And here we are, mere hours away from the revelation of Apple's most recent end-of-quarter financial results. Frankly, our enthusiasm's a bit dampened; for one thing, everyone pretty much already knows that the numbers are going to look fantastic. Steve dropped some very broad hints during his last keynote-- biggest Apple unit sales quarter in history, and all that jazz-- and so, given history's tendency to repeat itself, we're not expecting any big surprises. More black ink, and lots of it. Probably a bigger profit than the analysts expect, given Uncle Steve's Street-beating tendencies; according to AAPL Investors, consensus is for $155.3 million excluding one-time charges and gains. We'll know when Money Guy Fred Anderson drops the numbers in his 2 PM PST conference call.

The other reason we're not all that terribly excited is because the flu scotched our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest; by the time we were in good enough shape to get it going, there would only have been two days in which to enter, which would have been a royal bummer. We felt our energy would be better spent digging through our 200 accumulated email messages instead. Next quarter we'll have to do something a bit special to make up for things. Meanwhile, scribble your prediction on the back of one of the six thousand AOL CD-ROMs that undoubtedly showed up in last week's junk mail, and if you guess within $10,000 of the final announced profit, treat yourself to a Pop-Tart or two.

There is one thing for us to get excited about, though-- Apple's live broadcast of the event. Through the magic of streaming QuickTime, you, too, can listen in as Fred spouts off about earnings, revenue, one-time charges, cash on hand, and all those other figures that red-blooded Mac users find so thrilling. But if, like us, this kind of dry financial data just doesn't get your heart pumping, remember: it's a live call, and anything live has entertainment potential. We're kinda hoping that Fred gets the hiccups, ourselves.