Meanwhile, Apple's stock price has taken a beating lately, too. After hitting a three-year high of $47.50 last week, it dropped to $41.31 after some very heavy trading-- right after Apple posted some terrific quarterly results. Most stock-watchers seem to blame the fall on two factors: profit-taking from investors who might simply feel that Apple can't possibly get any better than they are now, and the downgrading of AAPL from "buy" to "neutral" by financial analysts Salomon Smith Barney.

Profit-taking seems to happen a lot after Apple posts a good quarter, possibly because AAPL attracts a lot of investors who bought the stock purely due to its growth potential. The Salomon Smith Barney downgrade is slightly more interesting, though. Their big reason for taking AAPL down a notch was their claim that Apple was "channel stuffing," or artificially inflating their sales numbers by shipping more machines to dealers than those dealers could reasonably be expected to sell. But Apple Recon claims that Apple is innocent of such a move, hinting that the extra machines in the channel came from Best Buy ordering way more iMacs than they were able to sell. That would make sense, given Best Buy's clueless attempts at Mac sales. Remember, they're the ones who hit the panic button and suddenly started to unload iMacs for $999 in December, back when such a low price constituted a fairly hefty per-box loss.

Recon also points out that Salomon Smith Barney claims that Apple stuffed "five weeks of iMac inventory" into the channel, which would potentially represent hundreds of thousands of iMacs. That's obviously not correct. So why would Salomon Smith Barney say such a thing? Ready for a conspiracy-less conspiracy theory? An anonymous Apple employee contacted us to note that, prior to the downgrade, Apple changed their default broker for the Employee Stock Purchase Plan and their Employee Options program. The new broker is eTrade, and the old one was... Salomon Smith Barney. Hmmmm... Thousands of Apple employees no longer doing business with Salomon Smith Barney-- is there a bitter taste in the air? Do we hear the distant sound of an axe grinding? It's purely hearsay at this point, but it's an interesting theory, nonetheless...