The answers: hell no, meh and hell yes, respectively.

Oh – and Apple destroyed the most bullish of estimates for what seems like the 20th quarter in a row. Seriously, Street: when are you guys going to get a fucking clue?

Highlights:

Revenue: $15.7 billion (vs. $14.75 billion predicted)

Earnings: $3.25 billion or $3.51/share (vs. $3.11/share predicted)

iPads: 3.27 million units sold (tough for analysts to blow that one since Apple has been announcing sales)

Macs: 3.47 million units sold (vs. 3.2 million predicted)

Lowlights (courtesy of WSJ Marketwatch):

Francisco Jeronimo, a mobile analyst with IDC, said Tuesday that the antenna issue may still impact results for the fourth fiscal quarter. His firm’s research indicates that 66% of current iPhone owners were delaying their upgrades until a solution was announced.

My research indicates that IDC is a shill rag and 66% of Francisco Jeronimo’s family thinks he’s a jackhole. I don’t know the compensation basis for IDC analysts, but being right is not among them.

Just goes to show despite the efforts of frothing media putzes and characteristically clueless analysts, Apple just keeps printing money.

The tech industry rags are in a similar race to ding the popular to their benefit. And Apple is without question the biggest target. The latest hit-magnet: tales of the iPhone 4′s antenna woes. Your EVO’s battery lasts 2 hours, your Eris connects your 911 calls then mutes both parties, but the best iPhone ever made gets all the ink because some users encounter some problem some of the time when they hold the handset a particular way.

Fire up the presses!

Although this will make zero difference in the proliferation of poorly-written hit-whore pieces designed only to sensationalize a non-issue with the most popular mobile phone on the planet, I’d like to offer one piece of rational advice for those who have yet to take their Google-sponsored whack at the Apple piñata.

Wait until the company releases the software update it promised to address the problem.

Until then, frothing masses of the blogosphere, your contributions to knowing what the problem is, and therefore being in a position to recommend a course of action, mean shit. You have no clue what combination of hardware and software variables are contributing to this non-issue. Your speculation about what Apple can and should do is about as well-grounded as the latest about Britney.

For a moment, try to think like the respectable journalism that kept this country free.

Take a pass.

If Ballmer is going to make a cameo appearance at WWDC, I’m thinking if such an announcement happens, it’ll be Silverlight for the iPhone.

What do these 2 things have to do with the title of the post? Advertising. The standard unit of internet success is the page view. More page views, more revenue. Things like “facts” and “research” work against the internet “journalist” 2 ways: they take time, which limits output and they don’t tend to be as interesting as “despite the fact that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter about why Flash would never make it on Apple’s mobile devices, I think a philosophically identical runtime from Microsoft is going to be announced by Steve Ballmer at Apple’s largest developer event”

Fucking.

Retarded.

Want to know why respectable print media is floundering? Want to know why a 600 word article on a tech site has to be spread over 19 pages? Want to know why the content you read for free on the internet is reduced to moronic spew like MJ’s?

Page views. So go ahead, buy a Nexus One and make sure to click through plenty of Google’s ads, so they can continue to rake in billions from your personal data and incentivize the collective lobotomization of our society. Along this trajectory, in 5 years we’ll have reduced all language to clicks and grunts.

So as many denial-riddled pundits yawn at SJ’s claim that “this is the most important thing I’ve ever worked on” (which would include the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, to name a few), several other businesses are making messes in their shorts – and not the euphoric kind of mess. So now that the iPad’s here, who wins and who loses? Here’s Part 1 of a quick round-up, starting with the losers.

Adobe

When Apple made it clear that they had no interest porting Flash to the iPhone, many analysts shrugged it off as an anomaly. I mean: Flash is ubiquitous on the web and Apple always did weird shit like this. Besides, Adobe was working its plow improving a stripped down version of Flash that would sip battery power like a hummingbird and play super nice with mobile browsers. Just wait for the next version…or the next one. Anyway, even if Apple never adopted Flash and grabbed 50% of the smartphone market, it was only a small percentage of the entire mobile device market. There were still plenty of people to maintain Adobe’s Flash as the de facto runtime on the web, right?

Well the iPhone and now the iPad won’t support it. And Google doesn’t care much for it either. And now Firefox is switching off plug-ins by default for its RC3 Maemo mobile browser, in essence because Flash is a hog. HTML5 support is picking up. And up. Technorati everywhere are going on record as plainly stating that Flash is a dog and HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe’s response to the threat: Flash is everywhere. Sound familiar? Keep throwing up your Bang Bros. references to the ubiquity of Flash, guys. Jig’s up. Might not happen this year, but it’s happening: you’re fucked.

