Your friendly neighborhood AtAT crew used to subscribe to MacWEEK, back when it was an actual paper publication (imagine!) and when we'd commonly hear people refer to it as "MacLEAK." At first there was a kind of comfort in receiving a big ol' magazine filled with Mac info every single week; it sort of reinforced the notion that the Mac world was big and bustling, at a time when everyone in the industry said it was small and dying. Eventually, though, getting the paper edition just became a hassle-- by the time it arrived, we'd already read all the articles online, and it was just another thing to throw in the recycling bin. Oh, sure, having access to ads that were updated on a weekly basis was occasionally useful when shopping around for cheap RAM or a new hard disk, but for the most part, MacWEEK was just a waste of paper as far as we were concerned. So we let our subscription lapse.

Then, of course, there was that whole rigamarole when the Mac publications world got very frightening: MacWorld and MacUser merged, and MacWEEK announced it was ceasing publication of its print version. Reasons cited included the fact that there just wasn't enough advertising revenue to go around. If ever there was a sign that the Macintosh universe was imploding, to us, that was it. And then came the coup de grace: the publishers of MacWEEK switched their focus to the cross-platform digital media industry and started cranking out eMediaweekly, which we're told wasn't all that much different from MacWEEK, except that it stuck a little closer to the digital content creation thing-- and start covering All Things Windows.

Apparently the publishers, Mac Publishing LLC, felt that stirring Windows NT into the mix would bring in all kinds of money that those throngs of Windows users have stuffed into their pockets. We can only assume that things didn't quite work out that way, though, since Mac Publishing released a statement announcing the "immediate suspension" of the magazine's publication. The official reasons given for the death of eMediaweekly include the lack of "maturity" of the digital publishing market and the fact that "computer publications across the industry" are having difficulties. Fair enough. We can't say we'll particularly miss the magazine, but we still feel a twinge of remorse, given the sense of comfort we derived from the very existence-- if not necessarily the content-- of MacWEEK several years ago. If there's a lesson here, we're not sure what it is-- unless perhaps it's, "Don't assume that opening your Mac-centric product or service to the Windows crowd will necessarily bring you fortune." (Hmmm, I think I got that in a fortune cookie once...)

If you've been tuning in to AtAT for any length of time, you know that one of the capital expenditures this studio has budgeted for 1999 is a new laptop. And not just any old laptop. Of course it has to be a Mac, that goes without saying, but it also has to be portable. We don't mean "portable" in the sense of the old Mac Portable, which weighed about as much as a three-year-old child, and also not in the sense that the PowerBook G3 is "portable," since it's roughly the size of a sofa cushion and weighs more than twice as much as our current Duo 280c. No, we're waiting for the fabled "consumer portable," that fourth chunk of Apple's product strategy, code-named "P1" and due for an unveiling any week now. Or so we had been told.

The latest news from Apple Insider about Apple's forthcoming four-pound translucent wonder is that the widely-anticipated introduction onstage at Macworld Expo Tokyo isn't going to happen. For whatever reason, instead Steve Jobs is expected to introduce the P1 to the world near or during next May's World Wide Developers Conference (not exactly the most appropriate event), and the units won't actually be available until Macworld Expo Boston in August. That's roughly equivalent to Apple's introduction of the iMac, which happened early last May. The iMac first hit store shelves in mid-August.

If true, that's a darn shame-- Macworld Tokyo would be the perfect time to show off the teensy new laptop. The Japanese have been less than impressed with the PowerBook G3's sizeable bulk, since it's too big to use on the Tokyo subway. Heck, it's even too big to use during a domestic coach flight without employing creative controlling yoga breathing techniques to minimize the size of your abdomen. A smaller G3-based laptop with a killer industrial design is exactly what the Japanese market is begging for, but it looks like we might all have to wait a few months longer. Personally, though, we're keeping our fingers crossed for the Tokyo unveiling; we still think Jobs is too much of a showman to pass up such a terrific opportunity to grab some wild applause.

Is there any doubt that it's still Sweeps Month? ER's got a month-long string of episodes dealing with Doug Ross' "possible" departure (yeah, like any of us are in suspense about the answer to that question), the X-Files is nearing its "Total Disclosure" two-parter, and "Redmond Justice" continues with the Great Faked Tape scandal of 1999. For those of you just tuning in, Microsoft introduced some new evidence this week in the form of a videotape supposedly revealing all kinds of performance degradation that creeps into Windows when Internet Explorer is removed. The only problem was, government attorney David Boies noticed that during one test shown on the tape, what was supposedly a single shot of a single computer being very slow was in fact video footage of several computers edited together; a changing title bar tipped him off. And he confronted Microsoft bigwig James Allchin about this in court, and sparks flew. It was definitely good TV.

But guess what? It's not over yet. According to a Reuters story, after four days of claiming that the videotape showed an actual test (even after Boies pointed out the Mysterious Changing Title Bar), Microsoft now admits that the tape was "not of an actual test, but merely an 'illustration.'" That's shifty enough already. But Judge Jackson (who has a lot more patience than we do, that's for sure) gave Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and let them redo the tests, provided that representatives of the government were present at the time. Sounds more than fair, right? Well, apparently Microsoft didn't think so, because they did redo the tests-- only after barring the goverment reps from the room for two hours. And when the government lawyers and computer experts were finally allowed into the room, one test in the test suite was mysteriously omitted. Guess which one? The very one shown to be doctored on the original videotape.

C'mon, even the most gullible trusting observer on the planet would have to start getting suspicious by now. Another Reuters story reveals Microsoft's rationale for abandoning the questionable test, which has to do with the speed of an Internet download. According to Microsoft official Tod Nielsen, they couldn't get a consistent Internet connection with which to perform the test. (Hmmm, are they using MSN?) Of course, there's no way to verify that claim to be accurate, since Microsoft had barred the government reps from the room during their attempts. And to top it all off, when Microsoft general counsel Bill Neukom was questioned by the press about the videotaped test, he remarked that coverage of the trial shouldn't be sidetracked by a "sideshow of melodrama about four minutes of tape." Oh, yeah, kinda like that "sideshow" about eighteen and a half minutes of tape during the Watergate investigations...