Ooooh, we've got a double-whammy sorta thing going on, here, folks. Steve Jobs's cancer surgery and subsequent month-long hiatus has effectively yoinked Fearless Leader from command central, and his duties of infusing All Things Apple with his inherent sense of vibrancy and drama, which has left the plot landscape flat and lifeless; meanwhile, since no one has any exciting Apple news to chew on other than what shall be referred to by generations to come as the Unfortunate Pancreas Incident, everybody's stewing in counterproductive musings about their own mortality-- or, even more depressing, Steve's mortality. As a result, the entire Mac community is sullen and moody and eating whole pints of Ben & Jerry's in their underwear and following that up with half a bottle of vodka and phoning their ex-boyfriends or -girlfriends at three A.M. and sobbing about how life's too short.

It's... Well, it's not pretty. There. We said it.

C'mon, people, the man's going to be fine! But sure, we understand, the natural reaction to news like this is to start questioning Steve's immortality altogether, which is why the media is flooded with articles channeling this impulse into newsworthy ponderings about what Apple would do if Steve were to be suddenly sat on by an escaped zoo hippo or something; just take a peek at the last couple of days' worth of MacSurfer headlines and you'll see what we mean. Anxiety over the apparent mortality of a godlike figure has everyone and his grandmother wondering what would happen to Apple's stock if Steve were to snuff it.

At random, we'll point you to this Macworld UK article which says that analysts (including our ol' pal Rob Enderle, who miraculously manages to keep his foot out of his mouth for thirteen whole syllables) and investors are concerned about the whole Jobs Mortality Wildcard, because he's "iconic," "very much tied to the Apple name", and "the driving force behind Apple's re-emergence." In other words, if Steve is Apple, what happens to Apple if Steve takes the dirt nap? The report even perpetuates the recent rumors that Apple has indeed been looking to bring in a new CEO to handle the day-to-day stuff so Steve could instead focus entirely on "the vision thing" and has allegedly been chatting up "former chairman and CEO of the Warner Music Group, Roger Ames" about taking the position.

Now, we don't know Roger Ames from two holes in the ground, and although he does have a vaguely Jobsian look to him, until we see him in a black mock turtleneck there's simply no way we'll be able to judge his aptness for the position. Besides, the very notion that Apple may be looking for a successor to groom really interferes with our steadfast denial about the whole "Steve not living forever" thing. Longtime viewers know that we've already covered this distasteful topic once or twice, so we don't really need to address it again, other than to remind you all that while we originally reported that Apple was cloning Steves like crazy to cope with just such an eventuality, later on we retracted that report as a typo. And yet we're still not worried, because now our sources close to the company report that Steve has a portrait of himself up in his attic that keeps aging while he stays daisy-fresh.

And if that doesn't make you feel any better, then consider this: AtAT operatives working on the inside inform us that there's an ever-increasing smattering of evidence that, yes, Steve was in the hospital for surgery and does need a month to recuperate, but the whole "pancreatic tumor" thing was just a convenient cover story. If these sources are correct, then Steve's Gulfstream jet crash-landed in the desert on Friday and teams of government and Apple surgeons spent the weekend fitting a badly-injured Steve with a bionic eye, a bionic arm, and two bionic legs, making him better. Stronger. Faster. And all to the tune of roughly six million dollars.

Seriously, they can rebuild him. They have the technology. So quit worrying, already.

Say, do you remember early on in the iPod Era when part of Apple's strategy with the lil' white doohickey was to sell a portable music player so amazing that Windows people would actually toss their Wintels and buy Macs just so they could use the iPod? And remember when Steve admitted just a month and a half ago that Apple had abandoned that strategy, instead choosing to make the iPod Windows-compatible so the company could sell a gazillion more of them? Even so, you've probably run across a lot of talk about a potential "halo effect"-- meaning that, even though people no longer have to use a Mac to use an iPod, when they see just how elegant, easy-to-use, and headache-free the iPod-plus-iTunes experience is, when the time comes to buy a new system to replace that aging Wintel, they'll be a lot more inclined to check out those computers made by "those geniuses behind the iPod" or whatever.

Well, as it turns out, that strategy may be working. BusinessWeek reports that "evidence is starting to mount that Apple is positioned to pick up some PC share with consumers." Some outfit called the Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics just surveyed "likely home PC buyers" and apparently a whopping 8% of those polled claimed that "they intended to buy an Apple." And while 8% may not sound like much, it sounds like freakin' Christmas compared to Apple's current market share of 3.7%. Better still, it's second only to Dell's "intend to buy" numbers, which is a respectable silver medal finish compared to last quarter's actual Mac sales having wedged the company into a lackluster fifth place position. And the 8% is "up from 5% in May."

