Why haven't we addressed the latest affliction to strike Apple's product line, you ask? Simple: when it comes to issues of personal health, we're big believers in the "ignore it until it either goes away or someone calls an ambulance" treatment strategy. You know the drill-- either that irregular mole's going to stop getting bigger, fade, and then vanish completely on its own, or eventually it'll grow to the size of a small child and you'll finally drag yourself in to see a doctor who makes heavy use of the phrase "if only we'd caught this sooner." Smart? Heck no. Catering to a remarkable predisposition for denial and an intense dislike for doctors and hospitals in general? Oh my yes.

Which brings us to the "White Spots" syndrome infecting new 15-inch PowerBooks quicker than that delightful monkey virus in Outbreak; we ignored it as long as we could, but now it's totally out of control. For the uninitiated, several owners of aluminum 15-inchers are discovering that their displays have developed patchy lighter areas over time-- not much time, either. Reportedly if you spend even a few days with a 15-inch AlumiBook, the odds are good that you'll wind up seeing spots before your eyes. Heck, some people are seeing them the very first time they power up their new machines. It's an epidemic, we tell you! As faithful viewer jrock suggests, go poke your head into this Apple Discussion thread, which is now serving as a makeshift quarantine. (Put on one of those cool baggy suit-things first.)

Why is this oh-so-alarming? Because while one Apple tech claims that the spots are caused by spacers inside the screen pressing against the back of the LCD panel, we've settled on a far more likely scenario: leprosy.

Yes, leprosy: known to some as "Hansen's Disease" and others as "Biblical Smackdown #12," according to conventional medical wisdom it's never been known to infect a computer display before-- but hey, those doctors just think they're soooooo smart. We figure this is some sort of smiting by the almighty Jobs, visited upon those Mac customers who have displeased him. Seeing as it took Apple a year to get aluminum 15-inchers out the door, which do you think is more likely: even after a year, Apple still shipped hundreds or thousands of units with a show-stopping defect, or Steve is smiting those customers who sinned by considering buying a Wintel instead of waiting? Exactly.

Whatever the cause, Apple recently acknowledged the "issue" and claims to have a cure-- er, fix, except that there's just one problem: there are hundreds of affected PowerBooks out there, including several whose screens have already been replaced three times and the spots kept coming back. Even if Apple does now have the problem licked (eeewwww-- poor choice of words), wait times to have PowerBooks repaired are reportedly hovering in the range of one to two months. Yeesh, that's only a week or so less than the wait at an average doctor's office! And at least in a doctor's waiting room you can pass those two months reading a selection of magazines from 1924 without having to deal with white spots all over the articles. Consider it time in purgatory, folks.

Homina homina yikes, the recent spate of bad news just keeps on coming-- and the only upsides we see are a seemingly-limitless Fountain o' Drama™ and the happy circumstance of being able to use the word "spate" a lot. On top of a Panther intro marred by FireWire data loss and displays in the long-awaited 15-inch aluminum PowerBooks sprouting white spots like someone infected with the rare but dreaded Albino Chicken Pox (oh, sure, you laugh-- until you die), now rumors are spreading about a significant restructuring of the way Apple actually gets people to open their wallets. If we're understanding the alleged situation correctly, there may be real consequences to Apple's sales figures... especially since this is all coming just as we sail toward the holiday shopping season.

First of all, we've got Think Secret reporting that Apple is "firing many of its Representative Apple Executives (RAEs) across the U.S., replacing them with existing inside phone liaisons." RAEs apparently handled Apple's relationship with its Apple Specialists, those small dealers who are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with Apple's own online and retail stores-- and they're about to find it even tougher, since Think Secret asserts that Apple also plans to require that Apple Specialists sell AppleCare Protection Plans for a staggering 40% of all Macs they sell in order to qualify for discounts on demo equipment. (The conspiracy theory du jour is that Apple wants the dealers to sell more AppleCare so that the company gets the names, addresses, and other contact info of Specialist customers it can then snipe for direct sales later. Ooooo, sneaky.) Sounds like the pool of Specialists might be getting a mite shallower not long from now.

