Hold the phone, Sparky-- don't go pushing your plastic at the Apple Store just yet. We're sorry if our discussion of Apple's new AppleCare Technician Training got you all juiced to rush out and join the ranks of the elite Apple-certified technicians, but several faithful viewers have since thrown a smidge of cold water on our enthusiasm. See, our understanding was that you buy the training kit for $299, use it to get yourself some o' that thar fancy book-learnin', shell out some more cash ($150, we're now told), pass an exam at a Sylvan Prometric testing center, and voilà-- you get your merit badge in Mac repair, granting you all the rights and privileges of the lofty station of Apple-certified technician, including the ability to muck about with the innards of other people's Macs without voiding their warranties. Sadly, we were far too optimistic.

See, according to The Mac Show's Shawn King, while you're officially an Apple-certified technician after passing the exam, you still can't don't get the magic anti-warranty-voiding aura until you get a job at an Apple Authorized Dealer. That's apparently the difference between "certified" and "authorized." So file away those dreams of becoming a freelance-yet-official Mac repair dude, roaming the back roads of this grand country, fixing people's ailing Macs in exchange for effusive gratitude and thick rolls of cash-- the AppleCare Technician Training program doesn't really give you that option. In fact, Dan Deering opines that your $299 gets you little more than "Mac Test Pro CDs which get outdated in about two months, and a single volume of the Service Source CDs." And, of course, the right to take the certification exam.

So if you can't set up shop as an authorized Mac repair dude in your own home, what's the point of spending $450 on Apple certification? One word: résumé. The idea, apparently, is that plenty of Mac-savvy and technically-inclined individuals will be willing to blow that kind of cash in order to make themselves eminently hirable at existing Authorized Service Providers. Since certified candidates don't have to waste any time with that darn exam after being hired, they can therefore don the magic anti-warranty-voiding aura immediately and get right to work, repairing Macs with impunity. (There's also the possibility that a few souls out there consider $299 a small price to pay to learn lots more about how Macs work.) Bummer... here we were hoping we could get certified and then do our own warranty repairs without having to ship stuff out, but sadly, it was not to be. So the next question is, how does one get one's house sanctified as an Authorized Service Provider?

Since no horrendous fate has befallen us since our public speculation regarding governor Jeb Bush's "official Florida business" with Apple Computer, we'll have to assume that we may have been a little off the mark with that stuff about seismic control, tectonic extortion, and pulling strings in the Dubya campaign. No further information has come to light about what that "official business" might be, but AtAT's faithful viewers have a few ideas of their own. And those ideas, while pedestrian and not overly-bursting with drama, have a ring of truth to them: Jeb may have a bone to pick with Florida's specific and solitary exclusion from the list of AppleCare coverage areas.

You heard right, and Mac-using Floridians probably know this from experience: as faithful viewer F. Green points out, if you live in Florida, you can't buy an AppleCare Protection Plan for your Macs. Apple's own site states that "this Plan is not available for Florida consumers or where prohibited by law." So does Apple have something against Florida? Nope-- according to the mysterious informant known to us only as the sleeping dragon, Florida has some pretty stringent consumer protection laws which are intended to curb insurance fraud among the retiree community. For instance, apparently AppleCare extended warranties are considered "insurance" and a company must have a corporate headquarters or something within the state borders in order to sell insurance in Florida. Something like that. So the state is doing an admirable job of preventing Apple from bilking thousands of elderly Floridians out of their pension checks.

Who called this meeting between Jeb and Apple, we wonder? Is it Apple trying to get Jeb to relax the state's consumer protection laws in order to open up an additional revenue stream? Or is Jeb possibly concerned that his state is the only one in the union where people can't buy AppleCare coverage? Either way, here's hoping that this "official business" soon results in the lifting of AppleCare sales restrictions to Mac users who happen to live on a sunny peninsula with a relatively high population of gators...

It's showoff time again: the semiconductor industry's equivalent of a monster truck rally. Welcome to the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where chipmakers flex their megahertz muscles and square off in an alarming display of who can squeeze the most clock cycles out of their silicon. The PowerPC may be way behind when it comes to the clock speeds of processors that are actually shipping in purchasable products, but in the alpha-geek demo environment of the ISSCC, it can still hold its own.

For instance, while a Wired article claims that Intel is showcasing a Pentium III ridiculously overclocked to run at a full 1 GHz, IBM apparently doesn't plan to let those Intel punks get away with that kind of crap; IBM's "special" demo PowerPC is also running at 1 GHz. (Strange, but we seem to recall that IBM had a 1 GHz PowerPC for demo purposes at least a couple of years ago. So much for progress.) Motorola's demo PowerPC is running at only a scant 780 MHz-- seemingly puny, until you consider that it's actually going to ship someday. Whereas that 1 GHz Pentium III will more likely be used as the heat element in a forthcoming "Now With Extra Heat!" Easy-Bake Oven than in an actual shipping computer. (Not that Intel won't have another chip that will ship at 1 GHz and up, but that Pentium III is pure skunkworks.)

Better yet, Keith Diefendorff of the "influential" Microprocessor Report acknowledges that the 780 MHz PowerPC is "much more likely to reach the market this year" than the juiced-up Pentium III, and even notes that "the 780 MHz PowerPC would be roughly equivalent to a 1 GHz Intel chip." Woo-hoo, vindication from an independent outside source! Now if we could just convince the public at large of that fact. And if Motorola could only get the G4 past 450 MHz. Oy... with Athlons at 800 MHz out there, we've got a ways to go. For what it's worth, Motorola still claims that 500 MHz G4 chips will ship before the end of March, but we can't help feeling pretty far behind.