The article credits the combination of the iPod experience and the accessibility of Apple's own low-pressure try-before-you-buy retail stores as the one-two punch that may boost the Mac's market share in coming quarters, and you have to admit that anyone walking in to check out an iPod is going to have to take at least a glance or two at that shiny new Mac it just happens to be plugged into. Once that happens, the seed's been planted; if the customer leaves the store with an iPod (as so many of them do), there's an association growing in the back of his head between the iPod and the Mac. Any growing love for the iPod will subconsciously transfer to a growing openness to the Mac platform. And when it's finally time to go shopping for a new computer, why not stop back at that Apple store and see what it has to offer?

Personally, we suspect that there's another sneaky little side to this whole dynamic: the iPod is exposing millions of high tech and digital lifestyle consumers to the apparently foreign concept that "you get what you pay for" and that buying the cheapest product isn't always the way to go. Think about it for a second: it's a little less scary spending a price premium on a $300-class product like an iPod than on a bigger-ticket item like a whole new computer. But once they've forked over the extra dough to get an iPod instead of, say, one of those Dell DJ thingies, those customers are going to recognize on some level that while they paid more for an iPod, they got more in return. Will that concept stick with them when they're shopping for new computers, too? Well, assuming that Technometrica's survey results aren't completely out of whack, maybe so.

Of course, Steve Jobs insists that none of this is the result of deliberate strategy; when asked recently whether he thought the iPod might still attract Wintel users to the Mac platform, his answer was an explicit "no." But if it comes to pass, somehow we don't think he'll mind.

Still begrudging us those three extra days off the air last week? C'mon, don't be such a lightweight; we weren't even in reruns for a fortnight, and at least we told you we'd be MIA before we took off this time. If less than two weeks between new episodes bothers you, clearly you're a relative newbie 'round these parts, because the Infuriating AtAT Hiatus of 2003 lasted over five times as long, and we didn't even have the courtesy (okay, technically we didn't have the time) to bother actually telling anyone we were going to fall off the face of the earth before we disappeared for almost three months. Indeed, we're the undisputed Kings of Unscheduled Downtime.

Undisputed, that is, until now. Wouldja believe someone's actually challenging our claim to the title? If you habitually hang around the seedier and/or more speculative corners of the Mac-centric 'net, you're all too aware that Mac OS Rumors, one of the very first pioneers to discover that web sites and Apple-flavored dirt-dishing are two great tastes that taste great together, had been off the air for ages. Indeed, at one point we were so concerned about the site's unannounced vanishing act (we're not just talking about lack of fresh content, here-- this was a full-blown site outage) that we put out a call for MOSR staff to contact us and let us know what was up. We never heard from MOSR, but a kind viewer informed us that while macosrumors.com was dead, the site itself was still running at its server's raw IP address... but then just days later, even the raw IP stopped responding completely.

So here's the thing: just when we'd finally given up MOSR for dead, faithful viewer Jim Palmer informed us that the site is back up again at its raw IP address and reporting that "macosrumors.com is now restored at Network Solutions," so its domain name should be functional again for everyone within another day or two. (It was working for us again at broadcast time; if it's still broken for you, give your DNS servers another day or so to catch up.) But since the site's original disappearance took place in mid-May, as of right now, MOSR has been more or less off the air for eleven full weeks-- the same length of time as our own masterpiece of slackery last year. So is this it? Have we been dethroned?

Depends on how you look at it, really. MOSR's eleven-week outage was primarily a domain name issue, plus some true downtime during which the server wasn't serving at all, but there were a few updates scattered around in there-- and not just of the "here's why we're gone" variety, but also of an actual on-topic rumoric nature-- even when most people would never know what IP address to type in to access it. Does that really count as a full eleven weeks MIA? Meanwhile, technically, our own eleven-week absence didn't consist of any dead air, since we kept broadcasting the same sorry episode nonstop the whole time: zero content change without even the slightest hint as to why, which we personally figure qualifies for slacker style points.

So it's a close call, but we figure we still retain the crown. Nevertheless, MOSR put up a good fight, and if it had been able to resist the urge to tell its fans what was going on, it really might have given us a run for our money, hiatally speaking. In any case, we're thrilled to see that MOSR is back online; whether you love the site or hate it, you have to admit that there's a lot more to kick around at the water cooler when MOSR is doing its Funk-ay Rumah Thang.

By the way, none of you was actually fooled by this thing, right?...