Well, here we are, less than three weeks away from the next scheduled Stevenote, which officially puts us into the "home stretch" as far as the leaks and rumors go. Expect to see a lot of conflicting and suspicious info flying around the 'net concerning whatever Steve may or may not have up his big, baggy sleeves. The one product that most prognosticators rate as a dead lock, though, is "Mercury," the long-awaited (and, by most counts, long overdue) PowerBook G4. We know, we know-- the current "Pismo" PowerBook was supposed to be a sure thing for last January's Expo, and it was nowhere to be seen. But what are the odds of that happening again? "This time, for sure!"

Now, if you've been waiting for Mercury for as long as we have, you can probably rattle off the rumored specs as easily as you can recite the alphabet: a huge, possibly-wide-aspect-ratio screen, a low-power G4 processor, a funky new enclosure that looks more like Apple's other "pro" products, etc. But Go2Mac is now reporting a new addition to those speculative specs, and it's a doozy: apparently Mercury will break from Apple's long-standing "Live And Die By ATI" tradition and will instead feature a mobile nVIDIA GeForce2 Go chip as its graphics processor.

While we can't say the signs weren't all there, somehow we're still surprised-- and a little skeptical. Sure, Apple's been taking heat for the lackluster performance of ATI graphics chips for ages now. Sure, the blue and white G3 suffered ridiculous instability problems due to notoriously buggy ATI drivers for the included Rage 128 card. Sure, ATI incurred the Wrath of Steve by prematurely issuing a press release that gave details about Apple's then-secret new products just before last summer's Expo. And yes, nVIDIA has both publicly pledged future support for the Macintosh platform and inadvertently revealed some tantalizing hints of things to come by having an Apple OEM directory on its web site. But still, deep down inside, we're having a really tough time accepting the possibility that Apple may finally have gotten the ATI monkey off its back.

If it's true, though, then we at AtAT welcome the move. Everything we've heard about the GeForce chipsets has been phenomenal, and while we love our Pismo to pieces, trying to play Deus Ex on it is an exercise in frustration. And here's hoping that this is just the beginning, and the nVIDIA line spreads to the rest of Apple's products over the course of the next year. Of course, there's no guarantee that nVIDIA's Mac drivers are going to be any less troublesome than ATI's, but hey-- at least it's a change of pace.

Uh-oh, is it possible that Mac OS X's robust and modern substructure isn't quite as ready for prime time as Apple would like us to think? We have absolutely zero proof to support such a stance, but seeing as it's the holidays and everyone's already stressed out to the max, we figured we'd join in by casting vague doubts over the architecture's viability as a server platform on par with Solaris or (cough) Windows 2000. Our sole shred of circumstantial evidence to back up this campaign of terror? Apple.com's mysterious outage last night-- and the new "Powered By Mac OS X Server" badge on the home page.

Apple has actually had at least a few Mac OS X Server systems in its Apple.com server farm for over a year, now, but it appears that the company has finally ditched all of its Sun boxes and put its money where its dot is by migrating exclusively to its own "industrial strength, heavy duty" operating system. Repeated checks via Netcraft didn't reveal a single non-Mac OS X Server box in the mix, and in fact the uptime graph reported by Netcraft seems to support the theory that Apple is in fact eating nothing but its own dog food these days, web server-ly speaking. That means we've finally come full circle, and Apple's site has returned to its pre-Second Jobs Dynasty state of actually being served by Apple's own products. (The site was hosted by the plain ol' Mac OS until Steve came in and started throwing Suns all over the place.)

But while we're thrilled that Apple.com is once again (apparently) being served by Macs, last night's site outage has us a little bit on edge. Scads of AtAT viewers wrote in to report that for a sizeable chunk of time last night, all efforts to load Apple's home page resulted in error messages or "very, very slow" response times. That doesn't bode well for the dependability of Mac OS X Server-- and therefore, Mac OS X, which shares its core technologies-- in mission-critical, high-volume situations. Let the wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth commence!

Okay, that's enough. Now that you've had your fill of needlessly alarmist speculation (thank you, thank you), settle down and keep telling yourself that there's absolutely no proof that Apple's migration to Mac OS X Server had anything whatsoever to do with Apple.com's outage last night. For all we know, a squirrel chewed through a cable. Or Phil Schiller got rip-roaring drunk at the office holiday party, went looking for a men's room, entered a network closet instead, and... well, let's just say that those routers will never be the same again, even after they dry out. Still, something big happened at Apple.com, and we'll be keeping a close eye on it just in case any further weirdness rears its ugly head.

By now you've surely heard about Bill Gates's personal plea to the Federal Communications Commission, and many of you are wondering why we haven't introduced that ready-made plot point to AtAT until now. Well, here's the thing, see... whereas some stories write themselves, others are so "done" that there's nothing more to add. For those of you who missed it, CNET (and about a gazillion other sources) reports that Big Bill actually called up the chairman of the FCC personally to "urge a close examination of America Online's dominance in instant messaging." This isn't just a rumor; this was actually confirmed by a Microsoft rep. Bill Gates has personally asked a government agency to intervene and investigate potential monopoly abuses by one of its competitors.

See what we mean? What could we possibly add to that?

We suppose we could explain the joke, by reminding viewers that Bill's company is currently appealing a "guilty" verdict in the antitrust trial of the century. We could further elaborate by detailing the numerous instances in which Microsoft accused competitors like Sun of personally lobbying the government to file suit because they were all afraid of a little healthy competition. We could even point out the absurdity of the world's richest man (well, maybe not since the MSFT stock plunge, but still) begging the government for what basically amounts to long-term financial support. But to do that would mar the simple perfection of the whole thing.

So, no. Instead we'll just leave the story as is: a glittering, multifaceted jewel full of flawless internal reflections like an early Akhmatova poem (only funnier). This one will keep us smiling for a good, long time-- and by then, maybe Bill will call Apple to complain about Mac OS X stealing the Windows interface.