Well, investors are clearly pretty happy with Apple's Q2 earnings results, because the company's stock held onto that 10% after-hours gain and closed at $29.30-- its highest value since the Great Cliff Dive of September 2000. Apparently massively-increasing iPod sales, surprisingly high iBook numbers, zero debt, $4.6 billion in the bank, Apple's strongest March quarter in four years, and guidance of continuing double-digit growth next quarter were enough to persuade Wall Street to bust open its wallet and break off a piece of that sweet, sweet action. We're still a little unnerved by AAPL going up after an earnings report, but we're coping okay-- especially in light of the backlash over that whole stock options flap.

See, as it turns out, not all the shareholders are thrilled with every little thing Apple does, particularly when it comes to what they call "executive compensation," which we reg'lar folks refer to as "swag for the bigwigs." In particular, CalPERS, a major AAPL shareholder and the U.S.'s biggest pension fund, got a little huffy a few years back when the $1-a-year-salaried Steve Jobs received a $90 million bonus consisting of a free jet and enough cash to pay all the taxes on it. Well, it seems that CalPERS is still a bit twitchy about Apple's whole corporate governance thing, and is also upset that the company still hasn't implemented a "shareholder-approved proposal to treat stock options as an expense."

Faithful viewer river-wind tipped us off to a Reuters article which reports that, because of the stock option thing and because Apple's auditor (KPMG) also performed consulting services for the company, CalPERS plans to "withhold voting its 1.48 million shares" from Apple's entire board of directors and also vote against bringing KPMG back for auditing duties. Yeesh, way to harsh on the post-Q2 celebratory buzz, guys.

The thing is, the reasons why Apple hasn't done the stock-options-as-expenses thing are because: 1) despite shareholder votes, not many others in the option-happy world of high-tech does it; 2) Apple (and many other companies) would be posting losses instead of profits if it did; and 3) the Financial Accounting Standards Board still hasn't finalized a consistent way it wants companies to do it yet-- there's a draft, but it hasn't been ratified, and if Apple makes the change now, it'll probably have to change things around again when the final standards are approved. (Of course, Apple probably emphasizes Reason Number 3 a lot more than Reasons 1 and 2.) Regardless, CalPERS will be doing the Eisnerian "vote of no confidence" thing, only not on quite so grand a scale.

While we personally like the idea of listing options as actual expenses and not tucking them away in footnotes, we can't fault Apple for waiting until the FASB proposal is finalized-- especially since it'd be posting quarterly results that would look far worse than everyone else's, so this is one instance in which "cutting edge" is probably not the right thing to be. We figure, let CalPERS complain; we'll be much happier if Apple expenses options when everyone else does, too, so the whole industry suddenly looks like it's going down the tubes instead of just Apple. And anyway, the CalPERS complaint makes us feel a lot more at ease about this freaky post-earnings stock runup, so it's all good.