Trite but true: what goes up must come down. On the PowerPC front, does everyone remember when Motorola was the whipping boy, and IBM was the architecture's potential savior? You know what we're talking about: Motorola repeatedly had to lay off workers and close plants, the company had so much trouble producing G4 processors at first that Apple had to alter its product line-up, and the G4 was stuck at 500 MHz for over a year while the competition made it to 1 GHz and beyond. Meanwhile, IBM kept cranking out faster and faster G3s, and Apple hired the company to make G4s because Motorola couldn't keep up with demand. Unconfirmed rumors claimed that IBM's vastly superior manufacturing processes allowed it to nudge the G4 as high as 650 MHz, but Motorola pulled legal strings to prevent that chip from shipping because it didn't want to look incompetent in comparison. In short, "IBM good, Motorola bad."

But some aspects of Motorola's PowerPC progress have been improving lately. The G4 hit 733 MHz in January, and then 867 MHz in July; on a purely meaningless clock speed level, that's still not terribly impressive compared to Intel's frequencies, but it sure beats sitting at half a gigahertz for another eighteen months. And now there are at least semi-credible rumors flying around that Motorola is ready to unleash the G5 at up to 1.6 GHz to start, the chip has actually reached speeds as high as 2.8 GHz in the lab, and performance positively runs rings around Pentium 4 processors at comparable clock speeds. So suddenly Motorola's looking, well, kinda cool again. Whodathunkit?

But is the seesaw principle in effect? In other words, does the fact that Motorola may be on its way up necessarily signal a downward slide for IBM? Well, we can't say for certain, but at least one early sign might imply that IBM's headed for a spill: faithful viewer Gary Looft dug up an Associated Press article which reveals that Big Blue is resorting to the Big Pink in hopes of avoiding a slip into the Big Red. Personally, we doubt it's much of an omen, but IBM is laying off some 1200 employees, 1000 of whom work in the company's "chip manufacturing and development plants." Is this the start of trouble for the "I" in the PowerPC AIM alliance?

Well, uh, probably not. When you compare IBM's layoffs to those of many other big tech firms recently, it becomes clear that, in this economy, a measly 1200 pink slips practically constitutes a hiring frenzy-- especially for a company the size of IBM, who employs nearly a third of a million people. Nonetheless, fatalists and crystal-gazers alike may choose to interpret it as a sign of IBM's imminent doom. If doing so somehow puts you at ease by bolstering your sense that the universe is host to some sort of fundamental cosmic balance, who are we to stand in your way?

Wow, it's pretty quiet out there in Macville right about now, hmmmm? Peaceful, like. Oh, sure, there are faint rustlings about imminent G5age in January, and Steve delivered a quick two cents on the Microsoft antitrust settlement proposal, but otherwise everyone's apparently too busy playing with their iPods to make much noise. Everything's so calm and tranquil... serene, even. Why, it's enough to make us want to scream at the top of our lungs and maybe set fire to our own heads out of sheer unadulterated boredom.

See, being drama addicts, we don't handle these news lulls terribly well; we get all twitchy and distracted and nothing short of a major scandal (or, presumably, a massive dose of prescription medication) will calm us down. Thank heaven for Apple, then, who did its very best to help keep us occupied, bless its big, lovable corporate heart. Despite the utter news vacuum, according to faithful viewer Robert Westmoreland, the company saw fit to issue a press release anyway-- about QuickTime 5's runaway success. Apparently Apple's eminently versatile multimedia software is being downloaded at the astonishing rate of "one million copies... every three days." That is, indeed, an impressive enough statistic to warrant a low whistle of surprised approval. (Insert low whistle of surprised approval here.)

However, this press release really seems to have come from out of the blue; perhaps our ridiculously short attention spans just missed it, but we can't see a shred of context into which this announcement might fit. As far as we can tell, there's no QuickTime-centric trade show going on, or a new product release that might somehow mesh with this nifty statistic-- just a standalone and rather offhand notice that, "Hey, we sure are doling out a whole lot of QuickTime installers these days." It almost feels like Apple has adopted a strict "No More Than Fifteen Days Between Press Releases" policy and was grasping at straws to make the deadline.

Not that we're complaining, of course; we're thankful for every scrap of semi-surreal Apple-related plot material we can lay our hands on. Still, we can't help but think that there must be some sort of underlying reason why Apple chose now to hit us with the news that QuickTime 5 is on its way to reaching 100 million downloads in its first year on Apple's servers. Does the press release contain some sort of hypnotic trigger phrase that will prompt everyone who's ever used QuickTime to enter a trance, grab a blunt instrument, and advance on Washington, D.C. and Redmond to assist Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller in an elaborately orchestrated grab for those seats of power? Given the recent drama drought, we can but hope...

As you all know, we've been devoting a lot of time recently to the notion of what to buy your Mac-loving friends and family this holiday season; we've repeatedly mentioned how the iPod makes a perfect stocking-stuffer, and just yesterday we told you how you can get an extra $100 off the purchase of an iBook just by drinking an inhuman quantity of any of a number of sugary carbonated beverages. Well, judging by the mail we've been receiving, it turns out that a few of you apparently lack the many thousands of dollars in disposable income necessary to buy iPods and iBooks for everyone on your list. It seems we're experiencing some sort of "economic downturn" or something. Go figure.

So for those of you hampered by a shocking lack of liquidity, today we're going to tell you about a Mac-friendly gift idea that will fit into most any budget and is sure to please: the Apple Gift Card. Yes, faithful viewer RenaissanceManUC kindly acquainted us with this wonderful option, which is a simple twist on an old concept: it's just like a gift certificate, only it's not a certificate-- it's a card. That alone makes all the difference.

You can purchase an Apple Gift Card at any of Apple's 22 retail stores, and the amount is up to you-- within certain limits. We called our local Apple store for details, and it appears that there's a $50 minimum, so if your budget only allows you to spend, say, $38.27, then you're going to have to give your friend or relative cash instead. Granted, it's not quite as neat or as attractive as a Gift Card, but a few minutes' work drawing the Apple logo on said cash with a blue highlighter can work wonders even on American money-- the least attractive currency on the planet. Go wild! (By the way, we checked to make sure, and yes, the Apple stores do accept cash in any amount-- even amounts less than $50.)

If you can swing spending at least fifty bucks on an honest-to-goodness Gift Card, however, we've also confirmed that you have total freedom in determining how much that card will be worth. In other words, if you want to give your brother an Apple Gift Card worth exactly $83.92, you can do that. This has the added bonus of allowing you to pretend that $83.92 has some special significance; you can then annoy your brother by refusing to tell him what said significance happens to be. Everybody wins!

So, Apple Gift Cards: the perfect present this holiday season. There's just one caveat, however: unfortunately, according to Apple's site, Gift Cards "cannot be used to purchase Gift Cards." No lie, people; it's right there in black and white. We know that's a deal-breaker for a lot of you, but for those of you who can live with that somewhat bizarre restriction, your holiday shopping may have just gotten a whole lot easier. No need to thank us; just send Gift Cards.