Well, you can bet that investors were pleased with Apple’s latest quarterly financials, witness the rapid 6% increase in the price of a share. Of course, the first day doesn’t always count for a lot. If there’s enough bad news that’s real or imagined, you can see it dropping again. Just think what happened when the so-called analysts read their Tarot cards and decided that iPod sales had peaked and were headed down, that scores of unsold units were filling up the warehouses. Of course, the cards were wrong.

What about the iPod killer du jour? Well, again Apple can’t stay at the top forever, so something has to give. The stock takes a hit again, but begins a run up after people realize that the cards are wrong again.

Subscription services? Surely those cheap prices from Yahoo will have some sort of impact, right? Of the various subscription music services, Yahoo seems to have a more polished interface, and at $4.99 a month if you opt for an annual subscription, it’s chump change. Forget that none of these services work on Macs or on iPods, or that only part of their song libraries are available via subscription. People will be happy to ditch their iPods in favor of some no-name, nondescript player that costs less and offers more features to get that cheap subscription. Once again, it’s not in the cards, but it can beat down the stock price for a spell.

I guess the term “nervous nellie” is apt here. The mere whiff of potential failure ought to be sufficient to make you scurry to your stockbroker and beg off. Ah, the trials and tribulations and outright gullibility of Wall Street. Do you remember how they fell for all the smoke and mirrors of the dot.com boom? You’d gladly pay $50 or $100 a share for one crazy scheme after another. Venture capital was robust in those days, and you could get tens of millions of dollars by the mere act of having a business with a “.com” at the end of its name, even if the business plan was nonexistent. No wonder it was all poised for a great fall. Of course, some businesses, such as Amazon and even Priceline, managed to survive the shakeout. Well, I suppose you could say that William Shatner’s “star power” was enough to save Priceline from certain death, and it did come close at one time.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Apple is unexpectedly in the driver’s seat in one segment of its businesses. After years of sitting at the back of the bus, the iPod makes it dominant, and that’s a tough pill to swallow. The bigger they are, and all that. So what if Apple went from a company with an estimated $8 billion annual revenue to one with an estimated $14 billion annual revenue in the space of a single year? Didn’t Apple say it’s hedging its bets for the current quarter, to gauge the potential impact in sales because there will be Intel processors inside beginning a year from now? Sounds just like smart planning to me. If sales do grow during the back-to-school system, Apple seems the hero, and if not, well, there are no surprises.

More to the point, it’s clear to me that Apple just doesn’t know what the impact might really be. You can’t take those instant surveys as proof of anything, because the sampling methodology is little or nonexistent, and opinions do change. A survey of that sort, with proper controls, might be interesting a month or two from now, once the flurry of excitement over the great processor migration dies down, as it will.

For now, you can bet your last dollar that the Wall Street analysts will continue to pore over Apple’s current financials and future guidance for evidence that bad times are in store for the company. Why be positive about such things? Why indeed!

Now I really should mention the fact that certain analysts are apparently in bed with some of the companies they purport to analyze, which makes them more inclined to bad mouth the companies that don’t send them paychecks. I suppose there are no checks and balances in that business, or not enough to stop the practice. But we do live in a world where so-called experts go on TV talk shows to deliver news about products they are actually paid to pitch. I suppose you can say it’s all entertainment anyway, and nothing you should take seriously. That is until you are asked to invest your hard-earned money in businesses based on the recommendations of those self-same analysts. That is a horse of a different color.

I don’t need tea leaves, Tarot cards, crystal balls or any innate psychic ability to predict that you will continue to hear negative thoughts about Apple in abundance in the months and years to come. Sure, the company can screw up, and not all of its new products will post record sales, or come even close. At the same time, you will also hear that Steve Jobs can’t wait to stop building Macs, that all the money and time invested in switching to Intel is just a smokescreen.

Five years from now, they say, you’ll be able to buy a shrinkwrapped copy of Mac OS X or whatever it is called by then that can run on any vanilla PC box. The iPod will be the hula hoop of the 21st century, and the electronics industry will have embraced some other marvel from a company the analysts are conditioned to favor. Or paid perhaps.

