What, no free iTunes Music Store gift certificates in every Happy Meal after all? Following yesterday's breathless rumormongering in the New York Post (Rupert Murdoch says, "Rumormongering is what Tiggers do best! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!"), faithful viewer Nkuvu pointed out a Dow Jones Business News article reporting that McDonald's has issued a formal statement cooling the jets on the whole "one billion free iTMS songs" promotion story-- and thus putting a bit of a damper on the spirits of iTMS enthusiasts everywhere who were looking forward to the dual joys of free legal downloadable music and acute atherosclerosis. Sadly, life is full of disappointments.

Although, you know, this may not be one of them. There's still hope for the prospect of this whole "Tunes for Grease" scenario: what McDonald's actually said was that "there are no agreements to announce, so anything else is pure speculation." Notice how that's not actually a denial-- or, at least, it's not a denial that there's a deal in progress; it only says that no deal is ready to announce. Considering that the Post only said that this alleged billion-song promotional arrangement was "close" in the first place, so far everyone seems to be in total agreement.

Now, it's certainly possible that McDonald's just has lazy and inefficient American PR lackeys who can't cogently deny their way out of a grease-soaked paper bag. For an example of a real denial, we refer you to the rumors that Sony was planning to buy Apple a few years back. In a record 4.28 seconds, Sony's own CEO vaulted an eight-foot concrete wall, dove for the nearest microphone, "flatly denied" that talks were underway, and then neatly put an end to the whole thing once and for all by adding that "Sony wouldn't consider a bid even if Apple extended one." There's Japanese efficiency for you.

In contrast, McDonald's closes its so-called "denial" by asserting that it "continues to aggressively pursue bold new initiatives in the areas of music, sports, fashion and entertainment to connect with our customers in fresh and relevant ways... You can expect news from McDonald's on a variety of fronts in the coming weeks and months." Say-- does anyone else feel a draft? You know, like a chilly breeze on the back of your neck? Why, it's almost as if someone had left a door wide open.

Whether the vague nature of the McDonald's "denial" was sly foreshadowing or gross incompetence remains to be seen, but if you're clinging to hope that you'll get to wolf down McNuggets at a dangerous pace while simultaneously racking up enough free downloads to acquire the iTMS's complete collection of Hanson songs, then you might be interested to know that MacRumors "received confirmation that McDonald's is, in fact, planning the iTunes giveaway, but no further details of the promotion have been obtained." So now it's just a waiting game to see if they're right. Oh, and you may want to consider scheduling a quadruple bypass nice and early, just to be on the safe side-- those slots fill up fast!

Say, remember when there was a little while when CNET was actually saying good things about Apple and its products all the time? Spooky, wasn't it? Well, thank goodness that's over with, so that now we can get back to reading articles such as this one pointed out by faithful viewer Paul: Five reasons not to buy an iPod. It's the number one player in the world, both by revenue and by unit sales, but CNET felt compelled to try really, really hard to find five reasons not to buy one. To his credit, columnist Eliot Van Buskirk did about as well as you could possibly expect: he found one legitimate gripe, and then tacked on four dodgy ones to meet his deadline.

First, the legit: yes, it's true that "six-plus hours of battery life is not always enough," although to be fair, neither is twenty. That said, the fact that Dell's iPod rip-off gets "almost 20 hours" of playtime (Dell claims 16) tells us exactly one thing: it's time for Apple to steal something from Dell for a change. Sure, Dell's player is a couple of ounces heavier, but surely that can't all account for an extra ten to fourteen hours of juice.

The dodginess dominates the article, though. "Jogging with a hard drive-based player is not cool"? His argument is that the iPod might skip, despite its 32 MB buffer, which seems pretty unlikely-- you'd have to prevent the iPod from accessing its hard disk until that 32 MB buffer were depleted, and we're going to assume that most people who jog don't do it while smacking their iPods against a brick for half an hour. Notice how he never says that his iPod skipped while he was jogging, or even that he heard that anyone else's has done it, either-- just that he thinks it's possible. Well, we here at the AtAT compound aren't joggers, but we are klutzes-- and we've dropped our iPods more times than we can count. We've had exactly zero skips in two years. Next.

