You know, Apple really flooded us with plot twists in the form of eleventy-seventy press releases yesterday, so we didn't get to tackle some of the quieter things poking around in the dark corners of the Mac universe. But now that we've taken care of all that stuff about the new iPods and faster iMacs and ten million songs sold and Steve Jobs wearing a beard of bees at the office because the buzzing makes him feel just like he's right back at home on the Hive Moon of Mellipherus 4 (wait... actually, did we run out of time yesterday before we could squeeze that last one in? Eh, never mind), so we're free to ramble incoherently about some of the fringier whispers rustling in the breeze-- like all that stuff about future G4s not being G4s at all.

You may recall a similar scenario that got kicked around a couple of years ago: back when Motorola had all but dropped its own G5 right off the bottom of the PowerPC roadmap and before IBM came swooping in to save the day, there were rumors that Steve planned on shipping a beefed-up Power Mac with a new G4 processor inside and just calling it a G5; after all, the whole "G" thing is technically just Apple's marketing nomenclature, so if it wanted to it could even ship a 68030 and rebrand it as a G12 just for giggles. Well, the latest incarnation of the Name Game is described over at Mac OS Rumors, as pointed out by faithful viewer Dan Boyle: future G4s may actually be G3s.

But not in a bad way! See, while Motorola has been floundering with the "supercomputer" G4 for the past half a decade or so, not only has IBM run rings around it with the G5, but it's also made almost ridiculously impressive improvements to the G3-- yes, the G3, which Apple's marketing department tried to make us believe was so pathetically slow and outdated compared to that spiffy "couldn't even export it to scary countries" G4. And the truly remarkable thing (well, remarkable as far as IBM's concerned; from Motorola's standpoint this is actually sort of pathetic) is that apparently IBM's latest and future G3 designs are actually faster than Motorola's best G4s-- and will probably boast a "cooler operating temperature and significantly lower power drain," too.

The gist of the whole sitch is that IBM's latest G3s are almost more G4-y than Motorola's G4s (yes, they'll even have Altivec), so Apple may well slap 'em into future lower-end Macs, call 'em G4s, and tell Motorola to take its slow-developin', non-chip-shippin' kiester away to go play in traffic once and for all. Just think of it: a Mac future that doesn't hinge on the chipmaking prowess of a mobile phone manufacturer. Why, we can hardly wrap our heads 'round the concept.

Meanwhile, IBM seems to be firing on all cylinders, PowerPC-wise; word has it that the minor Power Mac G5 delays were not caused by a dearth of processors (chalk it up to a worldwide shortage of thermal zones-- each Power Mac chews up four, ya know), and we hear that development of future G5 chip iterations is actually progressing ahead of schedule. Now, sure, with Apple's luck, as soon as IBM becomes its single source for PowerPC processors, Big Blue will probably undergo some sort of karmic corporate lobotomy and we can once again look forward to processors shipping in quantities of 6 and 50 MHz performance increases every two years, but until that happens, we should kick back and enjoy the dream.

Say, is it just us, or are Apple's rejiggered priorities wreaking serious havoc with the established order of things in the Mac-centric trade show business? Of course you know all about the company's steadfast refusal to participate in next summer's Macworld Expo (ostensibly because Boston is just too much of a hole to visit, but don't forget that Apple considered pulling out of this year's summer Expo in New York as well). But did you know that Seybold-- the publishing conference that's traditionally Apple's second-biggest trade show, we reckon, at least domestically-- is Appleless, too? WIRED knows the score; without Apple as an exhibitor, the show had to "cut back on space" and "fish for other big-name exhibitors" to try to fill Apple's shoes, but still wound up "barren and sedate."

So Apple's absence is a little weird, right? Especially since Seybold is a mecca for content creators, i.e. professional Mac users, i.e. one of Apple's alleged "core markets" that's been sort of neglected for the past couple of years. It's no secret that professional sales had slipped, due in large part to a lack of Mac OS X-native creative apps and less-than-compelling performance gains in the Power Mac G4. So doesn't it strike anyone as a little odd that Apple picks now to skip Seybold? After all, with the dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 now available alongside Carbonized versions of the most important Macromedia and Adobe products and the ever-elusive QuarkXPress, there's been no better time for Apple to go strut its stuff in front of the creative community. So why the no-show?

