Depending on whose expectations you’ve followed, Apple exceeded them or didn’t quite meet them. In recording the second best financial quarter in its history, Apple reported revenues of $4.36 billion for the quarter ending in March, which is somewhat less than the analysis from Thomson First Call of $4.5 billion. However, net income was $410 million, or 47 cents per share. This was above predictions of 43 cents a share. But it was in line with what Apple had been promising, so what can you say?

In fact, Apple’s stock rose in trading after hours, so clearly Wall Street was pleased. Looking at the numbers, Apple sold 8.5 million iPods. Although this was a 40 percent drop from the December quarter, it also represented a 61% increase over last year. What’s more, despite more and more pretenders in the music player arena, the iPod’s market share just keeps soaring, and is now 78% in the U.S., compared to 71% in the last quarter. The iTunes Music Store now has an 87 percent piece of the legal music download pie in this country. The present inventory includes 2.9 million audio tracks, 60,000 Podcasts, including two from us, 9,000 videos and 70 TV shows. So much for calls to open up the digital rights management or add a subscription-based service.

I’ll cover more of these numbers and their impact, but if you want the raw, unvarnished specifics, check at Apple’s site. After the numbers were released, Apple’s financial people hosted a conference call with industry analysts to answer questions, more or less. While some raw numbers were well in evidence, details about new products and strategies were, as usual, kept close to the vest. Did you expect otherwise?

The big impediment to boosting sales of new Macs is the ongoing switch to Intel processors. As older PowerPC Macs get longer in the tooth, customers are simply waiting on the sidelines for the models they want to be updated. Apple continues to maintain that it’ll finish the transition by the end of the year, but that’s a long, long time when it comes to buying a new computer. One expects the Power Macs and probably the Xserve, both likely renamed, to be the last to be updated.

Another potential holdup is the availability of Universal applications. In the creative field, the wait for Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 seems eternal. Right now, Adobe won’t commit to having it out before 2007, but Apple is supposedly working with them to help them deliver the upgrade as soon as possible. Now this is a key admission, because Adobe appears to have a whale of a job ahead of them to move their flagship software to a new programming environment and then deliver support for MacIntels.

Today, Photoshop, for example, suffers from a speed hit of about 50% when run in the Rosetta emulation environment. For a busy creative company, particularly those who work with large files and complicated rendering filters, this isn’t acceptable. So these companies will stick with their Power Macs for now. And, in truth, the Power Mac G5 Quad, outfitted with loads of memory, remains a world-class workstation. But a lot of buyers don’t seem to be in evidence.

The unofficial scuttlebutt has it that you’ll see an Intel-based successor to the Power Mac, possibly rebranded as a Mac Pro, some time in the third quarter of the year. This would be shortly after new generations of Intel’s desktop chips are available. Now we all know that Apple’s WWDC in August will feature the first official preview of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Perhaps you’ll also see the new professional Mac desktops at the same time, with promised delivery dates in September, and perhaps as late as October for the fastest versions.

Now, I’m not reading tea leaves. I leave that to people who guest on my “other” radio show. I’m just looking at the trends and Intel’s road map to come up with that conclusion. That, of course, would fulfill Apple’s promise to finish its Intel migration before the end of the year, but it also raises the pressure on developers to finish up Universal versions of their applications as soon as possible.

Adobe? Well, I just wonder what sort of help Apple is providing and how many resources it is committing to speeding up development of Creative Suite. But that may not be enough. What about critical 3D applications for the film and TV industries, such as After Effects and Maya?

Boot Camp? Well, Apple seems upbeat on the response so far, but continues to repeat the mantra about not selling or supporting Windows. So you’ll still have to buy it yourself if you want to take the dual-booting route or use a virtual machine, such as Parallels Workstation. And, by the way, I’ll have a preliminary report on the Parallels product tomorrow.

In case you’re wondering, Apple is predicting a similar earnings outlook for the third quarter of 2006, which ends in June. Again, the sales draught that results from the Intel transition is going to keep the numbers flat for a while. Now a new iBook, by whatever name, can help goose sales for consumers and educational buyers, but it’s an open question when it’ll appear.

I’m just waiting for a 17-inch version of the MacBook Pro.