Amazon

Poor Jeff Bezos. After all that work getting the eInk technology to perfectly mirror a dead form of media interaction, Apple has to come out with a device that does 20 times as much and a ridiculously competitive price point. That whimpering you hear is no longer the effect Kindle is having on the eBook market; it’s now coming from the CEO’s office. First he’s going to get to see sales of his devices freeze (not that we ever knew how many they sold) and then he’ll get to see his margins – if there ever were any – crash through the floor.

But there’s hope! Amazon just acquired Touchco, a maker of multitouch panels, so a touch version of the Kindle is surely on its way. Because didn’t Apple get multitouch by acquiring Fingerworks? You just plug that shit right into your business model and – BAM! iPad competitor! Right? Right?

Guys, seriously: kick the clown shoes under the bed. A minor feature of one of Apple’s products just buried you.

The Windoz Ecosystem

Granted, no one expects Redmond to respond to the iPad with anything that anyone would rather use (except maybe Paul Thurrortt). But in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ll make a lot of noise about it and respond with something underwhelming. It won’t be the Courier, because the Courier is a bullshit cloud of vapor that smells exactly like Cairo, Longhorn, etc. The only people who’ve made money off the Courier are the people working for the design firm who did the rendering for this non-device. HP, who had the distinguished honor of having their tablet device fondled my Steve Ballmer’s sweaty mitts onstage at CES, is one known entry. Lenovo is another. M$ will respond not with some innovative take on slate computing, but with some bastardization of Windows 7. It will be a customized assemblage of some commodity PC giblets made to look like an iPad to a drunk 6 year old. Because M$ has been playing the me-too game with Apple for at least the last 15 years, and because the cash they spew into this space will have little – if any – return, M$ is clearly in the loser’s column, which should shock no one. Their unfortunate hardware partners, who really don’t have much of a choice, will be dragged right down with them.

Google

Google’s a loser on 2 fronts. First, as the always-brilliant Daniel Eran Dilger points out, the Google model of advertising is much more compelling on desktop and laptop devices (if you can use the word “compelling” to describe the experience of getting targeted ads dumped on your browsing experience). On devices like the iPhone, the probability of people clicking on an ad is much lower. People don’t want to rabbit-trail ads on mobile devices; they want access to the content they’re looking for. Apple’s iPad, while allowing for a greater surface to browse the web like a laptop, still sticks with the iPhone’s touch model, which one would think would continue to discourage ad clicks. More people using iPads to browse the web means fewer people using laptops and desktops. The value of Google to advertisers drops. Some content providers may even prefer to go to a subscription model instead of trying (and almost always failing – or producing content like 99% of the toiletries that dominate tech websites) to get advertising to support their online presences. Apple does subscription models pretty well. Less business for Google

The second front is Google’s suggestion that they’re going to compete with the iPad with a port of Chrome to a tablet device. Maybe Google will shop their tablet-ready versions of the OS to some device-makers before branding their own device, something I’m sure mobile device makers and carriers loved when they did it with Android and the Nexus One. Funny thing is: this business keeps falling for the “Lucy/Charlie Brown field goal” trick perfected by Microsoft. Google’s insistence on continuing to invest money in making inferior OS ports that compete with Apple products lands them smack in the middle of Failsberg.

Next up: the Winners

Investors have grown accustomed to Apple crushing Wall Street estimates, so there are strong expectations for the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter, which ended September. Nearly 20 analysts have lifted price targets since September.

Analysts finally stopped notching their estimates at an average of $9.2 billion revenue and a profit of $1.42 a share.  So I guess the days of Apple catching analysts with their pants down are over, right?

Notsomuch.

This afternoon, Apple reported Q4 revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share, destroying every estimate on the Street.  You can take your pick of summaries, but Apple Investor News is a nice aggregator.

Apple must still be exploiting that lull in anticipation of Windows 7.

The folks at IDC (the same IDC that found that “Windows is cheaper than Linux“) cannot understand why people continue to buy Macs.  I mean, WTF?!

“Their sales just seem to defy all logic,” [IDC's] O’Donnell repeated. “There are obviously a certain number of people buying Macs even in the face of a recession.”

There are also a certain number of people who persist in their employment despite having their heads cemented up their asses.

Ed’s latest shaken fist is over Apple’s bundling of the iPhone Configuration Utility with his update of iTunes.  Being the vigilant watchman he is, he was immediately wise to Apple’s game.

