And the tech karma wheel just turns and turns. We usually don't have much trouble with our high-tech stuff, what with the computers being Macs and all, but remember how we whined about a slew of bizarre hardware and software failures last week? Well, it looks like the universe decided to equalize the pressure by cutting us a huge break in the area of tech distribution. As usual, certain Apple products are apparently pretty hard to come by; unfortunately, one of the tougher items to find is the new PowerBook we need to pick up before an imminent trip to Vegas next month. Poking around last week revealed that the 1.67 GHz 15-inch PowerBook is practically mythical in nature, like a unicorn, or a UPN sitcom: everyone knows what one is, but no one's actually seen one.

But we need to get our grubby little mitts on one, so we went shopping around, and since price is a pretty major factor for us right now, we eventually decided to order from Amazon.com (since they offer free ground shipping and a $150 rebate) despite the scary note that said "In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served." After all, we've got a few weeks' leeway before we need the thing, and when we checked around before the weekend, no online vendor seemed to have the SuperDrive-equipped 15-incher in stock, so the price incentive seemed worth the gamble. After all, if it got too close to travel time and the order still hadn't shipped, we could always just cancel it and pray that they'd be in stock in Apple's retail stores by then. So we placed the order yesterday morning, and spent the next twenty or so hours hoping that the estimated arrival date of March 18th that appeared in our online order status was actually based on real facts and inventory figures, as opposed to just being generated by a concussed ape throwing darts at a calendar (as so often seems to be the case).

Imagine our surprise, then, when we received a shipping confirmation message at 4:24 this morning.

Imagine our further surprise when tracking the shipment, which, according to UPS, actually shipped just before midnight on Monday from Harrisburg, PA, passed through Hartford, CT (just a hundred miles from our doorstep) as of 9:16 this morning, and had already arrived at the routing center in nearby Chelmsford by 12:28 PM. Assuming all of this is correct, we should take delivery of this hard-to-find PowerBook at noonish on Wednesday. Two days from order to delivery? Not bad for free ground shipping of a product that Amazon still lists as being "in stock soon." But doesn't it strike you as a bit odd, given how scarce this particular PowerBook seems to be? Heck, even the Apple Store is claiming a wait of "4-6 business days." We still half-suspect that it's all a mistake and when the box arrives, it'll actually contain a gift assortment of Cheeses of Many Lands or something.

If it's not all some cruel hoax, then maybe the universe cut us a little slack this time, granting us Timely PowerBooky Goodness when, all around us, far less lucky fools are going positively geriatric waiting for their preorders from over a month ago. Far likelier, though, is that for once in our lives we just happen to have impeccable timing and SuperDrive 15-inchers are just now starting to flood the channel. After all, iPod shuffles have been pretty thin on the vine, too, but according to AppleInsider, retailers just received scads of 'em over the weekend, with one retail source going so far as to say, "There are too many to count; we have a ton." So maybe SuperDrive 15-inch PowerBooks aren't quite so rare anymore either. Just for the heck of it, we called our local Apple retail store today-- and whaddaya know? They had the elusive lil' critters in stock.

But regardless, we refuse to stop feeling lucky-- at least until we hear that the UPS truck carrying our PowerBook was blown over an icy cliff in our current high-winds horizontal-snow situation. And then we'll probably still feel luckier than the driver. Marginally.

Sony strikes back! Just a day after canning its CEO and president in part for letting the company fall so far behind Apple in the portable audio market it once dominated, the home electronics giant has just unveiled its latest plan to dig itself out from under the weight of a zillion unsold Network Walkman units and wrestle some sweet stuff back from the various iPods that descended on the market share pie like a swarm of shiny, personable locusts. Is it a futile attempt? Not hardly; this is Sony, after all, which is probably the one company that really can compete with Apple on a design footing. So while companies like Virgin Electronics are, according to an Engadget article pointed out by faithful viewer João, calling it quits (remember when its Virgin Player was supposed to be the product that would kill the iPod mini?), Sony has the design sense and the muscle to give the iPod family a run for its ever-growing piles of money-- assuming, of course, that the company ever figures out what customers actually want in a portable digital music player in the first place.

So what's the latest from Sony's digital music elves? Well, according to a Reuters article forwarded by faithful viewer Nick Zervas, it's a new line of cheaper flash-based players intended to throw some cold water on iPod shuffle fever before every man, woman, and child on this or any other planet has no fewer than six of the doohickeys clipped, strapped, or otherwise fastened to various body parts at any given time. Reportedly the cheapest configurations "will retail below 100 euros," a move that Sony hopes "will address complaints that its products are overpriced." Sure, it's a little disconcerting to see a premium brand like Sony going all budget-conscious with the price points, but hey, these are strange times; it's certainly no weirder than Apple introducing the Mac mini.

