Hooooo, mama-- we'd have broadcast this a lot earlier if we'd had half a chance in Hades of being able to stop laughing for more than three seconds straight. You know this whole thing with RealNetworks whining incessantly for months that Apple "won't let us sell music that plays on the iPod, boo hoo hoo"? Well, did you think it had all come to a dramatic climax with the company's recent revelation that it had essentially hacked its way onto the iPod all by its lonesome? Yeah, so did we-- and boy howdy, were we ever wrong, because Real just unleashed a true sinkhole of hypocrisy and greedy cynicism upon the world and actually believed people would see it as a selfless endeavor to protect consumer choice. Ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce Real's latest contribution to our plot line: FreedomOfMusicChoice.org. Like we said, it's only the laughter than keeps us from retching.

What's so funny, you ask? Well, see, the Freedom of Music Choice site purports to be "an invitation for your dialogue and thoughts, whether it's about us or any other player on the field." To that end, it invites visitors to register for membership so that they can post their own comments on the various anti-Apple articles to which the site links. It also links to a laughable online petition that aims to overwhelm Apple with an outpouring of public support for Real's iPod-hacking "Harmony" software, in hopes that Apple will keep its lawyers chained up and also refrain from breaking the software in future iPod firmware updates. Gee, does the scope of this site seem slightly limited to anyone, or is it just us?

See, Freedom of Music Choice links to five articles, and each and every one is about how Apple should stop hogging the iPod; we wonder why there aren't any articles about how Microsoft should make DRMed WMA files Mac-compatible? Or better yet, an article or two about why Real's own music store isn't accessible to those who choose to use a Macintosh? Why is Apple seemingly the sole target, here? Oh, that's right-- because Freedom of Music Choice (the site) has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of music choice (the concept); it's nothing more than a thinly-veiled propaganda machine launched by an increasingly desperate company hoping to high heaven that the unwashed masses are dumb enough to fall for its act. We keep forgetting.

Honestly, what's this "freedom" of which they speak? Our freedom to stop buying songs from the iTunes Music Store's million-song catalog so we can instead choose from Real's selection, which is far smaller? Our freedom to stop using our Macs and switch to Wintels for the privilege, since Real's store isn't even Mac-compatible? Or just Real's freedom to try to blackmail Apple with public sentiment, in hopes that the company will cut it a completely undeserved break? Because last we checked, Real does have the freedom to build its own music player that's better than the iPod and plays Real's chosen format just fine. Funny how instead of getting to work on that it's just trying to get customers hating Apple, huh?

Well, as it turns out, the public apparently isn't as stupid as Real CEO Rob Glaser assumed it was, because this is where the real laughs come in: remember those user comments we mentioned that site members could post? Well, people did post. A lot of them. And they were all so pro-Apple, anti-Real that the site eventually decided to pull all the comments down and remove the ability to add more. Freedom of music choice is one thing, but heaven forbid we also get freedom of expression. So much for our "dialogue and thoughts" on the subject, hmmmm?

The poll was even better. Plenty of people were signing it; unfortunately for Real, they were signing in protest of the petition itself, since what appeared to be at least nineteen of every twenty entries included a pro-Apple, anti-Real comment. (It's still up and growing; flipping through the comments should give you days of entertainment.) Evidently a substantial subset of netizens see through Real's cheap stunt and understand that if Apple invests a lot of time and money creating a seamless hardware-and-software-and-service experience, it should be allowed to maintain the integrity of that user experience without having to worry about fielding tech support calls from people whose iPods are acting screwy because they've been putting Harmony'd-up songs on it. (Seriously, you've used RealPlayer; do you have any confidence that the company's programmers wouldn't screw something up?)

Needless to say, Real pulled the link to the petition just like it pulled all the user comments. If you check now, however, the comments are back-- now that Real appears to have hired some lackeys to post "rebuttals" to the rampant pro-Apple sentiment. A link to the petition is back, too-- or should we say, another petition? It seems that Real went out and created a second version, and this one doesn't allow comments. Gee, that'll show those pro-Apple zagnuts.

Except that people just started putting their anti-Real comments in the name field instead. (You just gotta love the adaptability.)

So now the petition doesn't let you view the signatures at all; there's no way around that, right?

Well, except that someone created a competing petition that asks Real to just can the whole "Freedom of Music Choice" thing completely, since it's clearly "an entirely self-centered move to keep themselves in the Music Download business rather than (as it purports to be) an act of Consumer-driven expression." And when last we checked, despite the media blitz driving traffic to Real's petition and the fact that several of its signatures were protest votes that shouldn't be counted toward the total, the far more obscure anti-Real petition was winning 989 to 741.

Real funny.

Hey, pessimists! Looking for a reason to stay depressed for as long as possible? Well, have we got just the angst-filled Dark Cloud o' Despair for you: the analysts are starting to make little rumbles about the possibility that IBM does not have its chip production problems sorted out as well as Apple assured us it did during that quarterly earnings conference call last month. If that's true, you can look forward to many more months of Power Mac shipping delays-- and since the iMac is going G5 next month, we suppose there's a distinct chance of iMac shortages, too. More doom and gloom than you can shake an unusually morose stick at!

