Sweet merciful homina homina yikes, is it really July already? Well, you know what that means; Apple's coming up on crunch time for .Mac renewals, and unless our noses are sorely mistaken, the company's wearing a new cologne just for the occasion: Calvin Klein's "Desperation." You may just possibly recall that when Apple announced that the free iTools service was suddenly going to cost $99 a year (largely, we assume, to help defray costs incurred by the name change), there was a little bit of "resistance." There was also a pinch of "annoyance," a dash of "remonstrance," and a heaping side order of "death threats." When the dust (and blood) finally settled, though, Apple kept issuing press releases to inform us of .Mac's ever-increasing subscriber rate, which it described as a "phenomenal success."

There's just one teensy little problem; the 180,000 subscribers Apple managed to sign up in the service's first three months were probably almost exclusively former iTools members who bit the bullet and forked over the special "reduced price" of $49 for the first year. And now that the first year is almost up, we just have to wonder how many of those subscribers are going to feel that they got their $49 worth-- and more to the point, how many felt they got $99 worth, since that's what it's going to cost them to renew. Given the widespread reports of .Mac mail problems over the course of the past year, we're thinking the percentage might be a teensy bit on the low side.

Apple, of course, being the reasonably sentient corporate entity that it is, knows all of this, and decided to come up with a plan to keep .Mac users from jumping ship come September. Its model? Well, judging by what the company came up with, we'd have to guess they spent an awful lot of time studying pyramid land schemes in Florida. You can't access the details of the promotion at .Mac unless you're already a member, but MacMinute has the skinny: Apple is entreating existing .Mac members to recruit their friends and family into the .Mac fold, and for each new member you manage to sign up "at least 31 days before your account comes up for renewal," you get 20% knocked off your own yearly subscription fee. That means for every Mac user you can sucker into joining, your ol' buddy Andrew Jackson says a big fat howdy; "sign up five friends and your next year is free." Which means, of course, if you don't think .Mac is worth 99 smackers a year, all you need to do is convince other people that it's worth 99 smackers a year and you can whittle that price all the way down to nothing.

Now, personally, we hardly think such desperate measures are necessary, since we happen to be .Mac subscribers ourselves, and we think .Mac is worth every penny. Heck, it'd be a bargain at twice the price! And it's only going to become more and more essential as Apple continues to add benefits like the enhanced iDisk support in Panther. Plus, we heard an unsubstantiated rumor that when the G5 finally ships next month, anyone who's a .Mac subscriber will get six of them for free, plus a big sack of Pixie Stix and a pony. A pony that lays golden eggs. But only if they've been referred by us! So, uh, if you're interested, drop us a line and we'll refer you... purely out of the goodness of our hearts, you understand.

Boy oh boy, if you thought Power Mac G4 sales would grind to a shuddering halt once the G5 was announced, just consider what's probably happened to the Xserves. After all, at least Apple had new G4 configurations ready to sell at insanely low prices; the G5 Xserve, on the other hand, hasn't officially been announced, which means the current G4 models are still sporting the same pre-Stevenote sticker prices, as if nothing ever happened. Because, you know, nobody would ever suspect that the Xserve would move to the G5 unless Apple explicitly said so, right? Uh, right.

However, if you're the exceptionally perspicacious sort and you've deduced that Apple's high-end server platform will eventually inherit Apple's new high-end processor, well, the question on your mind is likely no longer "if?" but "when?" Luckily, it turns out that there are other shrewd and clear-thinking individuals out there who not only arrived at the same remarkable conclusion on the former question as yourself, but also claim to have a reasonable handle on the latter issue, too. Mac OS Rumors insists that while the G5 is tricky to keep cool (gaze upon the deceptively simple yet maddeningly byzantine intricacies of the Power Mac G5's nine-fan, four-zone cooling system-- IF YOU DARE), it actually slots into the existing Xserve architecture quite nicely, which needs only minor tweaks like additional vents and "redesigned heatsinks/blowers."

But again, "when?" Calm down, Beavis, we're getting to that. MOSR claims that G5 Xserves will surface in "about two months' time," in order to give the Power Mac enough time to fill some of the pent-up demand before siphoning off some of its chips. Meanwhile, the French crystalgazers over at MacBidouille concur; assuming that Google's translation engine isn't just messing with our heads, those wacky francophones claim that the "Xserve will pass to fine G5 août/début September," which, if those savage beatings our French teachers administered on a daily basis did any good, means "August/early September." Or possibly "mountain goat/I have two red pens September"; we're not ready to commit just yet.

Either way, it says September, and that's good enough for us. So if you're in the market for one seriously fast and gorgeous 1U rack-mount Mac OS X server (and you're the foolish type who actually plans hardware purchases based upon whatever flotsam comes wafting through the rumors sites), you might only need to wait a couple more months before you can buy what is sure to be the sexiest piece of server hardware ever to grace the surface of this miserable, stinking planet. Ahhh... some things are worth living for.

Did anyone else think it was odd that Intel pretty much kept its mouth shut after Big Steve's superlative-laden G5 demo last week? Its response to Apple's claim to have the fastest personal computer in the world was to point quietly to Dell's published benchmarks for its dual Xeon system, which were substantially higher than Apple's; Apple responded publicly in the form of a detailed explanation to Slashdot of the company's benchmarking practices (courtesy of Greg Joswiak), and then from Intel... nothing. Well, okay, there was that cryptic little thing a day or two later where Intel told MacFixIt to look at a particular Gartner Group statement, but all the statement seemed to say was that Apple wasn't lying: the G5 was "'certainly equal' to the most advanced platform Intel offers." What the... where's the dirty fight? The low blows? The folding chair to the spine?

It could just be that Intel feels it has other benchmark battles to focus on; a recent article in The Register reports that IBM just bested Hewlett-Packard to seize the "world record for transaction processing." IBM's 32-processor POWER4+-based p690 server just knocked HP's best out of the top spot-- and HP's best was a 64-processor Itanium 2-based monster. Which means that an IBM chip (the one on which the G5 is based, incidentally) just beat out Intel's heavy-hitting server processor, despite the 2-to-1 odds. So maybe Intel can't say much against Apple's G5 benchmark results because, well, Apple won, there's no way around it, and maybe if Intel just keeps its yapper shut everyone will forget about it.

Or could Intel be hiding something even more scandalous? Faithful viewer Mike Brendler pointed us towards an article over at The Inquirer which reveals via some very interesting screenshots that Intel's most recent annual report was written and processed on-- get this-- a Mac. Well, whaddaya know about that? And since the G5 chip isn't available in any shipping systems yet, that means that Intel was using at best a G4-- you know, those processors we've all been complaining about being so much slower than Intel's offerings. Evidently Chipzilla realizes something that we always tried to explain to the Windoids but often forgot ourselves: having a super-fast processor doesn't do much good if your interface is the bottleneck.

Does anyone else find it delicious that Intel is using Macs running Motorola processors, while Motorola ditched all of its Macs a few years back to standardize on Intel iron? It's like some twisted high-tech Gift of the Magi thing going on. No? Okay, whatever.