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Despite all the undeniable advantages of Apple’s Boot Camp, it has one serious shortcoming: You have to reboot to switch between the Mac OS and Windows. Now this may not be so serious a matter if you can exist in one environment or the other for an extended period of time, or you need performance that rivals or exceeds a regular Windows box.

But for most of you, if you need to run Windows at all, it’s an occasional practice, and you’d like to be able to do it side-by-side without any delays for rebooting and reopening your documents. However, doing that on an Intel-based Mac, up till now, hasn’t been so easy. Microsoft is still waffling about whether it’ll ever make a version of Virtual PC for MacIntels. Other virtual machine applications, based on open source projects, haven’t fared too well. Performance remains unsatisfactory for extended use, and installations can consume many, many hours of your valuable time.

Enter Parallels Workstation.

You probably never heard of the company, largely because it’s quite new, but there are over 75,000 beta testers of the Mac OS X version of this application. And while still rough and not quite ready for prime time, Parallels Workstation has a huge amount of potential. If Microsoft were seriously considering bringing Virtual PC to Intel-based Macs, it may now be forced to reconsider.

After equipping myself with a copy beta 4, the latest release, and Windows XP Pro, I requested a 30-day user license. When Parallels Workstation is released, it’ll cost you $49.99, but you can save $10 if you place your order now.

Thus equipped, I went about putting Parallels through its paces. When you launch the application, you’ll find that things are spelled out, more or less, on the setup screens, but you have to get accustomed to such terms as virtual machine, which is the process of running another operation system at the same time as your Mac, and guest operating system.

The first launch of Parallels Workstation will present a Startup Options dialog, and when you select the Create new virtual machine option, a Wizard or assistant will guide you through the remaining steps. After an introduction, you’ll select the Create a typical VM option, which supposedly delivers the proper settings. On the next window, you choose the kind of OS and its name. After choosing Windows and Windows XP, I clicked next to proceed.

Here things get a little more complicated, because you’ll have a chance to specify the name for your virtual machine and the location of the configuration file. The best thing to do is don’t think about it and leave well enough alone. Click Finish and you’re ready to roll, well sort of, because there is one key step remaining and that is to activate your software, which requires selecting the appropriate function from the Help menu. This seems counterintuitive, since you ought to be able to take care of business the first time you launch the application, and I hope that Parallels will consider that option as it updates the software.

Once your virtual machine is running, simply insert your operating system CD to begin the installation process and, as I said, I used Windows XP Pro. Unlike Apple’s Boot Camp’s restriction to the XP SP2 installer, Parallels can support many flavors of Windows, Linux, Solaris and even OS/2. Although some claim to have performed a full XP installation in 20 minutes flat, it took about an hour on the Intel-based 20-inch iMac Apple sent me for review. This is only slightly faster than my recent Boot Camp encounter.

After Windows XP Pro was up and running, I installed Parallels Tools, a set of drivers that enhances video and input device support. I gave the virtual machine 512MB of RAM, and went about going through the motions of using my new operating system.

In general, it seemed about as snappy as the Boot Camp option, although dragging windows around seemed a tad ragged. I also ran into some sound-related issues. When playing a stream of one of my radio shows, the audio would stutter momentarily before it got underway. Unlike Boot Camp, the audio stream would stop playing whenever the the Windows or Mac OS screen saver was activated. Optical drive support also needs a little work. I couldn’t eject a CD, and had to use the Finder to make it happen.

Sharing files is a convoluted process at this stage of development. You have to literally set up file sharing for Mac OS X and Windows, but beta 5, due shortly, is supposed to provide a better alternative. Support for USB is also a work-in-progress.

All in all, however, Parallels Workstation is an impressive application. The company is working hard to address the various bugs and performance is surprisingly good. Parallels takes advantage of the virtualization technology built into the Intel chips Apple is using, and the benchmarks reveal the benefits. Macworld’s Rob Griffiths reports that, compared to Boot Camp’s dual-boot option, Parallels speed approaches 80%. For those who are used to the pathetic performance of Virtual PC and other emulation options, this is an amazing achievement.

