Whew, we're back! Trust us, it ain't all beer and skittles; when you're trying to produce a daily soap opera while living out of a suitcase in an unfamiliar land, Macworld Expo is an overall positive experience, but an extremely challenging one-- and that's not even counting the herculean task of lugging ninety pounds of AtAT t-shirts across Manhattan during the midday traffic snarl. Still, we were thrilled to get to meet so many of you in person (and take your money). Indeed, three days of chatting merrily with AtAT viewers and doling out shirts was almost enough idyllic pleasantness to erase the baffling and vaguely surreal memory of Jon Rubinstein lecturing us on processor design.

If you tuned in to watch the keynote, you already know what we're talking about: in lieu of having gigahertz Power Macs ready to ship, Uncle Steve brought out Apple's senior veep of hardware to bludgeon the audience with six and a half solid minutes on why clock speed isn't a valid measure of a processor's overall performance. Dubbed "The Megahertz Myth," Jon's informative presentation is now available online to those of you who just can't get enough processor design theory. As for us, last Wednesday morning we suddenly found ourselves flashing back to college, when we slept through similar lectures on the subject on an alarmingly frequent basis. Frequency? Pipeline stages? Cache design? Yikes-- that stuff couldn't keep us awake even when we were paying twenty grand a year to hear about it.

We'd like to think we're in the minority, there, but judging from the glazed looks on the faces of the fellow keynote attendees around us, Jon's presentation might more appropriately have been titled "How To Kill A Keynote's Momentum In Seven Minutes Or Less." Not that he didn't do a good job, mind you, because we happen to think he summed up the complexities of chip design admirably well for a nontechnical audience; it's just that throngs of people anxious to find out if Steve's "one more thing" is an LCD-based iMac or an Apple handheld (or, heaven forbid, a sequel to iDVD that's not due out for another two months) just weren't in the right frame of mind for a lecture on the latency with the instruction branches and the hey hey hey and the pipeline glavin. Chalk it all up to timing.

Now that you're entirely out of Keynote Hype mode, though, you may want to take another look at Jon's little spiel, because it's actually a nice clear demo of why the G4 is (in at least some cases) demonstrably faster than a Pentium 4 with twice the clock speed. Of course, it's not enough to convince a Macworld audience of that fact; we're already buying Macs. It's the Unwashed Wintel Heathens that need a little schooling, which is why we find ourselves hoping against hope that Apple will put up massive window displays in all of its retail stores that say, "An 867 MHz Mac Is Faster Than A 1.8 GHz Pentium 4? Come In And See!" In addition to the canned Photoshop and video-encoding bake-offs, why not have a Power Mac and a similarly-configured Wintel running on the sales floor, loaded up with similar applications so customers can see for themselves? (Unless Apple's chicken, of course.)

By the way, for those of you who couldn't make it to the Expo and are anxious to transform your torsos into walking AtAT ads by donning garments emblazoned with our cryptic yet striking logo (we actually sold a few shirts to people who had never even heard of the show, but just liked the shirt design!), hang in there. We expect to have an online order form available sometime in the next few days. In the meantime, keep studying that chip design, because there will be a quiz.

In light of the glaring absence of LCD iMacs, 14-inch iBooks, Apple-branded Lean Mean Grilling Machines, or any other jaw-dropping hardware that some people were expecting at last week's Stevenote, we plumb near forgot about what was missing on the software side of the fence. Mac OS X 10.1 was demoed, but not shipped. Mac OS 9.2 is now available, but only on the new Macs. A new version of iTunes was MIA, while iDVD won't get boosted to 2.0 until September. And just where the heck is the next pony in Apple's stable of Mac-only consumer-oriented killer apps?

It's that very last question that the Naked Mole Rat tackles in his latest prose wanderings, as kindly pointed out by his MacEdition cohort CodeBitch. According to everyone's favorite hairless rodent, progress on Apple's most recent lunge into the thrill-a-minute world of image-editing applications (yes, we said "most recent"-- what, you don't remember PhotoFlash?) continues apace. There's no mention of any sort of release date, but those of you who have been nursing conspiracy theories tying Adobe's Expo no-show and obstinate tardiness in releasing a Carbonized Photoshop to Apple's imminent release of its own native image-processing app might want to cool your jets.

See, "iPhoto," as it's reportedly called, is apparently going to be software that's strictly for Mom, Pop, Junior, and Sis-- its capabilities are probably going to stop just a hair's breadth past "Rotate Clockwise" and "Reduce Red-Eye" functionality. Think Kai's Photo Soap or PhotoDeluxe, not Photoshop; therefore, Adobe has little to fear from Apple encroaching upon its stronghold in professional image editing. (That is, until everyone in the graphic design industry decides en masse that they're perfectly happy to ditch all that tedious compositing and CMYK nonsense, instead opting to "enhance their snaps with simple controls and create electronic greeting cards, calendars and other personalized cheesecake via an assortment of templates." We figure that won't happen for at least another six months, however.)

As for when this long-rumored iPhoto will see the light of day, we're guessing that Mac OS X 10.1's nifty new automatic digital photo import feature (which seems to work quite well when the attached camera is actually on) is just the warm-up, while iPhoto is being readied as the coup de grace. Let's say that in September, Apple manages to ship LCD iMacs booting Mac OS X 10.1 by default-- complete with iPhoto so that customers can plug in their digital cameras, suck the images right off into their Pictures folder, gussy them up a bit, and upload them to their iDisks to share with friends and family all in just a few clicks of the mouse. Combine that with the digital music capabilities of iTunes and the video editing smash known as iMovie, and doesn't that sound like a digital hub that's too good to pass up?

Are you one of those Mac fans that hopes and prays that someday Apple will buy the PowerPC business from Motorola outright, and develop its own chips for Macs in-house? Well, if you are, then Wall Street agrees with you-- sort of. At the very least, analysts are nagging the Big M to do something with its flagging semiconductor business; as we've seen previously, Motorola's chipmaking arm lost a fairly whopping $381 million last quarter, and investors are none too pleased. According to a Wall Street Journal article pointed out by faithful viewer John Bryan, analysts are "putting pressure" on Motorola to "cut its losses and sell or spin the unit off-- or at the very least shrink it."

While Apple likely wouldn't care much for Motorola's overall semiconductor business (which seems to crank out chips for use in mobile phones, mostly), we can't help but recall those rumors that Apple will have the option to buy the PowerPC portion of that beleaguered division next year for the low, low price of half a billion dollars. Well, okay, so the price isn't that low at all, but maybe Motorola will cut Apple a "Please Bail Us Out" discount or something. The point is, even at full (rumored) price, Apple has more than enough cash in the bank to take the PowerPC off Motorola's red-ink-stained hands. In an ideal world, Apple could shell out significantly less just to take control of the PowerPC G4 and G5 projects and leave all that non-Mac-specific stuff behind.

Mind you, this is all just idle speculation based on unfounded rumor topped with a hefty helping of "Wouldn't It Be Nice If." For its part, Motorola doesn't want to part with its semiconductor business, and today announced a plan to shore up its sagging profits by selling its mobile phone chips to other phone manufacturers. Whether or not that'll work remains to be seen, but if Motorola ever does become amenable to the idea of selling off part of its chip division, we bet Steve would make some of those PowerPC engineers right comfortable in sunny Cupertino.