So much for the prospect of gutwrenching drama and/or blinding mayhem at yesterday's annual shareholders' meeting, right? We sure are glad we didn't hitchhike cross-country in hopes of witnessing Steve Jobs hurling disgruntled representatives of CalPERS and rampaging hordes of picketing ex-resellers through a plate glass window by sheer force of will, because by all accounts, we would have wound up sorely disappointed. Every indication shows that the meeting was essentially business as usual, which is, of course, good for Apple and the company's stock price, but sort of a letdown for drama hounds like ourselves. Ah, well; maybe next year.

So just how uneventful was the meeting, you ask? Reuters notes that the entire board of directors was reelected with 82% of the votes, which pretty much rendered CalPERS's "throw the bums out" stance purely one of protest-- not that anyone, CalPERS included, had expected different, of course, but it's interesting that everything CalPERS had opposed on a corporate governance basis (the reelection of the board, the retention of KPMG as the company's auditor, and the continued lack of executive pay restrictions) remained at the status quo. And if CalPERS reps were present at the meeting, it's safe to say that none of them raised a ruckus and needed to be silenced by Steve Jobs doing that across-the-room Dark Force Vader Choke thing, unless the press were so intimidated they conspired to ignore it.

Meanwhile, what of that reseller protest outside? Well, folks, it turns out that it consisted of a whopping ten people, and if they succeeded in getting any investors to raise the issue of the apparent retail pricing scandal, it didn't result in enough of an altercation to make the news; the only mention we encountered was this quickie blurb from the same Reuters article: "Asked about the issue by an investor at the meeting, Tim Cook, head of Apple's global operations and sales, said 58 percent of the company's sales go through resellers. 'It is very important to us. I don't see that changing.'" Which, um, says nada about why several thousand invoices collected by the lawsuit-happy resellers who staged the protest appear to show that Apple's own retail stores pay up to hundreds of dollars less for inventory than third-party resellers. Evidently the investors at the meeting didn't feel like pressing the subject.

And when you think about it, really, why would they? These are investors, not just (and possibly not even) Mac fans. They make money when the company makes money-- or more accurately, when AAPL's price goes up. As long as the stock keeps climbing, people at the meeting were probably ultimately just fine with Apple not expensing stock options, or giving its own stores a cherry deal on wholesale merchandise. If Apple had expensed options last quarter, it would have posted a loss; if the allegations of price lowballing are true, then the retail stores would otherwise never have gotten into black ink territory. We're going to go out on a limb and guess that consistent quarterly losses and an unprofitable chain of retail stores aren't the sort of things that typically make stocks go up.

Then again, if there's anything more likely to torpedo a stock price than quarterly losses and unprofitable stores, it's getting caught covering up quarterly losses and unprofitable stores via dodgy accounting practices, so you'd think that even the most mercenary investors would at least want to know that if Apple were being naughty, that it wouldn't get busted for it. Since the income expensing issue is totally public and there are people marching in the streets (well, ten of them, anyway) yelling about the retail pricing thing and the board of directors still hasn't fled the country, we think it's pretty safe to say that everyone's pretty confident in the lack of any serious scandal or intrigue.

Which, again, is great for the stock price-- but man, just once we'd like to hear about Darth Steve going all psychic-medieval on a roomful of malcontents. Nothing against the malcontents, of course, but we'd have enough drama to coast on for a month. Dare to dream.