David Quote 1- "Oh and Engadget your title is wrong.... Apple doesn't have CPAs. CPAs are outside people that get hired and work for an accounting firm."

David Quote 2 - "As an accounting major... I'm going to have to disagree with those who said I'm wrong."

David Quote 3 - "There is no reason a CPA couldn't be working at Apple, the problem is they aren't who would be thrilled by this. It's the CMAs who are happy."

As an actual CPA, it is my independent opinion that you are either an imbecile that can some how manage to contradict yourself in a few sentences, or you are incredibly pedantic and have no friends. Either way, you should probably change majors.

The original interpretation of the accounting rule was probably too strict anyway. The matching principle requires that revenues be matched against expenses. Clearly most of the expense associated with the sale of most electronic devices is incurred prior to sale. So it would stand to reason that they should have been able to recognize most of the revenue when the sale took place. They should have been able to come up with a reasonable way to estimate the costs associated with developing updates to their devices, and just defer that amount.

Or they should have also been able to just record all of the revenue as well as a liability at the time of sale, the liability would be to recognize an amount of estimated expenditures Apple expects to incur developing the software updates over the life of the device.

wow, generalize much? Accountants gave us Enron!!! You will find bad apples (no pun intended) in every field.

Apple is a company, it's goal is to make money for its stockholders... do you want them to be money-phobic? And what does that ad have to do with anything?

I love this from the palm press release:
"To facilitate comparisons to Palm's historical results, Palm has included non-GAAP adjusted measures, which exclude the impact of subscription accounting... The company believes this information will help investors better evaluate its current period performance and trends in its business."

Oh yes, I agree. Recording liabilities as revenue is helpful to investors. Oh wait, no it's not.

pick me, Engadget overlords!

i never win anything...

Incorrect... Sales taxes pay for very few essential government services. Sales taxes do pay for MANY optional and unnecessary government services.

pick meeeee!!!!!

what are the chances I win?