Of course, Apple has long range plans, but I don’t think the unlikely success of the iPod was ever anticipated. Products don’t achieve iconic status every day, or every year for that matter. You can only hope that Apple is working hard on the iPod’s successor, or on building new versions with even more compelling features. And, by they way, how about an iPod with voice recognition? “iPod play Ruby Tuesday by the Stones.” “iPod play playlist number four.” Yeah, that’s the ticket!

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Maybe they need a new set of tea leaves, or perhaps they should call on the services of the real life psychic who is portrayed in the TV show Medium. Regardless, when it comes to Apple Computer, Wall Street just can’t get an accurate fix on what’s going on.

Consider: In the last few weeks, you heard that iPod sales were slowing, and that Apple better come up with a successor real quick or it will lose its advantage. Wrong! You also heard that sales of new Macs would be hurt by the plan to switch to Intel processors. Wrong again!

Apple’s quarterly financials, announced Wednesday afternoon, confounded Wall Street estimates once again. Here’s a brief look at the stats: Revenue came in at $3.5 billion. Net income for the quarter ending June 30 increased to $320, or 37 cents a share. This is a record for Apple and compares to $61 million, or 8 cents a share, for the same quarter last year. Those so-called analysts expected income at 31 cents a share. Of course, if you’re into raw numbers, you can get your share direct from Apple, without filtering from commentators.

The iPod? Well, the analysts said sales would be flat or slightly lower, but sales increased to 6.1 million players, and revenue soared to $1.1 billion, an increase of 16 percent over the previous quarter, and over 343 percent since last year. Bear in mind that the average selling price for iPods went down, because of newer, cheaper models. Right now, the iPod has about 75% of the digital music player market, and its closest competition has less than 5%. Saying the iPod appears to be unstoppable is an understatement.

Another bright spot in Apple’s financial picture is the continued growth of iTunes Music Store sales. Despite the alleged competition from those subscription services, current estimates put Apple’s share of the legal music download market at more than 80 percent, according to Neilsen Soundscan. So much for those cheap Yahoo subscriptions, and has anyone heard much about MSN Music? Last I heard, Microsoft was even giving away extra songs to entice people to sign up, with, apparently, not a whole lot of success.

What about Mac sales? Is Apple going to throw in the towel, or at the very least suffer big time because of the planned migration to Intel chips? So far, the answer is no on both counts. In the words of Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations, “We saw no obvious reduction in sell-through after the announcement.” To be fair, Apple is being cautious here. They were working on sales data covering only a few weeks, and it may take a while to see if Mac users are holding off on buying new computers until there’s an Intel processor inside. That’s a reason why Apple is projecting flat sales for the current quarter, meaning things won’t change very much. Here the very same analysts who underestimated Apple’s income are now saying the company is just being cautious and that sales will probably continue on their upward spiral.

According to a report published in The New York Times, Richard S. Chu, financial analyst for SG Cowen Securities Corporation, had this stage comment, “The question for the investor is, Do you want to worry about something that is more than a year away?” The answer is probably not, and, frankly, my personal opinion is that the furor over the planned switch to Intel will largely fade into the background over the next few months except for a small subset of power users who care about such things. What does this mean? Well, I’m not a Wall Street analyst, and do not play one on TV, but I think that as folks look towards their computer needs over the next few months, they’ll take the sensible approach. If they need a new Mac now, they won’t worry about what kinds of parts Apple plans to use a year or two from now. Isn’t that the way it should be?

At the same time, there is one possible trouble spot in all this joy. All right, Mac sales were quite positive, at 1.182 million units, and the growth rate is said to be three times that of the PC industry. This means Apple is continuing to grow market share, and it does appear that the legendary iPod halo effect continues to influence sales. Sure, that’s 35% above last year, but much of that increase was confined to desktops, of which 687,000 were sold. Laptop sales, said to be the real growth factor in the PC industry, amounted to 495,000 units, an increase of just 8% from last year.

So what’s the cause of that modest iBook and PowerBook growth rate? Are Mac users lying in wait for faster models? If so, expect to wait a while, because it doesn’t seem as if we’re going to see any great improvement in portable performance until those Intel chips are ready to roll. So what can Apple do to goose sales? Well, with a war chest of $7.5 billion in cash, Apple can well afford to cut prices and not suffer all that much. What about a $799 iBook, and a $1,999 17-inch PowerBook? Dropping prices and, if possible, adding extra features and a tad more performance, could go a long way towards moving a lot more Mac portables into customer’s hands for the rest of the year. Or at least that’s my totally uninformed opinion.

