Wow, it's like clockwork: evidently every 7.28 years, the CEO of Dell Computer has to come out and say something two parts mean and three parts stupid about Apple to the press. Back in late '97, the CEO was company founder Mike Dell, who, when asked what he'd do if he were in charge of Apple, replied that he'd "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Today, of course, the shareholders are awfully glad that ol' Mike wasn't running the company-- at least, Apple's shareholders are.

But now Dell's CEO is some shmoe named Kevin Rollins, and as faithful viewer Ken Drake points out, the traditional duty of the Seven-Year Smack-Talk has fallen to him. Any guesses as to what he's come up with? Go on, guess. Seriously, just take a wild stab at it. Oh, never mind-- it's so goofy you'll never come up with it in a million years unless you inject yourself with Steve Ballmer Missing Link Anti-Logic stem cells, as Rollins apparently has: according to Silicon.com, ol' Kev has decided that the iPod is a "fad" and a "one-product wonder," because-- get this-- "the iPod has been out for three years and it's only this past year it's become a raging success." Because in his mind, see, a "fad" is evidently a product that takes time to build demand based on word of mouth and customer delight, as opposed to an irrational craze that sparks up instantaneously and then fizzles out just as quickly. And we're sure that's correct in whatever sunny alternate dimension his alleged brain resides during these cold winter months.

Wait, because it gets better-- when fishing for an example of another "fad" to which he can disparagingly compare the iPod, he actually comes up with this: "When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman-- a rage, everyone had to have one. Well you don't hear about the Walkman anymore."

In other words, the iPod will wind up fading from the public eye just as quickly as that failure the Walkman did. So make sure you sell off all your Apple stock in, say, eighteen or twenty years before that happens. Write yourself a note so you don't forget.

Interestingly, Silicon.com (one of the more overtly anti-Apple 'net publications we've encountered) doesn't ask Rollins the obvious follow-up questions: if the iPod is just a trivial "fad" and doesn't represent part of a "sustainable strategy" ("Music? Just a passing phase! Mark my words: in three years, no one will be listening to music anymore!"), then why, pray tell, did Dell clone the iPod in every way except looks, style, and ease of use when it introduced the ludicrously poor-selling Dell Digital Jukebox? And why has the company bothered to update that product to be (it hopes) marginally less sucky? And why has it released a new "Pocket" model that shamelessly rips off the iPod mini? And why will it probably ship a screenless, flash-based "DJ Random" or whatever once the first iPod shuffle sales numbers hit the stands?

But in the end, we really have to thank Mr. Rollins for tipping us off about the iPod being as short-lived a fad as the Sony Walkman. We've got our fingers on the "SELL" button right now, awaiting that fateful day in the 2020s when it all comes crashing down around us. Any decade now!

We sure hope your kidneys weren't planning to slack off this year, because they're about to get the workout of their entire renal career: faithful viewer neopod tipped us off to the fact that Apple has officially posted a teaser page for the return of the Pepsi iTunes Music Promotion, which, according to the posted rules, officially kicks off at the end of this month. That isn't exactly news-- at least, not to AtAT viewers, since we already told you a month ago that Pepsi was touting the return of the Yellow Cap promo at a trade show last November. But there are some actual details available now that Apple's talking about it, and so far we like what we hear.

For one thing, we were right when we guessed that this time around there'd be 200 million winning caps floating around out there-- although, when you think about it, even a doubling of the original 100 million song giveaway might not be enough. (The number of iPod users alone has ballooned eightfold in the past year, but we suppose we'll take what we can get.) The odds haven't changed; you still have a one-in-three chance of winning a song, unless Pepsi hasn't changed the cap design and you know how to tilt a bottle, in which case your odds improve considerably. Oh, and in order to encourage people to redeem their songs immediately instead of hoarding them until the last minute and overloading Apple's servers, the company will apparently be giving out one free iPod mini to a random promo song-downloader every hour throughout most of the contest period. According to iPodlounge, Apple plans to give away about 1,700 miniPods, "all of which will be silver with an engraved Pepsi logo on the back."

You're still limited to redeeming ten codes per day and 200 codes total, so the good news for your kidneys is that you shouldn't have to drink more than about 94 gallons of soda to max out your free song count, assuming The Tilt is no longer in effect. The bad news for those lil' guys back there is that Pepsi has responded to one of the biggest complaints about last year's promo: the exclusion of Mountain Dew from the Yellow Cap Club. This year, both regular and diet versions of the caffeine-rich chartreuse nectar (and even the Code Red variant) are included, right alongside Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Wild Cherry, and Sierra Mist. True, hardcore caffeine hounds will find much more efficient ways to get wired over at ThinkGeek Caffeine, but only the Dew will get you free iTunes downloads.