THEY LEFT THE CHECKBOX CHECKED!  Such incursion; such violation!

This isn’t the first time Apple has tried to bundle other software with updates for iTunes, which gives birth to Ed’s clever click-bait title: “Apple up to its old tricks, pushing unwanted software onto PCs”.

I’ll let you soak in the irony of the title for a moment.  Funny huh?

It gets better.  Because I like to point out irony to Windows enthusiasts (who by their very definition have no sense of irony), I’ll bang out a sentence or two in the comments section of webskid like Ed’s article.  Most of the time, doing so requires that you register at the site.  Undaunted by the time and effort required to create a user name and password at ZDNet (and stifling the urge to shower immediately afterward), I was treated to the following:

Note the three checked boxes to the right.  HOW DARE THEY CHECK MY BOXES FOR ME?!

So, I chuckle at the bonus irony and uncheck the boxes.  No thanks, boys.  Then I get the confirmation email:

I wish to WHAT?  Not only do I have to UNCLICK MY OWN CHECKBOXES on the site where Ed cries his self-righteous tears of injustice, I’m being spammed by them anyway?  Are you for real?  Well, obviously, I want to change my newsletter preferences from “no, don’t send me shit” to “really I fucking meant “don’t send me shit” when I unclicked those checkboxes”.  So I click the link to change my preferences and:

Wow. You want more information about me in exchange for the privilege of unsubscribing from spam that I should have never been on a list for to begin with?

To recap:

1. Ed Bott bitches about Apple’s software update foisting things on his PC he doesn’t need – that is, if he doesn’t understand that a checkmark in a box means he will in fact be downloading these things.

2. To register to leave comments on Ed Bott’s site, ZDNet‚ you have to uncheck 3 boxes to prevent you from being spammed by them.

3. Unclicking a checkbox on ZDNet apparently doesn’t mean what Apple thinks it means.  ZDNet still spams you.

4. You have to provide ZDNet with more information about yourself in order to really, really unregister for the shit you shouldn’t have been getting in the first place.

I mean, as a Mac guy who likes to laugh at Wintards, I’m all about the low-hanging fruit, but this even makes me a little embarrassed.

LOL.  Right.

Apple doesn’t do optimistic, especially with unemployment numbers hitting 10% in several states.  The game Apple plays is low-balling estimates at the conference call so they can smash them at the next one.  If they were to ever come in under their own guidance, it would be disastrous, especially since some of the smarter analysts are wise to SJ’s game.  For them to jack up their estimates in this economy, there’s got to be something in the pipeline, kiddies.   Something big.

Only time will tell (yes – that’s a joke).

Pffffffft.

Apple will stomp these estimates for 2 simple reasons: 3GS and MBP.  We know the 3GS blew past predicted sales and it looks like the price cut in the MacBook Pro line may make June one for the record books at Apple.   Get ready for the “boom”‚ indeed.

Update: $1.35/share on $8.34B in revenue – a new record for a non-holiday quarter.

Not to be confused with a fundraiser for breast cancer‚ the interface for the Project Pink phone is supposedly being designed by the Danger‚ Inc. folks that M$ picked up via acquisition last year.  Who are they?  Aside from being creators of how-to videos that make you want puncture your eardrums with something sharp‚ they were the masterminds behind the Sidekick phone software.

So it’ll be based on WinMo‚ but with a whimsical Danger overlay?  Maybe smartphone hardware with hip software?  Sounds about as well thought-out as any piece of consumer electronics M$ has put out to me.  Microsoft may also slap their name on the hardware.  Sweet Christ let that please be true.

Even though Microsoft is capable of announcing products that look finished – complete with appearances on late-night TV and star athlete endorsements – 18 months prior to their promised ship dates‚ Mary Jo is having a hard time pinning Redmond down on details.  One thing that is known:  McCann Erickson has been hired to manage the ad campaign for the PinkyPhone.  You may remember them as the firm who directed the Halo 3 campaign for the 360.  In that campaign‚ according to the firm‚ the challenge was changing the question from “how do you pull $40 million of milk from a dried-up titty how do you market a video game?” to “how do you honor a hero?”.  In Pink’s case‚ the challenge will be changing the question from “what the fuck is Microsoft thinking?” to “you guys made the Sidekick?”.

When it comes to shitty follow-ups to competitors’ successful products‚ no one walks into a punch quite like M$.  Here’s to another billion-dollar capital spigot!  Cheers!