As I said, however, it’s still a beta, so you’ll want to take the usual cautions should you give it a try, such as backing up your files, and preparing yourself to endure unexpected glitches. But the company seems eager to address as many problems as it can, and I’m really encouraged by this application’s speedy progress.

I’m anxiously awaiting the final release, and I’ll then give it a full review.

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Although lots of you have settled on Firefox as your browser of choice for both the Mac and Windows environments, I remain on the fence, at least on my Mac. Sure, it opens pages quite speedily, and I like the fact that previously-viewed sites appear almost instantaneously when you click the back button. I also like the fact that it’s making reasonable progress in grabbing market share from Internet Explorer for Windows.

At the same time, I keep returning to Safari because a few little things about Firefox don’t quite appeal to my personal sensibilities. Take initial launch time. Yesterday, when the Universal version, 1.5.0.2, appeared, I ran the built-in update feature on a copy installed on a 20-inch Intel-based iMac. I expected wonders in light of how Safari sings on a MacIntel, but my initial encounter was disappointing. Yes, Firefox’s launch times were faster, but not noticeably better than on a PowerPC Mac.

I did a quick Get Info probe and, yes, it was the correct version, but it bore the label “PowerPC” rather than “Universal.” Did the automatic update process somehow fail to replace the appropriate application code? Well, no sense trying to fathom the unfathomable, so I just downloaded a full copy, and replaced the application. This time it was properly labeled as Universal application, or at least that’s what the iMac’s Finder told me, but it still didn’t alter performance noticeably. All I can say is that the previous version, running in Rosetta emulation, ran much worse, so that’s progress, and repeat launches were reasonably swift.

So, once you get past this relatively minor shortcoming, what’s not to like? Sure, it does have a world-class browser engine, and I agree that, in some respects, it does seem a swifter beast than Safari. But the little things still irritate, and maybe it’s because it bears the veneer of not being completely Mac-like.

Take the bookmarks menu. Why is there no support for site icons, or Favicons? It’s not a serious shortcoming, but one that even Firefox’s Mac-only sibling, Camino, manages to overcome. I can see the cards and letters even now suggesting I’ve lost my senses over such a tiny issue, but there you go.

I am also one of those people who prefers to print long Web documents rather than just sit and read them on the screen. Call me old fashioned, but it gives me the flexibility of taking my research with me to the bedroom or to the lunch table; that is when I have lunch by myself, and not with friends or family present. It reminds me when my father, long deceased, would come to my home back in New York with newspaper in hand, sit down at our kitchen table, and begin to read. Incredibly, his attention never wavered from our conversation, so maybe he needed the paper as a crutch, just in case we began to bore him.

Maybe it’s a habit I’ve somehow inherited in my middle years.

My problem with Firefox is that, in formatting pages to fit within the boundaries of the printed page, it makes the text too small. This is a defect of other Mozilla-based browsers, and I wonder if nobody else cares, since I don’t think it would be all that difficult to overhaul the print engine. In case you’re wondering, font preferences are identical to those of Safari, in every respect, and I do not encounter the problem in the latest versions of Opera, even the current prerelease of version 9, which also has Universal support.

Now maybe the developers at Mozilla are younger than I and do not regard smaller text as seriously as I do. Yes, I can read the words, despite the tiny point sizes. I’ve worn contact lenses or glasses for decades, but I do not need any additional correction for reading. At least not yet. Perhaps those developers are just trying to save trees, which is a commendable goal, although I’m not quite pleased with their solution.

Or maybe it’s me. You see, I’m not particularly enamored of browser tabs either. I don’t mind if the application spawns numerous windows, cascading across or down the screen, and I’m not unaccustomed to jumping from one to the other. Sure, I suppose I should give tabs a try, and one day I will, but it’s not a priority in my life.

The real browser feature I crave is the ability to restore your working environment when the application is relaunched. Opera and OmniWeb have figured out a solution for that requirement. Maybe Firefox 2.0? Or perhaps Apple will reveal an even more compelling technique when they introduce Mac OS 10.5 and the expected Safari 3.0.

Now when it comes to running a Windows, even on that iMac on which it was installed courtesy of Boot Camp, I always stick with Firefox. I avoid Internet Explorer like the plague and it’s nice to know that more and more Windows users are also getting the message.

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