Yet another symbol of Apple's past is gone. This time, it's the famous "icon garden" that's gotten the axe. For the uninitiated, the public park outside Apple's headquarters in Cupertino includes huge sculptures of famous cursor icons, such as the arrow, the pencil, and the dogcow-- at least, it did until a few days ago. Apple spokeswoman Rhona Hamilton is quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying that the giant icons were taken down to be repaired, but there are no plans to put them back up outside; she claims that Apple has decided that they want to "update the park."

The more reasonable viewers in our audience may take this explanation at face value, especially since Apple's been in a serious "let's change stuff" mode lately. But the truly sharp among you will no doubt realize that Apple's official word on the icons' disappearance is an obvious fabrication, designed to cover up the unexplained theft of the sculptures from the public park. Nevertheless, Apple now must scrounge up something else to slap down in the park, since a condition in their building permit requires that they provide public art in that patch of greenery outside Apple's stronghold. Any bets on what they'll put there? A forty-foot statue of Steve Jobs, perhaps, standing triumphant over the decapitated remains of the defeated infidels from the Clone Wars? Or a giant translucent iMac, complete with crawl-in tunnels and slides for the kiddies? (You can ride the mouse for a quarter!)

By the way, on a related note, AtAT firmly denies the recent rumors that the six-foot fiberglass icons were secretly loaded into top-secret UFO-enhanced black helicopters, spirited to our east-coast studios, and now adorn the walls of our kitchen. And no, you can't come in to check for yourselves. We're, uh, remodeling it right now. Permanently. (If you want another look at the missing icons, we suggest you visit Jory's Apple Icon Garden Adventure instead.)

Merced, Merced, Merced-- that's all we ever freaking hear about from those who try to wave off the PowerPC's large (and growing) performance lead over Intel's processor offerings. Merced, as you probably have not been able to avoid hearing, is the next-generation 64-bit chip that Intel has been working on (together with Hewlett Packard) for several years now. It's the bee's knees. It's the cat's pyjamas. It's all kinds of body parts and sleeping apparel belonging to various mammals and insects. Unfortunately, it's also going to be late. According to PC Week Online, Intel's wonderchip won't be making its messianic appearance until mid-2000, instead of its most recently reported ship date of late 1999.

Given Intel's absolutely huge presence in the processor market, everybody on the planet expects Merced to be a major factor; in addition to 64-bit Merced versions of Windows NT, other operating systems targeting the processor are Hewlett Packard's HP-UX version of Unix, Sun's Solaris, and DEC's Digital Unix. Apple had even publicly mentioned that they were planning to get Rhapsody running on Merced; now, with Rhapsody's expected absorption into Mac OS X, Mac OS Rumors is even reporting the remote possibility of Mac OS X for Merced. Stranger things have happened. Each of these vendors' operating system plans may have to be reshuffled now that Merced is still two years away.

That doesn't mean that Intel's going to be shipping the same old Pentium II's until early 2000. Well, actually, yeah, in a sense it kind of does mean that; Intel's upcoming Xeon, Willamette, and Tanner processors, while faster than today's Pentium II's, are apparently all 32-bit chips that continue to squeeze more and more performance out of the increasingly tired-looking Pentium architecture. It's a testament to Intel's damn-near-godlike technical ability that they've managed to get blood from a stone, but the stone's got to run dry eventually. And that's why Merced's delayed appearance has the potential to shift the landscape significantly. Bring on the G4's!

Soon, six-PCI-slot Mac systems may be harder to find than a permanent Apple CEO. Mac users (such as digital video producers) who need more PCI slots than the three present in Apple's current G3 systems have turned to the few remaining clonemakers such as Umax and Mactell, who still sell six-slot Tsunami motherboard systems, typically with G3 upgrade cards installed. Unfortunately for them, Mac cloning v.1.0 is in its last death throes, according to a MacWEEK article, so that avenue will be gone by the end of the year.

As for an Apple-branded six-slot system to take the place of the 9600, it doesn't sound like Apple's really planning anything like that, now that the Gossamer II motherboard project is dead. Instead, Apple will rely on the third-party companies who make PCI expansion chassis to cater to the relatively small market that needs that many slots. That sounds like a reasonable stance to adopt, given that Apple's trying to reduce the number of motherboards it produces, and more slots means higher cost for the vast majority of people who would be paying for slots they'll never use.

Unfortunately, that doesn't address the concerns of the other audience fond of the Tsunami motherboard-- those people who need a ton of RAM. The Tsunami could take up to a full gigabyte of RAM, which only sounds excessive if you don't happen to work with huge prepress graphics files that you'd like to manipulate completely in RAM instead of falling back on a scratch disk. Hopefully Apple's upcoming high-end systems will take more RAM than the current G3's, which max out at something like 768MB, and only then if you use expensive DIMMs larger than Apple recommends.