too. The company would have sold even more iPods than that, but money dude Fred Anderson confirmed that Apple just couldn't keep up with the demand. Lack of stamina? No wonder Apple added the Wheaties guy to its board of directors. Balanced breakfasts for the whole staff!

Big Picture-wise, this was Apple's second quarter in a row hitting double-digit growth in both units and revenues-- and according to Fred, unless something nasty and unexpected happens (da da da DUMMMMMMM!), Q2 should turn out to be its third. Revenues won't hold above the $2 billion mark, since the holiday season had a lot to do with that, but Apple expects Q2 to bring revenue of "about $1.8 billion" and profit in the area of 8-10 cents per share, which comes out to roughly $28-35 million. Guess we'll find out in three more months.

Of course, none of this actually means squat to you, because the only reason you bothered to tune in was to see if you might have won a t-shirt in our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest. While we haven't compiled the detailed analysis yet (now there's a shock from which you'll never recover), we've futzed with the numbers enough to find our winner. For being the first entrant to guess Apple's $60 million profit on the nose and therefore being infinitely more accurate than the analyst consensus, faithful viewer Chad Hine gets to wear a smug grin of self-satisfaction and punch any Wall Street analysts he meets in the face. (Offer void where prohibited by law.) He also gets his choice of an AtAT shirt in the style and size of his choosing or a shrink-wrapped archaic software title from our world-renowned Baffling Vault of Antiquity™. Congratulations to Chad for his economic perspicacity, and congratulations to everyone at Apple for another stellar quarter.

And hey, while we're at it, what the heck: congratulations to us for being so gosh-darned great, and congratulations to all you AtAT viewers for having such terrific taste. Also, congratulations to Larry Ellison and his blushing bride Melanie Craft, and congratulations to Steve Jobs for landing the gig as photographer at Larry's wedding. Congratulations to faithful viewer Michael Fan for pointing that out to us. And congratulations to us, again, for letting this scene go completely off the rails and ending it totally off-topic.

By the way, about your choice of celebratory beverages... Clamato? Really?

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?

You know, we fully planned to throw together a scene about how, as faithful viewer loa bacon pointed out, Hewlett-Packard overtook Dell to become the number one seller of Wintel systems last quarter. We had the CNET article lined up, and the topic's all relevant and timely and stuff because, when coupled with last week's team-up, this news means that iTunes for Windows is going to ship on a ton of consumer-bound Wintels pretty soon. But then we saw how many numbers and percentages we'd have to slog through, and since we just went through that with Apple's quarterly results, we've decided to pull a Teen Talk Barbie, declare that math is hard, and instead discuss a computer full of potatoes.

Yes, potatoes. As in, spuds. Faithful viewer Ian Harris informed us of an article in The Guardian which reports that a guy in Germany bought a computer at a department store and then brought it back a few hours later, complaining that it didn't work. Store personnel opened the system's case to have a look, and "discovered it was not functioning because its working parts had been replaced with small potatoes." And this is how you know this happened in another country: "The bemused shop assistants gave the man a new computer free of charge." Here in the states, if you try to return a computer whose guts had been replaced with tubers, you'd probably get shot. In Germany, "hey, have another computer, potato-free-- it's on us!"

So now you know; in Germany, you can, indeed, exchange a potato-filled computer for a brand new functioning model for free. Just don't try it twice; potato-guy reportedly "returned a short time later with another computer-- again potato-filled" and claimed that "he didn't need a computer any more and asked for his money back in cash." Talk about pushing your luck, right? Well, this time the staff called the cops and the guy was arrested. You gotta know when to fold 'em, buddy.

Now, originally we couldn't figure out why the store personnel gave the guy a second computer in the first place, given that the returned model's innards had been replaced with potatoes. After thinking about it for a while, though, we arrived at the conclusion that the computer was most likely an ultra-cheap Wintel piece of junk, and the parts that the thief had pilfered and replaced with spuds were probably worth less than the potatoes themselves-- so, in effect, the store was coming out ahead on the deal. They only called the cops when he demanded cash.

Relevance? None at all; we just like that there was no math involved. But if anyone wants to buy a G5, pack it full of some sort of root vegetable, and then try to return it, you didn't get the idea from us.