Those of you who have been leaving your 5x00/6x00 Macs on 24 hours a day (as per Apple's recommendation) may soon be able to give those 603e's a rest. MacFixit reports that Apple is close to releasing a new version of Drive Setup that should squelch the "blinking question mark" problem once and for all.

This bug has been so mysterious and perplexing, we at AtAT are almost sorry to see it go. (Of course, we're not affected by it-- If we had bought that 6500 last January, we'd be singing a different tune.)

MacCentral's Newton News page lists some interesting rumors about possible Christmas offerings. Scroll down to the "Rumors" section to read about the potential devices.

Of the three new Newts, the most intriguing is the high-end MessagePad, which seems to be a MessagePad 2000 on steroids, tricked out with a 200MHz StrongARM processor, a color screen (!), a 56K modem, and a few other "minor additions." The low-end model loses the color screen, and has only a 33.6Kbps modem and 180 MHz processor. No word on the amount of RAM in these possible stocking-stuffers. There's also talk of a Newton-based NC that will somehow fit into Apple NC plans next year.

Yours Truly is still puttering along with a MessagePad 100, so I'm liking the idea of an expensive Christmas present to myself. ;-) Those of you Mac-folk who haven't tried a Newton, find a store with a display model you can play with for a while. It may be just what you're looking for if you're on the move a lot of the time.

Newsbytes has a nice human-interest story on the internet grassroots campaign promoting Mac OS 8. We at AtAT certainly think that this campaign was instrumental in Mac OS 8's incredible success. (You'll recall that it sold 1.2 million copies in its first two weeks-- four times as many as Apple had predicted-- and is now #2 on the PC Data top selling software list, which covers ALL software, not just Mac titles.)

AtAT believes that this Mac OS 8 campaign is a demonstrable manifestation of the reason that Apple, and the Macintosh, will succeed: Mac users are not just people using computers to get their work done. There is a Cult of Macintosh, a strong community of users that looks out for one another and takes a certain amount of responsibility for the platform's survival into its own hands. And it's for that reason that throughout the ordeals and doubtful lows over the years, we never once felt that buying a Macintosh would be a risky move.