Hey, no fair! Nobody told us that Apple retail stores are dishing out swag to n-millionth customers. And when we say "swag," we're not talking about that chintzy promo stuff you may have gotten at an Apple store in the past, like a grand opening t-shirt or a wholly inexplicable (though admittedly nice) set of Panther dog tags or whatever. If you scope out the Apple Store SoHo web page, you'll notice an "In the news" sidebar with a story about "SoHo's two millionth customer"-- and photos of her grinning like mad and clutching her brand new iBook G4, silver miniPod, AirPort Express, and more. Granted, it's no 17-inch PowerBook, 40 GB iPod, and 10,000 free songs like Apple gave away for the 100 millionth iTunes Music Store download, but still, that's some serious winnin's for the mere act of walking through a doorway.

Now, we're not sure if this is strictly a SoHo thing, or if other Apple retail stores also throw a couple thousand clams' worth of in-demand gear at their n-millionth customers. We tend to think it might just be a "flagship store" kinda thing-- you know, big press for the big stores, etc., but on the other hand we wouldn't expect Apple to play favorites like that. Then again, we don't recall SoHo ever sliding a goody bag to its one millionth customer, although we're admittedly only semiconscious most of the time and we may well have missed it. The bottom line here is that with only a single datum it's tough to establish a pattern, but we imagine that it's fairly safe to assume that, if you happen to be the n-millionth customer at one of the higher-profile Apple stores, you'll be showered with riches and fame and you'll be well on your way down the path to international superstardom.

What this means, of course, is that there's now a simple way to score a free iBook, miniPod, and accessories (or whatever the next prize pack will turn out to be). All you have to do is get to New York or Chicago or whatever, stake out the entrance of your favorite flagship Apple retail store, and wait a few weeks or months for the next winner to be greeted at the door. Then you simply need to spend a few more months counting each and every warm body that passes through the entrance, and once the total gets close to the next big milestone, saunter up to the doorway and traipse across just in time to become the next "lucky" winner. What could be easier?

Of course, if you wind up making a teensy little error and you wind up as Mr. 4,000,001 or whatever, no harm done; just return to your stakeout post, wait for the 5 millionth winner, and start counting up to 6 million. It may take you a few tries, but after a couple of years or so, we're sure you'll eventually pull it off. Best of all, it's totally free. Score!

More good news on the education front: remember a couple of days ago when we mentioned that the state of Maine was having trouble scraping together enough funding to extend its unprecedented every-middle-school-child-gets-an-iBook program into its high schools? Worse yet, even its Plan B wasn't taking off; the idea was to let the schools sign up to participate and foot the bill themselves, but even after getting Apple to agree to provide its original $300-per-student-per-year price (calculated for a lease of 38,600 iBooks) for a severely reduced minimum quantity of just 8,400 iBooks, Maine still couldn't get enough of its high schools to agree to pony up the cash.

"Wait," you say, "$300 per student each year? But an iBook with an AirPort Extreme card normally only costs a high school $1,020, and provided a school successfully puts the fear of death into its students so they take care of the equipment, it shouldn't have much trouble making those iBooks last for three or four school years. So that doesn't sound like all that great a deal for Maine." Well, okay, fair enough, except that Apple's price to Maine "includes servers and repairs" and "training and [assistance] in installing the wireless networks that link the computers." Given that high school kids rarely fear death and will likely be using those iBooks as boogie boards within a week, we're guessing that the repair bill alone may mean that Apple doesn't get much out of this transaction, financially speaking.

What's more, Apple's either really committed to bettering the educational experience of our nation's children, or it's really desperate to grab as much education market share it can in an era when Dell is regularly kicking its hinder up and down the school halls, because according to an Associated Press article, the program is moving forward after all-- now that Apple has agreed to lower its "minimum participation level" to just 6,000 units. Sure, that's still a pretty big order as far as education purchasing goes, but it's nowhere near the volume of the original middle school deal. Nor does it have the coverage: it only puts Macs in "roughly one-third" of Maine's public high schools.

Nevertheless, it's still good news in that six thousand more impressionable young State o' Mainers will get to learn with the help of an iBook, and we're all for that. There's just one potential snag, of course: Maine will soon find itself in a situation in which all of its public school eighth-graders will be used to iBooking their way through the learning experience, but only one in three will get to keep the iBooks in high school. Do we sense an impending class war between the haves and the have-nots? Or maybe even whole schools raiding, sacking, and pillaging adjacent schools for their sweet iBook booty?

For the sake of our ratings, let's hope so. Fingers crossed!

Okay, we know-- technically it's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, which you've all patiently done without for the past several weeks, what with our hiatus and our recent wanderings into Obscure Text Processing territory and the like. But it's been kind of a tough week for Mac users, what with Fearless Leader's cancer surgery and the prospect of his ensuing month off, and while we know that nothing cheers up the community like viciously sticking it to Redmond in a decidedly untoward fashion, somehow we get the feeling that good news about Steve's condition would offer more long-term healing power than another uncouth swipe at Bill Gates's Flowbee haircut or further endless debate on the topic "Steve Ballmer: Nature's Cruel Joke, Or Did Someone Make Him That Way?"

To that end, let's take a break from the Apple stuff for a second, here, and check in on Steve's other company, Pixar, which just posted Street-beating quarterly results earlier this week. Now, despite our obsession with All Things Steve™, we normally wouldn't incorporate Pixarian profit statements into the plotlines of our Apple-flavored soap, because it wanders just slightly too far afield even by our standards. But if you tune in to the webcast of Pixar's Q2 earnings conference call, you'll find it contains a bit of news that can send you off into your weekend with a lighter heart and a wiggle in your walk.

Don't want to bother? No worries, we did it for you; it was no trouble, because the good bit comes right at the very beginning. When Pixar prez Ed Catmull first rocks the mic, he offers this choice assortment of warm fuzzies: "But first, I'd like to share with you an update on Steve Jobs's recuperation from surgery, which I'm sure you've all heard about by now. John Lasseter and I visited Steve, and I'm very happy to report that he's doing great. His recovery is going very well, and he expects to return to work in September. He was cracking jokes, and he gave us the distinct impression that he'd be firing off a lot of email from his PowerBook over the next month. It was really great to see him doing so well."

Now, granted, Catmull was addressing an audience of Wall Street analysts and it's no secret that shares of both PIXR and AAPL took a hit once news of Steve's surgery got out, but try to see Ed's report as more than just a cynical attempt to pull his company's stock price back up. We're filing this as independent corroboration that Steve's doing as well as he'd claimed in his email to Apple employees last Sunday-- even though Ed's shameless PowerBook mention might lead suspicious minds to wonder if he was just reading a statement that Steve had scripted himself. Then again, if Steve is well enough to be micromanaging every word that his coworkers say to the press, that's pretty good news, too. So if you've been holding your breath since the cancer scare started, go ahead and treat yourself to a little oxygen. The man's fine and he'll be cracking skulls again in no time.

By the way, if you're really jonesing for a Microsoft-bashing fix, may we offer the following as a do-it-yourself kit? Faithful viewer Ben tipped us off to a CRN report about how Microsoft is late with the long-awaited Windows XP Service Pack 2, which is supposed to close a lot of the more gaping security holes in that colander of an operating system. The real juice, though, is that CRN has followed InfoWorld's lead and has tagged Windows with the "b" word formerly reserved strictly for Apple use. "Beleaguered operating system," anyone?