It's back! It's back! Just when we thought it was gone for good, Apple has answered our prayers (or, at least, our thrice-daily bordering-on-harassment nagging email requests) and restored the "Coming Soon" section to its retail page! Imagine our beaming, foaming delight when faithful viewer Justin Resuello hit us with the good news. Finally, Mac fanatics can drop all pretense of having real lives in favor of once again obsessing endlessly about where and when future Apple stores will spawn next! And just in time, too; now that Adobe has gone on the record as saying that Photoshop for Mac OS X will ship in April, some of us have really been looking for something else on which to fixate.

First up in Apple's second wave of retail store openings: as expected, the Durham, North Carolina location clumsily referred to by Apple as the "Apple Store The Streets at Southpoint." (Yick.) According to Apple, the Durham grand opening is slated for Saturday, March 9th (that's not this weekend, but the next), so those of you in the area may want to cancel the Panic Day parties, clear your schedules, and start planning your tactical approach now, with the help of Apple's handy maps. Those of you not in the area, well, Apple makes a point of mentioning that the new store is a mere twenty minutes from Raleigh/Durham International Airport. Time to cash in those frequent flyer miles.

Now, some people out there are going to say that even "those crazy Apple nuts" couldn't muster up enough enthusiasm to line up at insane hours and get all excited about Apple's 28th grand opening-- but we say there have just got to be some fevered North Carolinians looking to prove them wrong. As everyone knows, Apple's retail initiative isn't exactly profitable on paper yet, so the company can really use all the publicity it can get to help spread the word about each new store. A discreet call to the local paper mentioning that there's going to be a group of shirtless nutcases with their upper bodies painted aqua lined up at 4 AM just because an Apple store is about to open might go a long way on a slow news day, if you catch our drift. Try to show a little energy, and remember-- if these stores wind up folding, we're all headed back to CompUSA. Please muffle those screams.

Incidentally, this may have been going on for a while (or, given our general state of terminal cluelessness, a really long time), but we only just noticed that the Apple retail stores are now featuring "a free Getting Started Workshop for new Mac owners" every Saturday at 9 AM. In light of how many sales Apple is making to newbies and former Wintel users, apart from the time slot (as far as we're concerned, 9 AM on Saturdays is a time held sacred for sleep or cartoons; anything else constitutes a form of blasphemy), we consider that to be a fabulous idea. There you have it, folks: just one more reason why the proliferation of Apple stores is so crucial to the platform's growth and ultimate success. So get your Grand Opening mojo workin' and show a little spirit.

Holy dyslexia, Batman-- confusion about Mac OS X's current version number is running rampant. First, faithful viewer Antoine McNamara nudged us towards a Computer Times review of the new iMac (a pretty glowingly favorable one, by the way) which claims that the system ships preloaded with Mac OS X "10.2.1." Are they reviewing iMacs that have travelled back in time from next November, or was it just a simple typo? If you accept the principle that the simplest explanation is usually correct, then you might be inclined to lean towards the latter-- especially since the article also incorrectly reports that the iMac's native screen resolution is "1024x640," so mistakes aren't exactly scarce around there. Fair enough.

But then how do you also explain the fact that Apple itself seems to be having trouble keeping track of which Mac OS X version is currently out? When faithful viewer addict told us that Apple's latest Mac OS X email update tells users that "Mac OS X 10.3.1" is available, at first we just shrugged it off as yet another typo, and probably a small and easily-missed one at that. But after two dozen more reports of the error streaming in from frustrated fans who got their hopes up too easily, faithful viewer Anthony pointed out a screenshot of the typo-- and considering that it's in a headline and is thus rendered in huge boldface type, it is indeed pretty tough to miss.

So what, exactly, is going on here? Either someone in the Mac OS X development team is packing a time dilation unit with a hair trigger and a broken safety, or something is inducing widespread typographical errors among people attempting to report Apple's operating system version numbers. We're tempted to blame it on some new frequency-jamming signal originating from somewhere in the Redmond vicinity that causes synapse misfires whenever anyone tries to say, write, or type a Mac OS X version number; it's annoying, to be sure, but it's hardly life-threatening. It'll really be time to worry when we walk into the Apple store and see shrink-wrapped boxes touting "Mac OS Y."

Incidentally, the real current version of Mac OS X is, as everyone knows, 10.1.5. You're welcome.

We know, we know-- it's old hat to mention Mike Dell's Wacko "Hey, Look, I'm Steve Jobs" Copycat Move O' The Day, and given the increasingly obvious depth of the man's psychosis, it's probably also in pretty poor taste. But heck, we never said we were sensitive to the plights of the ravingly insane. Plus, it's a slow news day, so surely you'll forgive us if we seize the moral low ground and fall back on a classic recurring plot point, right?

So here's the latest... faithful viewer Ryan McGee forwarded us a ZDNet News article about how Dell has a new sales strategy up its sleeve: sell LCD displays instead of CRTs in hopes of "improving margins and lifting PC sales." Remember last year when Apple became the "first in the industry to move to an all LCD flat panel display pro lineup"? Okay, sure, this may be slightly too generic a plan on Dell's part to be an obvious lift from Apple's playbook, but something about the way it's reported just rings too many bells. And we just love how a research firm exec says that this move "helps to differentiate [Dell] from [its] competitors." Yeah, moving to LCDs just differentiates Dell from Apple like crazy.

Oh, and this is rich: the same guy who sees Dell's newfound emphasis on LCDs as a terrific differentiating factor also "wouldn't be surprised to see rivals such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq" copying Dell and moving to flat-panel displays themselves. So now instead of the rest of the industry following in Apple's trailblazing footsteps, apparently now it's Dell leading the way. Priceless. We can't wait until Dell invents an LCD connected to a CPU base unit with a positionable jointed arm and everyone else scrambles to copy it. After all, Dell was the first to integrate wireless networking antennas into laptops, right?

To be fair, we should mention that Dell's new LCD is a 19-inch model-- something that we bet a lot of Mac users wouldn't mind seeing in Apple's lineup to fill in the $1500 gap between the $999 17-incher and the $2499 22-inch Cinema Display. And we should also point out that, according to the article, Dell's model is "targeted at people, such as stock traders, who are looking for a sleek, low-power consuming screen." Don't ask us why stock traders are apparently particularly hot on sleekness and low power consumption; if we knew, our portfolio probably wouldn't be in the toilet right about now. But maybe Apple should steal a play right back from Dell and quit pitching the Cinema Display to creative professionals; if Dell's right, it's the reckless day-traders that'll really like this thing...