You’ll also want to listen to this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE for some sage comments about Apple’s sales picture from noted industry analyst Joe Wilcox of JupiterResearch.

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What can I say? It’s not as if the arrival of the 10.4.2 update wasn’t highly anticipated. It had been rumored for several weeks, and there were still some Tiger bugs that had to be fixed, but when it comes to the list of fixer-uppers, this one has most of the others beat by a country mile.

The short list of 10.4.2 fixes includes:

- File sharing using AFP and SMB/CIFS network file services
- Single sign-on authentication and reliable access to Active Directory servers
- Autologin for managed user accounts
- AirPort and wireless access
- Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, including updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
- Finder updates including finding on Kind and using Slideshow
- Synchronizing your iDisk with .Mac
- Installation reliability
- Managing Dashboard widgets
- Address Book, Automator, iCal, iChat, Mail, Safari, and Stickies applications
- Compatibility with third party applications and devices

I’m sure you’ll find one of your pet bugs in that list. Even if you’re not on a large network, perhaps you’ve experienced some of the oddball AirPort behavior that some describe. If you want to explore the nuts and bolts a little more closely, you’ll want to check Apple’s Knowledge Base document about the “Delta” update, the one that takes you from 10.4.1 to 10.4.2. This version is 44MB in size, if you get the whole thing, but the version that appears in your Software Update pane may be smaller, perhaps just over 20MB. Apple these days only delivers the updates you need for a specific computer. It might be convenient if you still need dial-up to get online, but it also complicates matters if you want to keep a copy of the update and deploy it on other Macs in your home or office, assuming you have different models at hand.

If you never got around to installing 10.4.1, you’ll need the 58MB “Combo” update, which takes you direct from 10.4.

Apple lists nearly 60 “reliability and compatibility improvements,” but adds that this is just a “few of the enhancements and improvements,” which means there may be a lot of changes that aren’t documented. I suppose we’ll find out more about the impact of all these changes in the next few days, as the update spreads across the landscape.

One important improvement is the new Widget Manager, which resembles the old Extensions Manager in function. It lets you turn your widgets on or off, and provides a minus button that gives you the option to trash the ones you don’t really want, assuming they’re not from Apple. But it doesn’t stop there. When you download a widget courtesy of Safari, you’ll also be greeted by the Widget Installer that asks you whether you want to install it or not. When you download a widget via another browser, you’ll have to double click on the file itself to launch the installer.

If you opt to install, you’ll be immediately switched to Dashboard, where the widget will open and you’ll have a chance to test it and decide whether you want to keep it or not. This gives you a double dose of protection against cluttering up Dashboard with things you don’t want. It also serves as an added security measure, in case someone decides to wrap some sort of malware within the exterior of a friendly widget. The only thing missing is a password prompt, something that ought to be considered for 10.4.3, whenever that appears.

The Widget Manager and new installation scheme should have appeared with the original release of Tiger. It’s not certain if Apple added it because of your requests, or had been working on it all along, but didn’t have the time to complete the job. No matter. It does simplify handling your widgets, and that’s the important thing. It’s should be particularly appealing to novice users, who are apt to have trouble figuring out how to use the files after the download process is done.

Among the vast list of changes, there is another that cures a problem I’ve encountered since setting up Tiger, and that’s the occasional message in iChat that there is “insufficient bandwidth to maintain conference,” when I tried to set up an audio chat.

Should you install 10.4.2? Well, my experiences have almost always been positive with Mac OS X maintenance updates, but there are a lot of changes here, and maybe it’s best to hold off for a while to make sure there are no serious problems. You will, as usual, read scattered reports online about installation problems, unexpected application crashes and that sort of thing. The important thing is consistency. If a large number of users report the very same problem, you will have reason to consider whether you might be affected. Otherwise, it may just be related to a handful of systems and probably won’t impact you at all.

Finally, once the installation is done and you’ve restarted your Mac, you’ll want to launch Disk Utility and run the Repair Disk Permissions function. It’s not that there will be a lot of problems to fix, but a little extra caution is never a bad idea.

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