Now, we know that the Xserve is sort of a specialty product with a niche-within-a-niche market, but jeez, there must be at least a couple of prospective customers whose heads have caught fire from the inside by now. Not that we Mac fans are anything but patient, of course; remember how long we waited for Motorola to break 500 MHz? And the number of horrifying deaths directly attributable to that delay was astonishing low-- a few hundred, tops.

With the Xserve's G5ification, though, the whole saga's been sort of a protracted tease: Apple unveiled the G5 processor last July, and it was obviously a natural for the Xserve line, but the Power Mac G5 shipped in August and the Xserve stayed G4. Months passed and seasons changed without even a hint of G5-powered Xserves approaching. Finally in January Apple announced the Xserve G5, with a long-overdue ship date of February... and now February's come and gone, G5 Xserves still haven't materialized, patience finally ran out after eight months of waiting, and a couple of people's brains burst into flame. Hey, it happens.

But since it's the second week in March and Apple is now officially over a week late getting those rackable rowdies out the door, the company has been forced to admit the delay-- though, of course, it's entertainingly vague about what the nature of said delay might be. Macworld UK reports that it's received an "official statement" from Apple, which simply informs us all that there's been "an incredible amount of customer interest" in the Xserve G5 "since it was announced at Macworld Expo in January 2004" (of course, the interest goes back waaaaaay further than that, but okay) and that the company is now "working hard to start shipping the new Xserve systems in March 2004, not by the end of February as originally announced."

Gee, and not even a token note of apology to the families of those whose heads went Ghost Rider from waiting too long. Meanwhile, note that saying "we're working hard... to start shipping in March" isn't quite the same thing as saying "we'll ship in March," so it's entirely possible that another "official statement" will need to be issued when the second week of April rolls around, at which point the death toll may frankly start to get a bit embarrassing.

Note also that Apple "declined to offer specific details about the delay," which leaves the door wide open for all sorts of wild and unfounded speculation to start creeping in. (Hallelujah!) Regular viewers will recall that we've previously touched on several theories seeking to explain the absence of Xserve G5s, as well as the continued limbo-bound state of speed-bumped Power Macs (using the same PowerPC 970FX chip that'll be in the Xserves when they finally grace this physical plane of existence) that many rumor hounds have been expecting since New Year's. Is it a cooling problem? A chip shortage? An infestation of murderous leprechauns? Only Apple knows for sure. And the leprechauns.

Hope glimmers on the horizon, however; faithful viewer chollyhead points out that MacRumors hints at a March 23rd intro for faster Power Macs, citing a French MacPlus.org article as its source. (This Babelfish auto-translation is surprisingly decipherable if you don't polly-voo-franzy.) The new Power Macs are rumored to be an all-dual lineup, with processors running at 1.8, 2.2, and 2.4 GHz. Make of that what you will; MacPlus was pretty emphatic about the whole "this is just a rumor" disclaimer, but heck, if it keeps the leprechauns away and your head from going Brain Flambé, more power to you.

Apparently analyst Rob Enderle has gotten tired of the hate mail, or he's at least hoping to reduce the number of people who point at him, cover their mouths, and giggle when they pass him on the street. Rob, as you know, is the current reigning king of high-profile anti-Apple punditry, a title which he clearly deserves. The man effortlessly blends Apple-hostile rhetoric and a penchant for prognostication that's almost Criswellian in its startling lack of accuracy, and serves it all up both in his own articles and in sound bites he tosses to journalists so they can quote a real live analyst in their own stories. Good stuff all around.

But like we said, it seems that Rob has decided to take a little break from the Apple-bashing; faithful viewer Tony Wren points out that his latest piece at TechNewsWorld is actually outright complimentary of Apple on several fronts-- not many of them technical, so there's a bit of backhandedness to the compliments, but still, this is quite a change of pace from his normal Apple material. Allow us to dish you a few of the more surprising quotes: "Apple's designs are, well, elegant. There is no better word for it." "The company simply seems to understand what will get people excited about its products, and then it executes on that vision." "Apple often gets it right in one try."

