Say, do you happen to have $25 kicking around? Because, you know, there are a lot of great things available to you when you're accompanied by Andrew "Big 20" Jackson and his buddy Mr. Lincoln. You can, for example, see two or three movies-- at full price. Or, instead, you could sneak into the movie theater and buy a small soda and a box of Raisinets. Or you could buy a SuperDrive eMac. Or, hey, you could almost preorder the entire first season of Wonder Woman on DVD! (Lynda Carter. Rrrrrrowwrrrr.)

What do you mean, "back up to the eMac thing"? Oh, that. Well, okay, you can't really get an eMac for 25 bucks, but that didn't keep several thousand people from trying. Faithful viewer neopod pointed out a Macworld UK article about some Japanese company called "Catena" that accidentally listed the price of eMacs on its web store at Yahoo! Japan as ¥2,787. That's about $25.48 in U.S. dollars, given the exchange rate at broadcast time. Apparently Catena sent Yahoo! the price for a five-pack of DVD-R discs, and Yahoo! somehow wound up posting it as the price of a 1.25 GHz SuperDrive-equipped eMac, which normally sells for ¥115,290 (about $1,053.87). Just a slight difference, there.

Unsurprisingly, Catena says that it pulled in orders from about 20,000 people in less than 24 hours. Somewhat more surprisingly, those 20,000 people placed orders for 100 million eMacs. For the calculatorily-challenged, that's an average of 5,000 eMacs per person. And, sure, it's a great deal and all (albeit an obvious mistake), but even so, were people planning to sell their houses to scrape together the $127,400 they'd need to pay for those things? Yeah, the potential for resale profit was enormous, but that's still a monster outlay of cash. Whatever. The point's moot anyway, since Catena is-- surprise, surprise-- "unable to fulfill the orders." The price was corrected less than a day after the orders started rolling in, and both Catena and Yahoo! have "posted notices on their web sites apologizing for the error."

In a way, we're kinda bummed that the mistake was corrected so quickly. Another twenty minutes or so and we could all have looked forward to articles by Rob Enderle and Paul Thurrott about how, even with a high-end eMac at $25.48, Macs are still too expensive and Apple's going to plummet to its doom any day now. But on the plus side, this little escapade has revealed exactly what Apple needs to do to boost its market share: just lower the eMac's price to 25 clams or so, and in less than a day it'll sell about 130 times more eMacs just in Japan than it sold of all Mac models combined for the entire previous quarter worldwide. Indeed, Macworld notes that if the Catena orders had actually been fulfilled, Apple's market share in Japan would have zoomed up to "90 per cent for the year."

And yeah, sure, there's the little matter of selling 100,000,000 eMacs for several hundred dollars below cost and losing roughly fifteen times its entire cash stockpile in less than a day, but c'mon-- this is market share we're talking about, here! Now there's a recipe for success!