Hey now, it's been pointed out to us that there's something slightly fishy about those latest sales numbers from IDC that had us fretting about Apple's market share plummeting ever earthward-- to wit, there's a minor discrepancy between IDC's count of Macs sold and Apple's own reported number of units shipped. How minor a discrepancy, you ask? Mmmmm, well, a ballpark potential difference of, say, thirty-seven frickin' percent. So, no biggie.

Here's the thing: faithful viewer Michel Benevento noticed that IDC states that Gateway sold 729,000 systems during the third calendar quarter. Fair enough, we suppose; after all, that's how many Gateway itself claims that it sold, and we've never known a cow to lie. (Then again, we've never known a cow to speak, either, so maybe that's not exactly an unimpeachable endorsement of talking bovine ethics.)

Meanwhile, IDC claims that Apple sold only 462,000 Macs last quarter, which made Michel a mite suspicious-- since Apple's own quarterly results press release indicates that the company "shipped 734 thousand Macintosh units during the quarter." Okay, fine, "shipping" 734,000 Macs isn't quite the same as "selling" them, but we're having a tough time figuring out how Apple might have sold only 462,000 of the Macs that it shipped. Especially since during the earnings conference call, Apple indicated that it had managed to reduce its channel inventory from six and a half weeks to five weeks, which implies (to us, anyway) that Apple sold more units than it shipped. Unless we're missing something (and, as always, there's a damn good chance that we are), it sounds to us as if Apple sold more computers than Gateway.

Armed with this information, we hunted down some lackey at IDC, taped his head to the bumper of our car, drove nice and slow, and politely asked him how his research firm had set about determining the number of Macs sold last quarter. He replied that they let a Psychic Chicken™ peck at corn kernels scattered over a numeric keypad and then just rounded down.

And thus the mystery is solved. So how come we, your typically skeptical AtAT staff, took an uncommon detour into unquestioning credulity when we first encountered the IDC numbers? Simple, really; when we looked at IDC'S press release it was about four o'clock in the morning-- and the principle upon which the entire infomercial empire is based is that people will believe just about anything at 4 AM. Which also explains the six Ab Forces in our hall closet.