Look out, people-- there's another one of those market research reports flying around overhead. You know these things; every so often they come swooping down from out of the wild blue yonder, revealing some surprising facet of knowledge about... well, about anything, really, but of course, being the single-minded and obsessive folks we are, if it doesn't relate in some way to Apple, it might as well be invisible. But when an Apple-related one of these things shows up, it's time to bask in the glory of its imparted knowledge, because it usually means that some people you've never heard of are making sweeping generalizations because they think they know so much more than you do. And that's always fun, right?

So here's the latest: MacNewsWorld discusses a new report from some firm called TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence which reveals that "as many as 50 percent of PC buyers who considered a Mac over the last 12 months actually ended up purchasing one," which is, of course, fantastic news, until you consider that no fewer than 50 percent actually ended up not. So who are these prospective Mac buyers who wind up getting Wintels instead? Well, according to TechnoMetrica, they're people who hear that Apple makes great computers, but who are "unaware of what an Apple actually is. Once they find out, many of them end up buying a Dell."

What, exactly, do you suppose they mean by "what an Apple actually is"? Because now we're picturing these shoppers saying, "oh, wait-- the Mac is a good computer? Never mind; we wanted a soulless, virus-riddled hunk of assembled parts that'll suck the very humanity from our marrow at an alarming rate. But thanks anyway."

The study also claims that, "although Apple sold 900,000 computers over the length of the study, it could have potentially sold 800,000 more during that time period." How? Well, TechnoMetrica notes that an irksome "38 percent of those surveyed cited price as their number-one driving factor" in deciding which computer to buy. (Philistines! Filthy heathens! What? Oh. Sorry, don't mind us.) In other words, they don't care that a $799 eMac includes functionality-- we're thinking specifically of all the iLife apps, here-- that they'd need to spend hundreds of dollars to add to that $399.99-after-rebate eMachines box (monitor sold separately), or that they'll save hours of time and bucketfuls of tears by getting a computer that actually works. In other other words, Apple could theoretically almost double its market share by shipping a displayless cheapMac with as much class, quality, and joy of use ripped out of it as necessary to bring the price down to the $400 level of the bottom-tier Dell and eMachines offerings.

To which we can only say, "duh."

This isn't news, but is a number that sheds a little more light on a long-raging debate: for years, the pro-cheapMac lobby has steadfastly maintained that shipping a stripped-down Mac for under $500 is an essential step to building market share, and the TechnoMetrica survey certainly seems to back that up. The anti-cheapMac arguments generally run along the lines of "getting a Mac down to that price range would necessitate removing too much of the quality and feature set that makes a Mac a Mac, and then we start getting into the Amelio strategy of trying to increase sales to the Wintel crowd by making Macs as much like Wintels as possible." Meaning, what profiteth Apple if it gains the whole world and loses its soul?

So the bottom line becomes, is it worthwhile for Apple to risk the Mac's reputation as a seamless "it just works" user experience in order to sell twice as many units at a reduced margin, merely to expand the user base to include people who don't see the extra value in a $799 eMac in the first place?

This is more of a question for the rest of us than for Apple, because if it thought the answer was "yes," it probably would have shipped cheapMacs years ago. Personally, while the idea of someone hooking up a new $499 Mac to some crappy old phosphor-burned 14-inch monitor just to save a few hundred bucks sets our teeth on edge, we think the market share increase might be worth the aesthetic affront to all that's good and decent. In particular, we bet that Apple could increase its education sales in a big way if schools knew that they could (shudder) reuse those skanky old VGA monitors, and there's a fair chance that students might gain a lifelong appreciation for the Mac's user interface-- even if they do only get to see it on a small screen that tinges everything green and has a mysterious dark patch spreading across its left side.

Heck, if nothing else, it'd be fun to see a cheapMac shake things up a little. But we doubt Apple agrees.

You know, we were really starting to get the shakes over here, because by our count it's been literally minutes since somebody in the press whined publicly about how Steve Jobs gets paid too much money. Ever since the Gulfstream jet, complaints about Steve's compensation have been a constant sort of background-noise thing, like living near the train tracks-- before long our conscious minds tuned it out, but our collective subconscious relies on the regularity of the noise to keep our internal clocks calibrated throughout the day. So when the media is suddenly devoid of pundits yapping about how Apple pays Steve way too much moolah for the job he does and the performance he turns in, it's like our brains have suddenly lost contact with the radio tower, and we plunge headlong into a nightmarish existence of chronological anarchy. We wind up eating breakfast at 5 PM and trying to tune into The Daily Show at 4:37 in the morning. It's not a pretty sight. Although the last time something like this happened, we did learn that at 4:30 AM, Comedy Central turns into the All-Girls Gone Wild-Infomercial channel. Who knew?

