Attention fellow Bostonians/Chicagoans: we have semi-credible opening dates for the remaining two newly announced Apple retail stores. Yesterday we mentioned that MacMinute had pegged the Plano, TX store for an August 3rd launch, with the Minneapolis one following on the 11th. Well, as pointed out by faithful viewer David Poller, not long after we broadcast yesterday's episode, MacMinute also reported that the store at the Woodfield Shopping Center in Schaumburg, IL (that's the northwest 'burbs to you Chicago city-dwellers) will go live on August 25th. So you're basically looking at a month-long wait at this point, but heck, things could be lots worse.

Or even just a little worse. Three of these things belong together, three of these things are kind of the same... but of the four new Apple stores that Steve announced last week, only the Boston-area Peabody location (in other words, the one that your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff would be frequenting) is lacking a MacMinute-reported opening date. So we had to take matters in our own hands and try to find out for ourselves-- with the help of our trusty Magic 8-Ball. We shook it while concentrating hard and intoning, "Oh Mystical Orb, when will the Apple store at the Northshore Mall in Peabody be open for business?" When we inverted the ball and looked at the answer, it read, "IT WAS SUPPOSED TO OPEN ON AUGUST 25TH, BUT IT WON'T BE READY IN TIME; TRY BETWEEN AUGUST 30TH AND SEPTEMBER 1ST, INSTEAD." (It's amazing how much text they can cram onto that little white triangle these days.)

Now, everybody knows that Magic 8-Balls are wantonly capricious when it comes to predicting the future with any degree of accuracy, but this answer was specific enough that we're willing to put a bit of faith in it. That's sort of a shame, really, because it means that we won't get to visit our local Apple store until just before (or even just after) Steve's "opening in August" deadline expires. On the other hand, it does mean that the AtAT staff just might be able to attend two grand openings; we have tentative plans to be in Chicago on August 25th, and back in Boston before the 30th. So if these rumored/divinely imparted opening dates are correct and everything falls into place, with luck, we'll be all retailed out come early September.

For those of you who have forgotten what all the fuss is about, may we recommend a certain Los Angeles Times Syndicate article that renewed our own enthusiasm? Basically the author decided to shop for a Mac three different ways: at small local dealers, at big Mac-selling chain stores, and at the Apple store in Glendale. The results aren't terribly surprising, but they are exciting: she makes the Apple store sound like heaven on earth for computer shoppers willing to think a little differently. Credit cards at the ready!

By now you've probably heard about Apple's status as a founding member of the HyperTransport Consortium; indeed, a press release issued by the ragtag band of industry bigwigs even quotes Apple hardware guru (and Megahertz Myth lecturer) Jon Rubinstein as stating that "Apple is delighted to participate as one of the leaders in the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. HyperTransport represents a great technology with exciting future potential." So what exactly is it, and why is Apple so gung-ho about it?

Well, you know us-- our eyes glaze over when people start talking about hardware specs and stuff like that. As far as we could make out before being distracted by a mote of dust in a sunbeam, HyperTransport is a proposed bus architecture just like the one in current computers but a zillion times faster... or at least 48 times faster, which is still nothing to sneeze at. Basically it's just a much, much faster way for chips to swap data; whereas transfer rates today apparently top out at about 266 MB per second, HyperTransport promises to boost that upper limit to the 12.8 GB per second level. As James Brown was never heard to remark, "That's a whole lotta throughput. Hah!!"

As for what Apple plans to do with this technology once it actually matures, the obvious move would be to stick it in future Macs to boost data transfer speeds and overall performance. But some conspiracy theorists are looking at some of the other members of the consortium and wondering if something more significant-- or even sinister-- is afoot. After all, HyperTransport is an AMD technology, which has some people wondering if Apple is thinking about getting AMD to build future Apple-designed PowerPCs, or maybe even just switching to AMD chips altogether. As faithful viewer The M@d H@tter notes, Mac OS Rumors takes a different tack; as far as we can tell (again, it's that dust-mote-in-sunbeam thing), MOSR seems to think that Apple may be looking at HyperTransport as a way to enable Macs to use system chipsets created by nVIDIA, who has recently supplanted ATI as Apple's graphics company of choice-- and who recently entered the system chipset market with the nFORCE series.

Whatever. Actually, what we're hearing is that Apple just accidentally joined the wrong consortium altogether. Apparently Steve misunderstood the whole "HyperTransport" thing, and thought he was signing up for a think tank on cracking the age-old puzzle of teleportation. Longtime Apple watchers already know that the company has been researching teleportation technology in top secret underground bunkers for decades, now, and is actually pretty close to finishing up its work on a safe and economically viable matter transporter. The big remaining bug is that anything teleported using Apple's implementation is transformed into any of a number of various soft cheeses in the process-- except for Jeff Goldblum, who volunteered for the first human test-flight and instead turned into some big slimy fly kinda thing. In any case, Steve's mistake may have been a happy accident, because HyperTransport-enhanced Macs still sound like a pretty good idea to us. As for matter transference, well, we have no doubt that Apple's scientists will eventually decode the Cheese Matrix on their own.

Despite the AtAT staff's eclectic musical tastes, we admit we never really got into Radiohead-- at least, not enough to go out and actually buy any of their stuff. At the same time, we don't exactly go lunging for the dial to change the station when a Radiohead song comes on the air, either... and when someone tells us we can watch their latest video for free via the magic of QuickTime, we're more than willing to make that arduous mouse click in exchange for the chance to hear "I Might Be Wrong" while a little animated bummed-out devil guy goes fetal and various things burn.

Even those of you who have never heard of Radiohead may want to check out Apple's "Hot News" article on the band, because not only are these gents opting to distribute their latest video via QuickTime, but they're also diehard Mac fans through and through. According to the band's producer, Radiohead's last two albums were almost entirely assembled using "a multitude of Macs," including a Power Mac in the recording studio, and PowerBooks for the whole band. What about Wintel? "I hate PCs," he says; "they are overcomplicated and unfriendly. While Macs are people-friendly and intuitive."

As for this new video, well, here's the kicker: it was made "entirely on a PowerBook" over the course of two months. The director apparently created all the animations himself using Hash Animation: Master and cut them together with footage of the band's lead vocalist using Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Videodelic. So if you've ever doubted that a PowerBook can serve as a fully-functional mobile video editing station, doubt no more-- the proof is online.

Given Radiohead's overall Mac-centric nature (don't forget the guest vocals by the "Fred" Text-To-Speech voice on the song "Fitter Happier"), it's nice to see Apple giving them a little PR-- and vice-versa. Hmmm, maybe we'll have to pick up the latest album after all...