Imagine our horror and surprise when we walked into the local mall the other day to find employees putting up the Christmas decorations. Blimey, it's November already! Time flies when you're producing a daily soap opera. Gone are those halcyon days when we'd do most of our holiday shopping a couple of days before Christmas, with the last few gifts being purchased on Christmas itself. (Tip for Chicago-area last-minute shoppers: unless things have changed, the Alley at Clark and Belmont is open 365 days a year. On Christmas morn it's just the place to get a bullet-riddled police jacket for that special someone, and green and red hair dye makes wonderful stocking stuffers.) Considering that in recent years our list of giftees has grown out of all proportion to reality, we're accustomed to starting the holiday consumer frenzy in, say, August. To find that we're so far behind is more than a little disconcerting.

But as usual, we digress-- before we even got to our point in the first place. We wanted to bring up the subject of New Year's Resolutions, those promises you make to yourselves that typically get forgotten on or about January 4th. Don't panic, they aren't due for a couple of months yet-- unless, of course, you happen to be a computer company whose fiscal year for 1999 started several weeks ago. In that case, you'd want to have those resolutions firmly in place by now. Good thing Apple's right on the stick; according to MacInTouch, they've got an internal "five-star" program that delineates five separate goals for 1999. Reportedly, Apple hopes to: sell 5 million computers; sell 5 million software packages; get back into the list of the top five computer sellers; grab 5% market share; and increase foreign sales to account for 50% of Apple's total sales. (Sure, that last goal's 5 theme is a little bit of a stretch, but hey, they can't all be gems.)

Sounds like a great set of resolutions. If Apple can keep the momentum it's built up over 1998, we're confident that each of these goals is attainable. In fact, when comparing Apple's resolutions to our own from last year, we feel a little inadequate. Especially since one of the biggies was "start the holiday shopping earlier." Hmmm, perhaps we'll just get everyone lawn ornaments and be done with it...

The nutty thing about the technology industry, as we're sure you're all aware, is that it's like a soap opera in several ways. It's not just all the crazy lawsuits, under-the-table dealings, back-room business propositions, personal attacks, and dramatic announcements-- though without those, AtAT definitely be a lot less gripping. No, it's also the pace at which the whole story moves: as with any soap opera, if you miss a few episodes, you come back to find everyone sleeping with different partners, at least two characters dead, at least three back from the dead, a couple in comas, and one that's inexplicably changed genders. (This is, of course, a metaphor; we're not implying anything about Gil Amelio's pulse rate or any exotic surgery "Bill" Gates may have undergone while overseas in the seventies.)

So it's important to stay on top of things to avoid getting left behind in the story. That's why, as the rest of us are still wondering about the Yosemite/El Capitan pro-level Power Macs that Apple is expected to unveil early next year, Mac OS Rumors is already talking about the pro machines due after those. Talk about a head start! Those machines are reportedly code-named "Sawtooth," and they may appear as early as Macworld Expo Boston next summer. As for what to expect, preliminary details hint at AltiVec-enhanced G4 processors running between 400 MHz and 1.2 GHz, three fast 66 MHz PCI slots (still no six-slot machine in the works at Apple, hmmm?), a system bus running at 100 MHz or faster, RAGE 128 graphics, a cool translucent dark blue case like El Capitan, and all starting at only $1750.

Now sure, that all sounds great, but there's a very interesting corollary to having such a fast Mac. A Rumors source at Apple hints that given AltiVec's incredible performance enhancements on top of the G4's raw speed, when it comes to Windows emulation, Great Things™ are afoot. It's still pretty speculative, but it sounds as though a mid-range Sawtooth Mac might well be able to run Windows in emulation at an "equivalent of a Pentium II 450 with decent graphics and disk performance." Whether that actually turns out to be true or not is anyone's guess, but the implications are pretty interesting. On the plus side, there would be virtually no penalty to getting a Mac, even if you had to run lots of Windows software. The downside, of course, is that such a situation might prompt software developers to write software for Windows only, since why should they spend time and money on a Mac port when Macs can run Windows anyway? As always, it's a double-edged sword. But we'd still love to see if, in a year, the fastest Mac can run Windows faster than the fastest Wintel...

And on today's episode of "Redmond Justice," guest star Avie Tevanian finally gets some actual airtime. Avie took the stand for cross-examination to defend the points made in his scathing, infuriating, and highly entertaining written testimony, submitted last week. That document, you may recall, accused Microsoft in no uncertain terms of threatening to cancel Office for the Mac unless Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser in the Mac OS. It went on to state that following Apple's refusal to stop developing QuickTime for Windows, Microsoft threatened to drive Apple out of the multimedia playback market entirely. For everyone who thought the whole "Age of Apple-Microsoft Harmony" announced in August of last year was nothing but smoke and mirrors, the Avie testimony pretty much backs up your claim.

So today, Avie-- live and in person-- took the stand as Microsoft attorney Theodore Edelman tried to break down his credibility. ("Who's this Edelman guy?" you ask. Well, Microsoft lead litigator John Warden is apparently taking a much-needed break after his marathon bout with Jim Barksdale. So for now, Ted is "the man.") Our impression from the MacWEEK coverage of the trial is that Ted didn't do a very compelling job of casting doubt on Avie's credibility. For instance, to counter Avie's claim that QuickTime was deliberately made incompatible with Internet Explorer for Windows, Ted brought up the fact that Apple routinely refused to sign Microsoft's non-disclosure agreements and therefore weren't allowed access to all beta versions of Microsoft's software. Avie's response, according to a ZDNet article, was the obvious: since the problem was in Windows and not in QuickTime, if they had all the beta versions, "all it would have told [them] was it was broken." Overall, we get the sense that Ted's first appearance on the show was lackluster and needed more spark.

When all's said and done, Ted's argument was essentially not that all those sudden and mysterious incompatibilities in Windows and IE didn't exist, but that Avie couldn't prove that Microsoft put them there on purpose. Of course we're a biased party, but the motive for the "error message" that Windows originally produced when QuickTime was installed (which prompts users to revert to ActiveMovie even though there's no technical error) seems pretty transparent to us. But then again, we aren't the judge in this case. We won't know whether the judge believes Avie or Ted until the decision is finally handed down.