Yeeeaaaaahhhhh BUDDY! If you found the time to tune in to Honest Fred Anderson's quarterly conference call with the analysts, you already know that the news is good, the ink is black, and it's nothing but sunshine and smooth sailing from here on in. Apple made a $19 million profit last quarter (significantly higher than the analysts expected), boosted revenues to $1.545 billion (that's up 8% from a year ago), and increased its gross margins to a healthy 27.7%. Cash is up once again, to $4.54 billion, and both profits and revenues are expected to grow still further next quarter. In short, there's no down side. Nope. None at all.

Well, okay, there's a slight down side, but it's nothing like the sky-is-falling sense you get by scanning the "legitimate press" headlines over at MacSurfer, which make it look like Apple's about to declare bankruptcy while kicking several puppies and small children; half of them include such cheerful phrases as "decline in profit," "net income falls," profit slides," "company responsible for SARS, global unrest, and chewing gum in your hair," etc. Okay, yes, fine, Apple's $19 million profit represents a 41% decline from the same quarter a year ago-- but we're still talking about a profit, folks, and one higher than anyone expected, at that. Luckily, judging by Apple's stock spike today, it looks like Wall Street's paying attention to the revenue (Apple's highest in three years, notes The Register) more than anything else, though investors may also be cheered by the zillion little things that are also going Apple's way.

Take a gander at the copious notes over at MacMinute for a comprehensive list, but some of the happier highlights include a 71% increase in PowerBook sales, a 5% rise in education sales, increased traffic to the almost-breaking-even Apple retail stores, 6.5 million songs sold at the almost-breaking-even iTunes Music Store, and "strong" preorders for the G5, still slated to ship next month. C'mon, doesn't that all just make you want to wear a silly hat and dance a little jig? In public? Naked, during rush hour? Yeah, we thought as much. It's a magical time, indeed.

Meanwhile, we haven't yet compiled the final results and stats in our quarterly Beat The Analysts contest (expect them sometime before the sun goes nova), but we've done enough poking at the data to find that the big winner is faithful viewer Yorik, with his decidedly analyst-beating guess of $19,011,725 for Apple's quarterly profit. That is, you'll notice, just a hair's breadth from Apple's actual reported profit, whereas those hoity-toity analysts with all their fancy book-learnin' were off by sixty-something percent. (Take that, institutes of higher education!) Yorik therefore gains the unyielding fame of being a BTA winner that will certainly put him on the gravy train for life-- and as if that weren't too much already, the AtAT Prize Patrol will also be contacting him shortly to offer him his choice of this season's hottest looks in AtAT-themed apparel or a dusty, crusty software title straight out of our infamous Baffling Vault of Antiquity™! Why, it's like a fairy tale come true!