Nice stuff, right? And there's more; Rob goes on to speak with surprising insight about that sexy back-and-down hinge in the Apple portables that lowers the height of the systems so they take up less space during inflight use. He refers to the Power Mac G5's enclosure as "trendy," "exclusive," and "stunning," which could almost make you forget that he's Mr. Ferraribook if it weren't for his constant comparisons to features of cars. (Porsche and the Honda S2000 both get a mention this time around.)

None of this is to say, of course, that ol' Rob isn't still smoking something potent. He closes the piece wondering if the HP-branded iPod might lead to an accompanying "iTunes PC," an Apple-built Wintel box that brings some of the Apple experience to the Wintel world. "What if this PC had an Apple hardware design and used a skin to give Windows XP an Apple-like user interface?" he wonders. Well, we could answer that right now, actually, with any number of humorous folk sayings. There's one about a silk purse and a sow's ear, for example. Another one about lipstick on a pig comes to mind. (Boy, the pigs just don't come off well in those old folk sayings, do they?) Frankly, we're a little surprised that Rob can wax poetic about the design of Apple's laptop hinges and then still think that changing how Windows looks is going to make all the difference, but hey, the guy's tripping, so we won't even try to understand.

Oh, and we can answer his next question before he even asks it: yes, we have looked at our hands. Really looked at our hands.

Meanwhile, is this the beginning of the sort of change of heart we've seen infect a few Apple-hostile pundits in the past? Could be, especially if what causes it is contagious. David Coursey used to be pretty unfriendly to Apple, too, but in recent years he's taken to bashing Windows on occasion while praising his Macs to the skies-- and he recently admitted that Rob Enderle is his friend. Indeed, Coursey's last bout of Windows-crashing ickiness took place right after he'd been to Rob's house. Think Rob may have caught something?

Maybe, maybe not; for all we know he's just trying to stem the barrage of flame mail until his eyebrows grow back, or perhaps the same psychotropic substance that has him thinking how great it'd be if Apple built Wintels also nudged him over the line into Crazytown. Still, whatever the motive, it's refreshing to hear Rob saying nice things about Apple for once. Enjoy it while it lasts, because his stash will run out eventually.

Just a quickie, here, folks-- hands up, who remembers MyTunes? For the slightly less obsessed, here's a refresher: not terribly long after iTunes for Windows appeared, someone wrote a bit of software that hooks into iTunes itself and records music streams into local MP3 copies saved to the hard drive. The upshot is that iTunes's sharing feature, which lets you listen to the songs of other iTunes users sharing their libraries on the same local network, could be used to copy songs instead of just listening to them. You could just hear all that character corroding before your very ears.

Now, technically, MyTunes wasn't really all that big a deal; all it did was record a song playing through iTunes, which means that it couldn't be used to copy someone's protected iTunes Music Store purchases unless the MyTunes computer was authorized to play the music in the first place. And it's not like audio stream recorders didn't exist before, on all sorts of platforms (take WireTap, for example); it's just that MyTunes tied itself so closely to iTunes that it grabbed a bit of press and probably made Apple a little nervous. (Remember, Steve had to work hard to convince the record labels that licensing their music to Apple was a good idea, and something like MyTunes might panic some of the less tech-savvy suits.)

Why are we bringing this up again now, you ask? Well, interestingly enough, CNET reports that MyTunes has "all but vanished from the Net, and its programmer's sites have gone dark." Was it the RIAA going lawsuit-happy again? Or maybe Apple's lawyers making with the cease-and-desist mojo? Nope; MyTunes is gone because its author, Bill Zeller, didn't keep backups: "he simply lost the source code in a catastrophic computer crash." Since his code is now wending its way up to that Great Bitbucket in the Sky, Bill says there "won't be any updates" because he "[doesn't] want to rewrite it."

How inconvenient-- for Bill, at least. But if you're the paranoid type, you might find it a little too coincidental that Bill's hard disk went kablooey just as he was "about to release the second version." Sounds to us like Apple may have dispatched a tactical ninja or two to "encourage" Bill's little storage malfunction. Such a shame... that poor hard drive never hurt a fly. Then again, it was running Windows, so maybe it was grateful to be put out of its misery.

The moral of the story? If you're writing software that Apple might one day deem "strategically disadvantageous," you really should be keeping offsite backups of all your source code in a ninja-resistant fire vault. And don't skimp on the ninjaproofing. Just how do you think the Windows source code bled out all over the 'net? They move like shadows, people. Shadows!