You know, it's nice to know that we can take some time off every once in a while to deal with the fallout of post-reproductive sleep loss and find that when we once again have the energy to turn our attention back to the drama in the world of Apple, fundamentally, nothing's changed. Oh, sure, stuff may have shifted in context slightly; three and a half years ago, "three pizzas" was the monthly cost of buying a new iMac on the "Bleed Me 'Til I'm Dry" payment plan, whereas now it's what we might be able to buy with the proceeds after liquidating our cratered AAPL holdings following last week's earnings warning. But the important stuff is all still in effect. For example, as faithful viewer Alpha Dan points out, G4-maker Motorola is still printing up pink slips like they can be used as legal tender; nothing new there, and at this rate, the only surprise is that Moto still had 7,000 employees left to lay off. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (For the unschooled, that's French for "I would also like a book of matches.")

Likewise, faithful viewer T.S. McBride (and most of the rest of this planet's mammalian population) notes that John C. Dvorak is evidently still smoking the same low-grade crack that led him to predict that the original iMac and iBook would both be dismal failures; now he's denigrating the switchers in Apple's new "Real People" ads as being "goofy looking shlubs" when he, himself, looks like this. Heck, the only reason ol' Crackpipe John doesn't have his-- well, for lack of a better term, we suppose we'll call it a "face"-- immortalized next to the definition of "shlub" in the American Heritage Dictionary is because he failed to pass Houghton Mifflin's mandatory drug screening. (Apparently even PC Magazine's editors have given up on trying to coax any sort of coherence from John's tripped-out scrawls. Ignoring for a moment his research-challenged spelling of Steven as "Stephen" and Aaron as "Aron," just bathe in the heady glow of this gem of literary clarity: "I don't think the company is not going on the offensive." Bravo. Geez, if they can't clean him up, can they at least get Dvorak off the crack and onto, say, horse? At least heroin addicts occasionally write something interesting.)

Moreover, it's not just the long-term trends that appear to be continuing. Earlier this month (when we thought we were actually going to be able to get back on a regular broadcast schedule before Anya would sleep through the night, har de har har) we raised the unsettling possibility that iMac demand might be dropping off even as Apple had finally ironed out its supply problems. Well, that "might" is looking less and less iffy these days; by now you've probably noticed that CNET has reported that distributor Ingram Micro had over 2600 LCD iMacs in stock earlier this week, and orders from dealers for fewer than 200 of those pups-- a disparity amounting to "more than 15 weeks' worth of inventory," which ARS analyst Matt Sargent describes as "definitely disconcerting." Yowza.

If you're not the type to be unnecessarily alarmist (oh, you're no fun anymore), it's perhaps worth noting that the entire personal computer industry is reportedly in a nasty slump these days, so it's not just Apple having trouble moving merchandise. And you've probably also noticed that Macworld Expo is just around the corner, which means we're mired squarely in that traditional sales slump that always precedes a Stevenote, as wary potential buyers hold off to avoid getting burned just in case His Mercurialness plans to introduce a $99 Power Mac G5 with integrated Cuisinart and self-cleaning lint brush. Still, between this potential iMac pile-up and the whole revenue shortfall bag-of-angst, next month's quarterly results conference call has the potential to be a real powder keg, dramatically speaking. We can hardly wait! And it's good to see first-hand that the one constant in this game is that there's always something out there in Macville to inflame an ulcer or two...

Lock the doors, board up the windows, and don the tin-foil hats: Xserve is here. And by "here," we mean here here, not "we announced it so it's here" here. Actually, wait, no, we don't mean here here, because if we had one here, as in right here in the AtAT studios, we'd be way too busy cackling with manic glee, rubbing our hands together in that movie villain manner, and plotting our imminent ascension to Evil Overlord status to be telling you about it. Alas, an Xserve may fit happily in 1U of space in an industry-standard 19-inch rack mount, but it won't fit no way no how into AtAT's budget until we either win the lottery, sell another several hundred t-shirts, or cross a certain ethical line we drew for ourselves many years ago and follow through on a contingency plan involving a safe deposit box, three videotapes of grainy footage of an unnamed (and unclothed) multibillionaire CEO engaging in "questionable behavior" at an underground nightclub of ill repute, and a word that sounds an awful lot like "shmackmail." For the sake of karma, we'll just do without for the time being.

