Hey, so did everybody have fun at yesterday's Apple Analyst Meeting in Cupertino? What do you mean, you didn't go? Sure, it's technically for financial analysts only, but c'mon, everybody knows that they let in anyone with a $3,000 suit and a look of smug self-satisfaction. The look takes a bit of practice, granted, but the suit is easy to get: a real analyst is easily lured into a dark alley with a skim mocha double-tall latté, at which point the only challenge is incapacitating him without getting blood on his Armani. (We find that a light tap on the back of the skull with a sock full of quarters is usually all it takes.) Ah, well; maybe next year. Too bad, too-- you missed some excellent bagels. Mmmmmmm, Cranberry Orange.

Fear not, though; sure, you may have missed the free munchies, but at least you can still get a dose of Reality Distortion Field energy by tuning in to the QuickTime streams of the event. For what it's worth, Steve only makes his appearance in the final "Q & A" stream, but everything he says there is pure gold, in terms of both attitude and content. The factoids, for example, are priceless; remember when the iTunes Music Store had a 70% market share for all legal music downloads? Well, now it's up to "over 80% market share," prompting Steve to refer to it as "the Microsoft of music stores." (Expect dozens of security holes to be found any day now.)

Of course, most people discussing Steve's sound bites are harping on the aforementioned iTMS market share news, or PowerPC versus x86 issues ("It's perfectly technically feasible to port Panther to any processor," says Steve, but the PowerPC roadmap looks "really good-- I can't talk about it, but it's really good"), or the first public confirmation that, right now, Apple has no plans to support Microsoft's Windows Media format in the iPod or sell non-AAC music online. And the fact that this is all that people are talking about is strange, because Steve actually let slip Apple's biggest strategic direction shift ever, and the media is barely mentioning it even in passing. We refer, of course, to iToast.

Okay, we don't know that it'll actually be called that-- it's just an educated guess. But in response to a question about whether Macs would ever incorporate television features, Steve specifically answered thusly: "We're not gonna go that direction, we're gonna integrate toasters and computers. Because we think people want toast when they're working on their computers. We can have computer control, just get it exactly how you-- we can put up pictures of toast, you pick the one that looks like what you want, and it'll come right out the side. We think it's a much better idea."

Now, faithful viewer sinjin notes that CNET did report on this startling revelation, but only to refer to it as a joke-- but we're 100% sure that Steve was telling the truth. Remember that part when Phil Schiller jumped in with the comment about doing an upsell on bagels? That was a joke. (Upselling bagels... as if.) But the rest of it was deadly serious.

See, the problem is that the media at large utterly fails to recognize when Apple is telling the truth about something in order to "hide it in plain sight." If you've been tuning in for a really long time, you might recall the top secret "Columbus" project which Steve eventually told a reporter was "anti-gravity technology-- get 300 miles per gallon." Everyone laughed and said Steve was funny, but you all remember how that so-called "joke" turned out.

Wait, it really wasn't anti-gravity technology?

It was the iMac logic board?

Oh. Well, nurtz-- then you're right, that whole "toast" thing probably was a joke. Bummer. We were really looking forward to that.

That's okay, though; the session also contained this gem, referring to customer indifference to how computers get things done, as long as they get them done: "They don't care if it's a gerbil in there running around in a cage." This one, at least, is clearly no joke. Expect an IBM announcement about a stunning breakthrough in rodential computing any day now.