There's just one problem: if these cheaper Sony players are primarily intended to compete on price, Apple still comes out way ahead. Sony's cheapest new model costs the same as a 512 MB iPod shuffle, but only packs 256 MB of flash RAM; if you want as much storage from a Sony product as Apple's top-of-the-line €149 model, you'll have to shell out a whopping €90 more, because "the most expensive one-gigabyte model will go for about 240 euros"-- which, incidentally, is only slightly less than Apple charges for a 6 GB iPod mini. Oh, but Sony's still playing games with how many songs it says its players can hold, claiming that the 1 GB model "can store the equivalent of 45 compact discs." That's entirely true-- assuming that you typically listen to said compact discs over a baby monitor whose transmitter is positioned in front of your stereo's speakers four rooms away, since Sony is evidently assuming an "equivalent" 64 Kbps encoding bitrate. (Apple more honestly bills the 1 GB iPod shuffle as being able to hold 240 songs-- at 128 Kbps.)

To be fair, though, the Sony players do have screens (and very nice ones, apparently), which the shuffles do not, and they look pretty darn slick. Slick enough to put a noticeable dent in iPod shuffle sales? Obviously we won't know for sure until they ship later this month, but let's put it this way: given the price difference, the iPod's brand strength, and the fact that iPods aren't exactly butt-ugly themselves, we figure the Sony units would have to look like little naked ladies or something before they do any serious damage to iPod sales. Anyone taking bets?

"Say, AtAT," you ask telepathically like Danny in The Shining and possibly without even knowing it, "how come you haven't said much about the ongoing lawsuit that Apple filed against Think Secret for spilling the beans about unannounced products, or the way it's subpoenaed source info from that site and others in order to sue the people who leaked trade secrets in the first place?" Well, kiddies, partly it's because we don't want to skew the Vegas odds on the outcome, but mostly we're just pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. We see valid points on both sides of the conflict, and since we generally prefer not to think about things if we can possibly avoid it, rather than mull over the issues during hours of TV-killing soul-searching and then coming down squarely in one camp or the other, we figure we'll just leave the matter unresolved in our heads and wait to hear what the nice judge will say.

You don't understand why we're conflicted? Well, okay, here's the problem: we think that free speech is absolutely the single most important right granted by the U.S. Constitution-- far more important than all that stuff about unreasonable search and seizure or not waking up to find three Army Reserve guys crashed out on your living room floor. Given that we yammer on endlessly here every day (well, okay, that's a stretch recently, but allow us a little poetic license) about the most esoteric trivialities, we really like knowing that the fundamental basis of our entire legal system guarantees that no one's going to pass a law making it legal to shoot logorrheic Apple-obsessed nutjobs just to get them finally to shut their virtual traps once and for all. So we'll gladly give up the right to bare arms and wear long sleeves even in the summer, just as long as no one in authority can tell us we can't keep spewing this drivel until we fall over in a heap.

But as every schoolkid knows, freedom of speech has its limits, which is why it's not legal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater unless something's actually burning. (So if you want to do that, make sure you set fire to the place first.) Sensibly enough, the right to free speech starts to fade right when you get into the area of saying things that might deprive others of their rights. And that's why we can't see these cases in black and white terms; according to CNET, last week Apple argued that "there was no journalism" involved in what Think Secret and the other subpoenaed sites had done, which amounted to nothing more than "simply fencing stolen information by publishing it verbatim." And we can definitely see that point; if stealing a trade secret and passing it along to one competitor is illegal, why should soliciting insider info, knowingly receiving a stolen trade secret, and then publishing it so all of Apple's competitors can see it be protected as freedom of the press? This isn't the case of a whistleblower leaking secrets to stop some hidden corporate crime, or anything like that; these were product specs, posted solely for the sake of posting them. Given that trade secrets are "intellectual property," why is what Think Secret did any different than trafficking in stolen goods?

That said, Think Secret makes a solid point when it says that "if a publication such as the New York Times had published such information... Apple never would have considered a lawsuit." Think Secret is clearly the underdog, here, and there's more than a faint whiff of Calvin Klein's "Corporate Bully" lingering in the air.

See? We could go back and forth on this all night, and it's already cut deeply into our available TiVo time, so we're just going to leave things right where we found them and disengage before we sprain a frontal lobe or something. We can at least rest secure in the knowledge that, however it all turns out, we'll be able to nod our heads sagely and say, "there is merit in this outcome." Pretty zen, huh? Or maybe we should Yoda it up a notch and say, "merit in this outcome there is." Either way, we're going to need some cool cloaks.