Well, since attending trade shows is obscenely expensive, we suppose it could just be all about cost-cutting, but apparently it's really just a matter of scheduling conflicts and those aforementioned priorities. See, while an Apple-free Seybold is cranking away at Moscone right now, OracleWorld is shakin' its enterprise thang at the exact same time-- and according to MacNN, Apple is both a full-fledged exhibitor and an "equipment sponsor" at the latter shindig. Hmmmm, sounds to us like Apple's newfound focus on enterprise sales led it to pick OracleWorld over Seybold. Pretty zany, huh, kids?

Then again, maybe Steve just wanted to catch Michael Dell's sure-to-be scintillating keynote address, "Enterprise Without Compromise." Steve, as you know, could really use some tips when it comes to public speaking, and ol' Mike is apparently a real master. For example, check out this excerpt from "Silvertongue" Dell's Mikenote as he explained his crutches and bum ankle (excerpt courtesy of The Register): "I was riding a horse, and the horse slipped and fell, and, of course, if you are on a horse, and the horse falls, you usually fall. The horse fell on my leg, and it didn't feel too good, but I will be alright."

Man, it's like Shakespeare. We've got goosebumps. We hope you took good notes, Steve! (By the way, AtAT sources inform us that Dell's injury wasn't from a horseriding accident at all, but rather from his keynote rehearsal, when he tried to leap around on stage screaming "GIVE IT UP FOR MEEEEE!" à la Steve Ballmer. Clearly that approach was a little too strenuous for him.)

Anyway, don't worry too much about Apple abandoning its traditional markets; the company will have a "major presence" at IBC in Amsterdam next week, where it'll focus on desktop video, and of course Apple Expo will take care of a wide cross-section of European Mac users right after that. And Apple will even target creative pros on this continent at PhotoshopWorld at the end of the month. We're still a little weirded out by the OracleWorld-over-Seybold choice, though. And why couldn't they just attend both? After all, they're taking place in the same convention center, for crying out Pete's sake-- how hard could it be? Three words: booth on wheels.

You thought they'd ignore it, didn'tcha? You figured that Apple would just pretend that last week's eBay auction of a song purchased from the iTunes Music Store never happened. (That's certainly what eBay's doing, at any rate.) Well, frankly, so do we; Apple usually doesn't address goofiness like that directly, and we're more than used to seeing the phrase "Apple was unavailable for comment" at the end of articles about such shenanigans. And yet this time, the company had an official take on the whole issue of "First Sale" as it pertains to all those ABBA songs you've been hoarding: according to CNET, as far as Apple's concerned, you do, indeed, "perhaps" have the right to resell the music you've purchased.

That's more significant than it may first sound, because what Apple's Peter Lowe is saying is that, yes, when you buy music from the iTMS, you're buying music from the iTMS. ("Perhaps," sure, but we'll take it.) You're not just paying for a license to listen to the downloaded data. As an area, it's all sort of grey and fuzzy and it's got little fiddly bits hanging off it at weird angles, but from Apple's perspective, you do in fact own that particular recording of that song, so according to the doctrine of "First Sale" (which is what allows you to sell a book or CD that you bought without having to get an okay from the copyright holder first), you're perfectly free to try to resell it if you like. The only thing is, you probably won't like.

What Pete "director of marketing for applications and services and boy this is a really long nickname oh wait it's actually my job title so never mind" Lowe actually told CNET was that "Apple's position is that it is impractical, though perhaps within someone's rights, to sell music purchased online." The thorny bit, of course, is the FreePlay digital rights management embedded into iTMS songs, which ties the purchaser to the downloaded tune so that it can't just be copied willy-nilly all over the planet. Since your purchased songs are linked to your Apple ID, in order to resell a song that the buyer could actually play, you'd also have to sell your account. And the problem with that is, of course, if you bought 100 songs and sell just one, if your Apple ID gets sold with that one, suddenly you've got no way to play the other 99. D'oh!

On top of that, since there are technical hurdles to jump on both the buying and selling ends of the transaction and the song is available hassle-free for 99 cents directly from the iTMS in the first place, the market for resold iTMS music should be next to nonexistent. So basically, what Apple is saying is that reselling your iTMS songs is kinda like being a flabby and unattractive man who rides a unicycle through areas of heavy pedestrian traffic while singing campfire songs topless: you can do it and it seems to be legal, but no one actually wants you to do it, so why go through the hassle? (No offense to the flabby, unattractive, unicycle-riding, Kumbaya-singing, topless-going contingent of our viewing audience, of course.)

That said, Apple is clearly misjudging the demand for used iTMS songs, since the one auctioned on eBay had risen to over $100,000 before eBay pulled the plug. We would gladly part with our Apple IDs for that kind of cash. Heck, at this point we'll sell 'em for eighty bucks and a bag of Baked Lays. Any takers?