Guessing facts and specifications about Apple's upcoming hardware offerings is a favorite party game among Mac users, right up there with the "Spot the Mac on TV" drinking game (if the Apple logo is plainly visible, take two gulps!) and "Pin The Antitrust Rap on Bill Gates" (bonus points if you manage to pin the subpoena to his crotch). But just because we Mac users can imagine some pretty killer hardware on our own doesn't mean that it isn't nice to hear what Apple's real plans are when it comes to future computers. That's yet another reason why the annual Worldwide Developers Conference is such a blast; it's one of the few times when Apple is publicly forthcoming about what they plan to release over the course of the next year. Oh, sure, they don't tell us everything, but they have to disclose enough information to let the programmers write software that'll work on whatever cool new Macs are coming down the pipe.

Now, as you would probably imagine, after months of personal speculation and hearing all the rumors about scary new technology Apple's cooking up in its secret underground labs, the reality of the situation might seem a little bland in comparison. That said, it's still worth your while to check out ZDNN's coverage of Tuesday's WWDC hardware strategy session. If you've been holding off on getting a blue-and-white Power Mac G3 because you figured there'd be G4s shipping within a few short months, your hardware strategy is running a bit faster than Apple's; apparently the Power Mac G4 won't be released until "this time next year." If that seems a bit late to you, given that the G4 chip is very close to shipping, then you're not alone; it's all well and good for Apple to be making favorable comparisons between the G4 and the Pentium III-- the G4 is smaller (what isn't?), packs more transistors, and sucks up less power-- but the Pentium III is here today, while we've got to wait another year before Apple ships G4-based machines. And by then Intel will have the next chip out the door, and Apple will probably be saying how much better the G5 will be when it's released a year from then. (Well, not really, but you get the point.)

Anyway, impatience aside, we still consider it a good thing finally to hear what Apple's G4 plans are from the horse's mouth. In a more general hardware sense, Apple reps reportedly also announced that the floppy is dead, dead, dead (as further evidenced by the fact that the new 101 PowerBooks don't come with a floppy, nor can you buy one as a media bay peripheral from Apple), and DVD drives will become standard equipment, replacing the ubiquitous CD-ROM drive. And of course they played up USB and FireWire, the next generation of peripheral bus interconnectivity-- no surprise there. All told, there weren't any revelations that come close to the fevered imaginings of Mac fantasists conjuring up their dream machines, but again, it's nice to get a solid sense of Apple's take on the future. Now, anyone up for a round of "Spin the iMac Mouse?"

Are you disappointed at the lack of big surprises at this year's WWDC? Was the fact that Dragon Systems plans to release a Mac version of their continuous voice dictation software just not shocking enough for you? Were you hoping for thrills and chills that you felt you just didn't receive? Well, apparently most of the developers at the conference wouldn't agree with you. They're all walking around with stunned looks on their faces and their jaws dragging on the floor because this has been the most surprising WWDC in years-- precisely because there weren't any nasty surprises.

Think about it; for the past several years, it seems like every WWDC has brought a new Apple operating system strategy that's forced developers to rethink their whole commitment to this wild and wacky platform we call Macintosh. There was Copland, which would have some modern features but would break lots of existing software. Actual books were written, published, and sold about how to write software for Copland (we have one kicking around at the AtAT studios), which is especially ironic since Copland was eventually thrown out the window, with individual salvageable bits being rolled into other versions of the Mac OS. Then there was Rhapsody, the NeXT-based operating system that basically required Mac developers to rewrite all their software-- and originally they had to do it in Objective C, a programming language few Mac programmers knew or wanted to learn. Then last year Apple announced Mac OS X-- a new spin on Rhapsody with Carbon APIs, which made life a lot easier for developers who wanted to update their existing applications without having to rewrite them from scratch.

So the big surprise this year is that Mac OS X is still the operating system strategy of the day. Carbon still exists-- and in fact the APIs have apparently been finalized and released. It's a year later, and Apple has stayed the course; we imagine there must have been at least a few developers at the conference who keeled over stone dead when the realization hit them. It looks like there's really something approaching a state of stability in Apple's whole software strategy, and a bigger (or happier) surprise we can't imagine.

A new mystery has arisen, and it may actually rank higher on the Baffle-O-Meter™ than the startling and secret new genetic evidence that reveals Steve Jobs was in fact born on this planet after all. Faithful viewer Scott Kramer noticed something peculiar about the Mac OS 8.6 installer. In his own words, "693-2025? OK, after expanding the binaries and mounting the .smi's, we get a folder called 'Mac OS 8.6 Update' ... perfectly normal. But do a 'Get Info' on it, and we see '693-2025' in the comments box. What might this be?" Indeed, eagle-eyed Scott is correct; our mounted 8.6 disk image also contains the mysterious phone number in its Get Info comments box. Intriguing, no?

In a basic web search for that phone number string, we found a couple of pages that list "693-2025" as a contact number. The first is a real estate listing for houses in "The Meadows" of Solano County, CA, which lists (707) 693-2025 as the number to call for more information. Curiously enough, the second page we found is another real estate listing-- but this one's in Japanese. Not being familiar with the language (though Mac OS 8.5's multilingual web support allowed Netscape to render it beautifully on our screen), we can't give many details, but one of the houses in the middle of the page has a phone number of TEL091-693-2025. Two real estate listings sharing the same phone number in different countries... Coincidence?

Now, please note that we are not suggesting that people actually start calling this number in various area codes trying to find some bizarre evidence that will connect Apple with the Whitewater scandal, the Kennedy assassination, or the frightening trend of KFC and Taco Bell sharing the same restaurant. The last thing we want is lots of poor folks who just happen to have that phone number getting lots of calls waking them up on the weekends and interrupting their dinner time-- leave that to the telemarketers, okay? We don't need a repeat of that whole Tommy Tutone/867-5309 thing. Having said that, we admit that we did try dialing the mystery number as a toll-free 800 line. Imagine our surprise when a recording began with "Hi, Sexy! You've just connected to the hottest phone service in the country!" Hmmm... Just what are those Apple developers up to in the operating system department?