Attention everybody who heard Apple's original prediction that Apple's retail stores would be profitable right away and immediately snorted in utter disbelief: your pessimism, while perhaps unattractive, was right on the money. In other words, you were right that Apple wouldn't make any money-- at least not in the first year of its retail initiative. AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae Katie happened to notice that Apple filed its annual 10-K form yesterday, and while we're about as likely to go crawling through over eighty pages of financial data as we are to star in a Broadway musical based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, luckily there are always condensed info-bites from Reuters for us to fall back on-- and apparently those spiffy retail stores are going to be bleeding a little red ink for a while yet.

That's no reason to start panicking, of course, so if you were headed to the corner to huddle naked in a fetal position while rocking back and forth and muttering "I can't go back to CompUSA I can't go back to CompUSA," hold up a minute. Things really aren't that bad; instead of the originally-predicted break-even quarter and small profit for the year, Apple now expects its AppleGaps to report a "small loss" in both time frames. That's not the end of the world-- nor is it the end of the Apple stores. So if you've been using Apple's immaculate Australian-floor-tiled bathrooms instead of the official mall ones out by the food court, relax; you don't have to go back to the cesspools just yet.

For one thing, Apple states that the stores' impending "small loss" won't be due to anything fundamentally wrong with the company's retail strategy, but rather to-- surprise, surprise-- "the continued deterioration of the U.S. economy and the after-effects of the events of Sept. 11." Sure, a loss is a loss, but if the strategy is sound then that loss should turn to profit if the economy as a whole ever improves. And Apple's got enough cash to ride out the storm until then; in fact, the company is even planning on spending another $200 million on "capital expenditures" this year, and a big chunk of that is reportedly earmarked for "more Apple-branded retail stores," according to AFXpress.

Personally, we always figured that the retail stores might be a money-losing venture, but we always felt that was just fine; in our eyes, any loss those 27-and-counting stores might report should just be considered a marketing expense. More than anything else, the stores are big, gleaming Apple ads, spreading the gospel and sticking the company logo in the faces of millions of shoppers across the country who might otherwise never even think of "Apple" as anything other than a Jolly Rancher flavor. So red ink, shmed ink-- here's hoping those stores keep sprouting up next year, and more power to them.

Faithful viewer Paul pointed out another juicy little nugget extracted from the murky depths of Apple's 84-page 10-K form: as reported by ZDNet News, Steve Jobs's regular annual salary for fiscal 2001 was, once again, a dollar. One whopping buck. And while various B-list celebrities may knock themselves out in commercials trying to remind us that you can talk for twenty minutes anywhere in the U.S. for 99 cents, Steve's net salary won't even get him that phone call; after taxes, we figure his Apple earnings are maybe enough to score him a bag of pretzels out of the vending machine down the hall.

Oh, sure, the board of directors also gave him that Gulfstream jet, which certainly makes the whole buck-a-year salary thing go down a little easier, but we still blanch at the sheer injustice of the fact that Steve makes less in a year than we can pull out of the couch in about eight seconds of uninspired groping under the cushions while watching "Married... With Children" reruns. Indeed, Steve makes less than Al Bundy does selling shoes. And, not that Apple isn't doing pretty well these days, but this whole salary issue makes us wonder whether the company might be doing even better if its CEO were compensated a little more appropriately for his assigned duties. Yes, he's kicking butt; but would he be kicking more butt if he got a raise? This is the question that keeps us awake at night.

So, in the interest of promoting the health of Apple, and, therefore, the general welfare of the Macintosh platform, here's what we're a-gonna do: we are hereby introducing the AtAT Jobsian Salary Matching Program. Yes, folks, you heard it here first-- we're offering to double Steve's 2001 salary by kicking in another dollar. And we're not talking about couch-change, here; we're willing to go the extra mile and dig around in our old coat pockets to find actual paper money. How sweet is that?

Wait, it gets better-- remember how, when Apple's directors gave him a $45 million jet, they also handed him another $45 million in cash to offset the tax burden he'd face? Well, we're following suit. In addition to that dollar we're offering Steve, we're also going to kick in... another dollar. That means that, after taxes, Steve will finally get to make that twenty-minute phone call-- and he won't even have to touch a penny of his official Apple salary to do it, so he gets the pretzels, too. All he needs to do is drop us a line and we'll send him a couple of Washingtons as a hearty thanks for a job well done. Heck, it's the least we can do...

Great Aunt Gertrude, we never thought we'd see the day-- but it's finally out! Well, sort of. It's just a public beta, so it's not really out, out. And your odds of successfully downloading it before the next Ice Age arrives currently look pretty slim, since at broadcast time the server on which it resides was being flooded with a torrent of so much pent-up demand from long-suffering users that it makes the Slashdot effect look like a dripping faucet by comparison. Still, in at least some sense of the phrase, "it's out," and for that we're supremely grateful to faithful viewer Victor Agreda, Jr. for delivering the good news.

Oh, did we forget to mention what "it" is? "It" just happens to be Palm Desktop for Mac OS X, baby. That's right; as Palm puts it, now there's "one more reason to upgrade to Mac OS X!" That may be laying it on a little thick, since it's not like Palm synchronization doesn't work in Mac OS 9 anymore, or anything like that; indeed, as far as we can tell (and, seeing as our download of the software is currently progressing at a blazing 83 bytes per second, we won't be able to test for ourselves until sometime next year), we're going to be better off sticking with the Mac OS 9 version of the software for a while, yet-- conduits for Vindigo, AvantGo, etc. still need to be ported to Mac OS X before this is going to do us a whole lot of good. Still, while syncing via Classic has actually been working halfway decently, it's nice to see some concrete evidence of solid Mac OS X support coming from Palm's direction.

Then again, maybe "concrete evidence" isn't quite the right term-- it won't be particularly concrete until we manage to download and run this alleged new software, probably sometime in the year 2525. Say, have we ever told you about our brilliant plan one day to announce some fantastic piece of utter vaporware, hype it to the stars until demand is through the roof, and then finally announce its availability by sticking some large and appropriately-named file of garbage on a slow server on a 14.4 kbps dialup connection, thus proving that it "shipped"? Everyone figures the server is just on a hideously overloaded T3, nobody's able to download a copy, and the few that do and find they can't run the software just assume that the download got corrupted. Pay off a few reviewers to claim they've used the product and love it, and voilà: actual shipping vaporware. It can't fail!

Not that this applies in any way to Palm Desktop for Mac OS X, of course-- probably. We'll know for sure any eon, now. 2% of 13312K and counting.

Whoops, connection lost! Guess we're starting again. Wheeeeee!! (Thank heaven for almost-certainly-unauthorized mirrors...)