Of course, the single thing that really torpedoed the giveaway last year was Pepsi's inexplicable incompetence when it came to getting yellow-capped bottles onto shelves more than, say, four or five minutes before the promo ended. Here's hoping they've got that problem licked and we'll see more than a pathetic 5 percent redemption rate this time around. Truth be told, we're actually a little surprised that Pepsi's trying again, considering the low response rate they got last year-- but hey, if they want to shoot us a free song or two in the course of our sugar-water quaffings, who are we to argue?

Oh, no-- Europeans are up in arms because Apple priced the Mac mini too high! At least, that's what CNET reports, as it tells of an online petition protesting Apple's decision to charge €489 for the entry-level mini, which, at today's exchange rate, comes to roughly $639.19-- a whopping $140.19 more than the US price, or 28 percent higher. And sure, we'd be the first to agree that a pricing discrepancy that out of control would warrant even such drastic action as asking a bunch of random 'net surfers to type in their names and click a button. (What, no guillotine? 28 percent, people!)

Here's the thing, though: CNET never mentions that Apple's European pricing includes the horror of VAT, the per-country sales taxes in Europe that are annually responsible for thirty to forty vacationing New Hampshire residents dropping stone cold dead on the spot when they encounter taxes of at least 15 percent on practically everything they see. In Germany, for instance, the €489 price tag on the entry-level Mac mini clearly states that the price is actually €421.55 before the 16 percent tax; that's roughly $551.02-- still about 10 percent higher than the $499 we pay here in the States, but a darn sight less brain-seizing than the $639.19 it looks like Apple's charging, from which it has to cut the State in for its piece of the action. And in France it's even worse; the price for a Mac mini there is €499 after tax, but €417.22 ($545.36) before it. That's a 9.3 percent before-tax price premium for French customers-- and a 19.6 percent tax markup, which, frankly, makes us want to go fetal in the corner and sob uncontrollably.

But while CNET seems to have neglected the issue of VAT, the authors of the petition did not; they simply feel that Apple charging Europeans 10ish percent more for the same Mac mini as they charge Americans is unfair. And ultimately, sure, it probably is-- though that's not necessarily Apple's fault. We're not claiming to know Apple's reasons for pricing things the way it does, but while the petition's authors note that Apple's "profit margin is the same, independent from the sales location" and "transport costs are equally the same for delivery to customers in the US and the EU," they never address the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Apple's cost of doing business in foreign countries is higher. Maybe we're being naïve about this, but spending two weeks in London sucked cash from our wallets so fast the suction made our buttocks cave in. So if it costs more to live there than here, isn't it possible that it costs more to run a business there, too? And that Apple might want to factor that added cost into its product pricing in countries where it spends more money to generate each sale? Just a thought.

In fact, a quick-and-dirty, completely unscientific test of that theory may lend it some weight. We pulled up Dell's web sites for the US and the UK (just so we wouldn't have language issues, monolingual ignoramuses we are) and compared low-end desktop prices between here and there. The cheapest system we found offered for sale on both sites was the Dimension 3000, and after configuring both systems as closely as possible and subtracting out the included UK VAT of 17.5 percent, we found that the UK price was still nearly 15 percent higher than the US price. Time for another petition? (Okay, we admit it: variables like Dell's promo pricing on different options in each market make this test pretty much worthless. Beats workin', though.)

In any case, there's some indication that Apple did tone down its European markup specifically for the mini; a quick spin through the French Apple Store reveals that the price premiums on entry-level eMacs, PowerBooks, and iPods are 12 percent, 11.3 percent, and a whopping 19.7 percent respectively. Suddenly a 9.3 percent markup on the Mac mini doesn't look quite so bad. Don't get us wrong, here-- we'd love to see Apple lower its pricing in Europe, because there's a huge market of benighted Wintel users over there just waiting to be converted into slavering, cash-dropping Mac fans. But from what we can see, the Mac mini's pricing in Europe is at least in line with the prices of other Apple hardware, if not better. Whether that's good enough remains to be seen; apparently there are at least 6,000 people out there who say it's not. So let's just sit back and wait for the sales figures, shall we?