So Apple's stock is still doing happy things, much to the surprise of veteran Apple-watchers everywhere; despite the overall market closing down today, AAPL was up another 39 cents, and earlier in the day it actually came within 17 cents of its 52-week high-- a week after an Expo Stevenote, mind you, which is traditionally a time when the market doesn't "get" the new announcements and drives the price down. Heck, with all the swirling speculation of a $99 miniPod, we would have sworn that AAPL was poised to take a tumble; instead, analysts liked GarageBand (it's well known that most Wall Street analysts only enter the job after their bands fail to score a recording contract), a lot of them were bullish on the iPod and even its new younger sibling, and that surprise HP iPod announcement two days later really kicked things into overdrive. And that's all with Janus dumping 13 million shares.

"Yeah, but all that Stevenote and HP stuff is so last week," you note. "What's with the price rise today?" Good question, Grasshopper. Well, it seems that some analysts are a little slow to come around, and are only just now upgrading their ratings on AAPL based on what they've seen in the past week. If you take a gander at the news headlines on the Yahoo! AAPL page, you'll notice that "Apple Computer [was] upgraded by Thomas Weisel" from Peer Perform to Outperform. (We have no idea what that means, but apparently it's good.) And you'll notice another link to a Forbes article in which Merrill Lynch declares that "Apple has gotten its act together" and is "innovating again." Again?! Whatever, we'll let that one slide. The important thing is that Merrill Lynch now rates AAPL a "buy" with a price target of $29, and that's exactly the sort of thing that keeps the numbers green when the rest of the market is a sea of red-- which is just fine by us.

Incidentally, we notice that there's another link there to a Forbes story titled "Microsoft's Lawyer Goes Back To His Roots." We haven't read it yet, but we assume it's about the guy's return to his previous gig poking damned souls with a pitchfork.

But we digress. What'll really be interesting to see is whether AAPL manages to cling to higher ground after tomorrow's earnings conference call, at which CFO Fred "We Can't Comment on Unannounced Products, So Quit Asking or I'll Go Caveman Upside Your Head With a Tire Iron" Anderson will reveal all sorts of fun facts regarding Apple's last quarter, provide guidance looking forward, and field questions from analysts desperate to get him to slip up and blab a little something about a video iPod and Mac OS X for Intel. What usually happens is that Apple's results come in better than the analysts expected and then the price of AAPL drops anyway. Tune in to the QuickTime webcast at 5 PM Eastern to hear history in the making-- and to get a sense of whether you might be in the running to win our Beat The Analysts contest. (You did enter, right? Because it closes at 4 PM Eastern, so you really don't want to put it off any longer.) Fingers crossed!