No, by "here" we mean only this: the thing is finally shipping. Faithful viewer Dan Smith was kind enough to forward us his shipping confirmation notice, which states that his own Xserve is winging its way Danward as of yesterday, and similar reports are popping up all over. (Um, the "similar reports" state that other preordered Xserves are making their individual ways to their respective purchasers, and not all to Dan. We just wanted to make that clear, so Dan doesn't feel let down when he doesn't find a few hundred Xserves on his doorstep over the course of the next few days. Inflated expectations can be a real kick in the teeth.) So if you're one of those people who doesn't like ordering new stuff until it actually becomes available and you're in the market for the first real Mac server ever to grace our otherwise dreary plane of existence, you can officially add an Xserve or six to your shopping list now. Go ahead. Pencil it in there, right under paper towels and English muffins.

By the way, if you're still on the fence as to whether or not an Xserve would be worth your while from a cost effectiveness standpoint, we noticed over at MacNN that Xinet has posted some of the Xserve's first comparative benchmarks, and to us, at least, things look just spiffy. Overall, the dual-1 GHz Xserve soundly outperforms a dual-1 GHz Power Mac G4 in both the "Output Generation" and "Photoshop Opens" tests, at least under heavier loads, showing just how much difference little tweaks like DDR RAM can make.

Better yet, though, the Xserve more than held its own against a dual-1.4 GHz Dell PowerEdge 1650, which got spanked by the Xserve in both tests, particularly at the high-load end of the spectrum. Now, granted, the Dell PowerEdge 1650 starts at just $1499 while the dual-processor Xserve has a sticker price of four grand-- but Xinet didn't use bare-bones systems in its testing. If you take the time to configure a 1650 to match the specs of the one Xinet used, you'll find it costs roughly $5600 for a 5-client license, or $7300 for a 25-client one. (Granted, much of that is the "Microsoft tax," but hey, they tested it with Windows 2000...) Meanwhile, the Xserve as tested (maxed out at .48 TB of storage-- drool, drool) prices out at $6000 and comes with an unlimited client license. So if you're talking bang for the buck, the Xserve is pretty clearly a winner, here.

Of course, we could also mention how the Xserve did respectably well against massive SGI and Sun servers that cost an order of magnitude more; buy a six-pack of Xserves, pop 'em in a rack, enjoy blinding performance and super-safe redundancy, and save tens of thousands off the price of a quad-processor Sun Fire 8800. But hey, only if you feel like it.

Here's a quickie to make you go "hmmmmm" over the weekend: faithful viewer (and AtAT iDad) Joe Miller clued us in to an interesting article over at The Nation. It's interesting for a number of reasons, actually; for one thing, it's by John Densmore of "The Doors" fame, which makes it at least remotely interesting right off the bat. Then there's the subject matter: John's topic is the issue of musicians "selling out" by selling their songs to big corporations who need catchy tunes to push running shoes and SUVs onto the consumer populace. That's pretty interesting, too. And there's also the fact that the article is dated July 8th, 2002, which means that when John and his cohorts sought to open the doors of realization, they apparently also succeeded in opening the doors of time travel. We now strongly suspect that Jim Morrison isn't dead after all; he and Elvis are just living perpetually twenty minutes into the future.

That's all well and good, but we fully realize that none of it means squat to the majority of our viewers, who are jonesing for a dose of Apple-flavored melodrama and not an essay exploring the cosmic ramifications of using hippie-era rock songs to sell more sports drink. Well, patience, folks, because the last way in which John's article is interesting is right up your alley. Check out this choice quote: "Apple Computer called on a Tuesday-- they already had the audacity to spend money to cut 'When the Music's Over' into an ad for their new cube computer software."

Now, the prospect of Apple wanting to use a Doors tune to hawk its wares isn't particularly surprising, given the musical (and past chemical) tastes of one Mr. Steve "Keep On Truckin'" Jobs. But if you were hoping for a new Apple mystery to ponder over the first weekend of the summer of 2002, chew on that mention of "new cube computer software" for a while. For our part, we haven't a clue as to what John might be referring. Is Apple preparing to launch "iRubik" at the Macworld Expo Stevenote in a few weeks? Or is this some sort of rebirth planned for some aspect of the G4 Cube, seeing as in its July 2001 press release Apple tantalizingly hinted that "there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future"?

Only Steve's hairdresser knows for sure. Heck, for all we know, John Densmore actually started writing this article way back in the summer of 2000 when Apple was putting the original Cube commercial together, and the man just writes really, really slowly. But ponder away-- it's good for expanding the limits of your consciousness. Or something.