Yes, according to a Forbes report, the Prudential Equity Group has been keeping tabs on this whole G5 availability thing, and "following a series of recent checks on Apple," the firm sees no evidence of the sudden G5 oil strike that Apple predicted would arrive this month. Consequently, the Pru feels that "the availability of the company's 1.8 GHz and 2.0 GHz G5 processors may be worse than initially anticipated," which implies that IBM will reprise its starring role as Quarterly Scapegoat during the next earnings conference call in October.

Trying to see the glass as half-full? Good luck, because Prudential isn't the only analyst firm predicting a continued G5 shortfall; CBS MarketWatch reports that analysts at UBS insist that the "key risk" to Apple's stock price in the next few months is "IBM's ability to produce enough G5 chips." UBS claims that while Big Blue is allegedly "devoting more resources to the 'Apple issue' on almost a weekly basis," the measures have met with only "some success in yields" and production still isn't where it needs to be. The upshot? Apple may experience Power Mac "yield issues" until sometime next quarter, as well as shortages of whatever the G5 iMac turns out to be when demand far outstrips supply. (Ugh, it'll be the buzz-smothering intro of the original iMac G4 all over again.)

But don't go off the deep end or anything, because things aren't all foreboding and woe. It's significant that Prudential's target price for AAPL hasn't budged; sure, there will probably be continuing G5 delays, but the firm expects that their "financial impact should be modest." Meanwhile, UBS admits that "Apple could still deliver significant sequential improvement" heading into the holiday shopping season, and Apple still hasn't been hit by a single analyst downgrade all year. Sounds like the honeymoon isn't over just yet. Of course, there's only so much of this sort of thing Wall Street will stand, and if Apple is still singing the G5 Shortfall Blues come October, you can bet that the downgrades will come fast and furious. Don't forget to pack a poncho.

There's no doubt about it: some things about using a Mac aren't as easy as they used to be. Remember when creating a bootable system backup was as simple as dragging your System Folder to another hard drive? Nothing against Mac OS X, of course, which is the greatest thing since some brilliant individual said "Hey, this bread would be even cooler if someone took a knife to it"; that said, though, we do miss Mac OS 9's flexibility when it comes to dragging system files all over creation. For example, gone are those halcyon days when trading up to a new Mac meant little more than starting up File Sharing, mounting your new hard disk on your old Desktop, and dragging your entire old hard drive into a folder on the new Mac, where its contents could subsequently be moved wherever you needed them. Try that now and you can end up with a big ol' mess.

But that doesn't mean there aren't other improvements that compensate. We know we've already mentioned the nifty new addition to Apple's Setup Assistant that walks you through transferring data from your old Mac to your new one, but we're going to mention it again for the simple reason that we recently had the opportunity to use it-- and it's so slick it makes Teflon look like tree bark in comparison. It really does hold your hand through every step of the process, telling you when to plug in the FireWire cable between your two Macs, when to boot the old Mac with the "T" key held down to put it into FireWire Target Disk mode, etc. We clicked a few checkboxes to choose what to transfer, let it do its thing, and blammo-- 24 minutes later, a formerly off-the-shelf eMac was booting with 6 GB of transferred data, including applications, multiple user accounts, network settings, software preferences, etc. Logging in was just like sitting down at the old iMac... just with a bigger screen, a faster processor, more disk space, better graphics, etc.

It isn't perfect, mind you. For one thing, even after copying across network settings perfectly, Setup Assistant wants to walk you through setting up your Internet connection from scratch, as if it had never happened. (Opt to set up your network "later" and as soon as the Setup Assistant quits, you'll find that your old network settings are set up as expected.) It also didn't move everything across; some hardware-specific preferences like Energy Saver settings weren't copied, which only makes sense (new hardware, new hardware settings), but UNIX tools that had been installed into the old iMac's BSD layer were ignored and needed to be reinstalled, and the Developer Tools were likewise left behind. But the assistant never claims it'll move any of this stuff in the first place, so it's not a bug so much as a potential new feature for version 2.0. And we suppose it would have been nice if the assistant could have somehow offered to set iTunes on the new eMac to queue up an iTMS deauthorization request for the old iMac, but now we're really reaching.

That's the thing, though; the assistant made the transition from an old Mac to a new one so close to seamless that we really have to dig deep to find any criticism. It used to take us weeks of reinstalling apps, recreating user accounts, tweaking preferences, etc. to make a new Mac feel as comfortable as the old one; the new Setup Assistant did it in half an hour. So if you've been thinking about trading up to a new system, Apple's no-hassle upgrade process may be one more reason to take the plunge-- provided your old Mac has a FireWire port and is running Mac OS X 10.1 or later, that is. If not, well, you're on your own...