While alarming, that's not even really the scary part, at least as far as holiday sales go; specialists generally sell to niche-market professionals, and it's the average shmoes that drive holiday purchasing. But what's this? AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has severed its ties with MarketSource, those folks that put together Demo Days promotions and planted "Apple Representatives" at non-Apple Mac-selling retail chains. Granted, there aren't nearly as many non-Apple Mac-selling retail chains these days, but the ones that remain are reportedly going to find themselves sans Apple Reps real soon now. (Not CompUSA, though-- they're "said to be unaffected.") We all know what happens when potential Mac-buyers go shopping in a retail store without an Apple Rep: the personnel steers them toward whatever Wintel dreck is currently offering the highest sell-through bonus, and before they know it those potential Mac-buyers have sold their souls for a frickin' Presario or something.

Now, with luck, these changes (assuming they're true) don't reflect panicked cost-cutting on Apple's part, but rather the company's improving success with its own online and retail stores. Apple's got more retail locations sprouting up all the time-- two new stores opened over the weekend, and another one just outside of Chicago launches this Friday-- and we wouldn't be entirely surprised if the company it working toward eventually phasing out everyone else entirely, other than a few select retail chains and online/catalog resellers.

Crazy? Maybe. Crazy like a Jobs.

Okay, we don't really know what we mean by that.

Faster, pussycat! Process! PROCESS!! Yes, kidlings, it's time once again for Big Mac Watch, the segment of our show when we take a peek at the latest performance scores from Virginia Tech's Mac-based supercluster. Things are coming down to the wire-- it's November, final performances scores are due soon, and the school has only days left in which it can tune Big Mac 'til it hums. The cluster's scores have steadily increased since its initial somewhat disappointing 7.41 teraflops, and deep in underground bunkers beneath Hokie Central, green-skinned Rigellians with freakishly large brains are hard at work trying to coax ever more performance from its 1,100 Power Mac nodes. (Rigellians are good at that sort of thing. Plus, they'll work for Almond Joys.)

When last we tuned in to this gripping saga, Big Mac's score was still 9.555 teraflops, but Big Big Mac Man Srinidhi Varadarajan had remarked during a presentation last week that he hoped that his team might squeeze another 10% out of his little project before the mid-November deadline so that Big Mac could become "the first academic machine to cross 10 tera." As far as goals go, though, believe us when we tell you that the "10 tera" one won't win any medals in the "Long-Term" categories at this year's Lofty Goal Awards banquet-- it's less than a week later and Srinidhi has already hit his target.

Well, mostly; so far he's only extracted another 7.6%, not 10%, but that was still enough to put Big Mac over the top into double-digit performance territory. ("Don't you mean 'Tera-tory'?" you ask with a sly wink. No. No, we don't. Stop it.) According to the Dongorra Files, as of yesterday, Big Mac's official score was 10.28 teraflops, and the game still isn't over yet. (If you're the type who needs proof, faithful viewer David Triska has thoughtfully provided a screenshot so you don't need to wade through the whole PDF. But if you insist on checking the original source, Apple's entry is still on page 53.) It's worth noting that, for the first time, the test score reflects the use of all 2,200 processors, so apparently those 44 slacking Power Macs have finally gotten off the couch and started some heavy lifting.

There's still room to grow (Big Mac is still only performing at 58% of its theoretical peak), but the fact that it's already managed to wedge itself in third place on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers is turning heads-- and not just scientific heads. It's also turning big heads, mammoth-sized heads-- enormous heads of the non-Rigellian persuasion, packed with ego instead of smarts. In short, we're talking about Redmond-dwelling heads. Faithful viewer David Poves points out an article in The Register which reports that Microsoft has "licensed leading-edge processor technology from IBM for use in future Xbox products and services." Apparently Billy 'n' Ballmer have come to the conclusion that if the G5 can model massively complex weather systems and nuclear reactions, then doggone it, it must be good enough to model a "no-holds-barred badass" packin' heat.

Well, now, isn't that interesting? It's not entirely clear yet what the IBM-Microsoft deal entails (maybe it's not PowerPC-related at all), but while high-price suits like Rob Enderle and hundreds of armchair analysts have long predicted that Apple would have to switch from PowerPC to x86, instead it looks like Microsoft may be switching the Xbox (the closest thing to a personal computer that the company actually makes) from x86 to PowerPC. Big Mac: changing minds one innovation-throttling monopolist at a time.