"The iPod is expensive." Well, duh-- as long as it remains the number one portable music player on the market, that means people are still shelling out the dough to own a quality product, and Apple would be brain-achingly stupid to lower its price. In other words, it's expensive because there are these things called market forces which dictate that it can be; given the market share numbers, buyers who vote with their wallets agree that the iPod is worth every penny. Eliot's suggestion? Forget all about size, weight, interface, storage capacity, etc. and just get a $60 CD player (with MP3 capability) instead. (Gee, and so jogging with a CD player is cool and skip-free?) Next.

"You want to make high-quality digital recordings." Oooookay, well, sure, there are going to be folks out there who not only want a music player, but also want to be able to make soundboard recordings at live shows or something. But the fact that a couple of portable players offer this capability hardly seems like a reason to fault the iPod, especially since in addition to buying a Dell player for battery life and a CD player for cheapness, we now also have to throw in a Samsung or iRiver unit for recording capability. This one might as well be "You want a player that smells like peanut butter"; the iPod is a general market device and by definition won't cater to every niche. Next.

Ahhh, the most fatuous assertion of them all: "You want a choice in online music stores." Eliot admits that he "really enjoys" the iTunes Music Store, but feels "hemmed in" because the iPod doesn't give him the option of buying from BuyMusic.com or Napster instead. This is the same argument made by people who claim the Mac sucks because there's so much more software for Windows and then use nothing but Office, Quicken, and Internet Explorer. Just what, pray tell, is he expecting to happen? That some magical new service will teleport in from Fairyland and offer every song ever recorded for a penny each, but iPod owners will be screwed because the songs are all in WMA format? "Hemmed in." Sheesh.

In short, there's a reason why the iPod is still CNET's "favorite overall MP3 player," which is because in order to make up for each of the five shortcomings highlighted in the article, you'd have to buy three or four different players to do it. But Eliot still wins the Back-Handed Compliment of the Week Award for this gem: "Of course, if you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the [sic] way to go." Now that's a quote for Hot News, right there...

Gee, it sure feels good not to have Apple's supply of high-end chips tethered completely to Motorola anymore, doesn't it? Don't get us wrong, it's not that we disliked Motorola or anything, it's just that... well... there were some "reliability issues" when it came to delivering the goods. Which is to say that, at certain times, Apple probably would have had better luck whittling G4s by hand from a nice block of wood than actually squeezing a chip or two out of Motorola's plants. Thank the deities of silicon that IBM is shaping up to be a much more dependable partner in that regard.

Now, maybe we're just suppressing hurtful memories, here, but we don't recall Motorola being systematically late with development or delivery of processors to Apple until the G4 problems started popping up in the late '90s. So if Motorola was a reliable source that eventually turned sour, where's the guarantee that the same thing won't one day happen with IBM? What if, six months down the line, all of a sudden the G5 supply dries up and we all relive the lurking horror of a chipless existence? Because we're not sure we can live through something like that again. The phase "suicide pact" is starting to hover at the forefront of our minds. Also the phrase "huge burrito," but that's probably just because we skipped lunch.

Well, maybe this will bring you some peace of mind: according to a DigiTimes article (found by way of The Register), IBM has been outsourcing some PowerPC production to Samsung lately. "But AtAT," you whine annoyingly (and man is that an irritating habit), "what about that super-nifty fabrication plant IBM built to crank out G5s which is plastered all over Apple's site with captions like 'Swell FOUPS'? Can Samsung really turn out a quality product, or will our G5s turn into cheap third-world knockoffs?" Calm down, Beavis-- IBM didn't outsource G5 production. The PowerPCs Samsung is making are 180-nanometer chips, which means they're definitely not G5s; they must be some sort of G3s, which are no longer used in any Apple products, so any concerns you might have about Samsung's production quality are moot.

Unless, of course, Samsung wants to develop its own PowerPCs; according to The Register, "Samsung is interested in IBM's intellectual property, which may mean it's looking at becoming a PowerPC licensee. That would add a third chip maker to the platform." Woo-- Motorola, IBM, and Samsung? Sounds like there's the slimmest of chances that Apple may have another option if IBM winds up catching whatever it was that Motorola came down with when its production yields went through the floor. The more the merrier, we say. Come on in, the water's fine!