Anyway, it was faithful viewer Scott who pulled us back from the abyss by forwarding us a Business Wire release touting the San Francisco Business Times's new print article revealing "the Bay Area's most overpaid and underpaid CEOs." Guess who just happens to star in the very first sentence? That's right: "Apple Computer's Steve Jobs was among the most overpaid CEOs in the Bay Area in 2003." Not highest-paid, mind you; most overpaid. And not "the" most overpaid, either, which is sort of implied by his top billing in the announcement's introductory sentence, but merely "among" the most overpaid; from the context of statements further on we gather he's actually ranked fifth or something. Better luck next year, Steve!

Unfortunately, the full article isn't available online, and we readily admit that we haven't flown cross-country to pick up a copy of the issue in question, so we're ranting without all the facts at our disposal, but that's never stopped us before. That said, to us it seems slightly less than accurate to say Steve was paid $74.5 million last year when in reality he received $1 and five million shares of restricted stock. Why? Because for one thing, he can't touch that stock for three years, so his actual spendable paycheck last year was one measly buck. But more than that, it's the fact that those five million shares of stock were actually trade-ins for unexercised and worthless stock options he'd been paid in 2000 and 2001. In other words, when Steve finally has the ability to cash in those shares in 2006, he'll really be collecting his pay from 2000-2001, not 2003. Oh, and since the Business Times has no way of knowing what AAPL's price will be when Steve can finally sell (it's plummeted before-- believe us, we know), attributing a dollar value to the granted shares strikes us as a tad presumptuous.

Meanwhile, Steve's bestest buddy Larry Ellison "was among the most underpaid," which struck us as rather unlikely given the man's bank account and penchant for suits that cost more than the gross domestic product of Hong Kong. After reading a bit further, though, the pieces fell into place: similar to the way that Steve only gets a dollar per year in actual salary, Larry's paychecks from Oracle "only" total $59,165 for the year, but "the $40.5 million that Ellison took home from stock option sales wasn't counted as part of his 2003 compensation because his election to sell stock options was a personal investment choice not related to company compensation decisions."

Oh, great-- so when Steve got a dollar a year and stock options which he never exercised, the media counted those as employee compensation and said he was the highest-paid CEO in the country. But when Larry collects a salary of 59 grand and cashes in $40 million in options, those options somehow don't count. Why, we'd be at least mildly incensed by the double standard if it weren't the exact sort of anti-Steve media coverage we need to get our mental clocks wound back up.

Still, you just gotta love the attitude, right? After all, he may not be perfect, but is there anyone else on the face of the planet who could have hauled Apple back from the brink like Steve did? Does a jet and five million shares of restricted stock really constitute "overpayment" for a bona fide miracle? Because down here at AtAT we happen to be shareholders ourselves, so in the most tenuous sense that's our money they're paying Steve-- and every time we sit down at Mac OS X, or dial up a song on an iPod, or even check the current value of our AAPL holdings, we flash back to 1996 and realize we're getting Steve's services dirt cheap.

Then again, maybe we've just been RDFed to wit's end. But either way, we feel pretty good about it.

Hoooo, apparently it's Long-Winded Day down here at the AtAT compound! Those first two scenes alone already more than chewed through our allotted airtime; it just proves the old rule that the 'net-based soap opera format can't accommodate more than one careering foam-flecked rant per episode, we guess. So we're going to pick a nice, innocuous topic and get through it quick, and then we'll shut up and let you all get to your whole weekend thing, whatever that may be. Deal?

Hey, how about this? Faithful viewer JD MacMan tipped us off to a short AppleInsider blurb which reports that there's a new Apple retail store in the offing-- and it's going to be the first one in Iowa. Since we're trying to finish this episode and get off the air before your great-grandchildren die of old age, we'll refrain from pretending that we think Iowa's a different country and forgo the cracks about how this is another shining example of Apple's commitment to international retail expansion, etc. It hurts, but we'll manage.

You want evidence? Well, no listings for positions at an Iowa store have yet surfaced at Apple's retail jobs page, but AppleInsider refers to positions showing up at "third party Internet job listing web sites" starting last Wednesday, so we tried a search at Monster.com, and voilà: seven openings for standard Apple retail positions (Mac Specialists, Mac Geniuses, Keyholders, etc.) with a location of West Des Moines, Iowa. Location-wise, the listings don't get any more specific than that, but AppleInsider claims that the new store will be going into Jordan Creek Town Center, a new mall that'll be opening in about a month and a half; there's no Apple store listed in Jordan Creek's directory, but AI claims that "leasing representatives" from the mall have confirmed that Apple has staked out some space.

Given how many retail store grand openings the company has under its belt, we haven't a clue why Apple is apparently trying to keep this Des Moines store so covert; between the lack of job listings at Apple's site, the absence of the store from the mall's directory, and-- reportedly-- the top secret construction of the store camouflaged by the continuing construction of the new mall itself, you'd think the company was planning to sell black market military-grade munitions there or something. Will we be able to plunk down $1.2 million in nonsequential unmarked bills and walk out with an iWMD? We guess we'll find out when August rolls around.

See? We can be briefish if we have to; it just makes our eyes and ears bleed, that's all. Now go play while we try to figure out how to apply a Band-Aid to an eyeball. Shoo.