Hey, have you been following the saga of the build-to-order moratorium at the Apple Store? Last month a notice appeared there stating that there was an early December deadline by which to place custom-built orders, though Apple would continue to sell pre-built systems through the end of the year. Then the notice changed recently, saying that the Apple Store would also cease taking orders for even pre-built systems after December 20th. The store will apparently close on that day, and won't reopen for business until January 5th. So if you've got any orders you've been meaning to place, hop to it, or you'll have to wait until next year.

Now, as for why the Apple Store's closing up shop, it's not to give Steve's elves a well-deserved holiday rest. Far from it, in fact; according to Don Crabb, while the rest of us are polishing off the last of the cookies and standing in lines to return sweater vests, every elf within a twenty-mile radius of Cupertino will probably be clocking some serious overtime. See, it's not just the Apple Store that's coming offline-- Apple as a whole is pretty much shutting down for the last week of the year. They need to close up shop in order to switch over to a new, state-of-the-art order-tracking and manufacturing system-- not a trivial task for any company, let alone a multi-billion-dollar one. It may not be pretty, but apparently it's worth a little bit of lost business (and a whole lot of holiday elbow grease) to get Apple up and running on SAP's R3 software, which will make the whole operation more responsive and effective. (At least, that's what the brochure said.)

All pretty mundane, right? Except for an interesting little tidbit that just surfaced over at Mac OS Rumors: what if the Apple Store downtime (which is longer at both ends from the overall Apple downtime) is due to plans for changing the infrastructure of the online ordering system? Remember, the Apple Store is a pretty solid piece of work, and it's a great demonstration of what can be done with Apple's WebObjects architecture; the only downside was that it's run on Sun UltraSPARCs instead of Macs. But Mac OS X Server is reportedly ready to ship, so what if Apple's using the company downtime as an opportunity to rehost the Apple Store on honest-to-goodness PowerMac G3's running their brand spankin' new Unix-based server OS? After all, what a great way to demonstrate the power of Mac OS X Server-- and the Apple Store's due to reopen just in time for Macworld Expo. Coincidence?

Let's face it: the high-tech world changes faster than any other business we can think of, which makes trying to follow all the rumors sort of a futile endeavor. After all, any rumors of technological advances or new-fangled hardware are often talking about products that aren't expected to be unveiled for six months or longer, which is almost a lifetime in the fast-paced tech world. On top of that, rumors only spread if they're exciting, so you typically wind up hearing that a certain computer (not due for another half a year or so) is going to include every single one of whatever features currently occupy the Top Ten List of What's Hip in High-Tech-- even if the price of those ten features added together is three times more than the product itself is expected to cost. Yes, staying on top of all this stuff is futility indeed-- but that doesn't mean we aren't going to try. It just means that we can't mind being disappointed on a fairly regular basis.

Take, for example, the P1 consumer portable, due by mid-1999 from our friends in Cupertino. This "portable iMac" is arguably the most eagerly-awaited system among Macophiles, and rumors about what it is (or is not) have run rampant. When you add up all the stuff that we've heard will be included, like DVD, wireless CDPD networking, a fast G3 processor, etc., it just doesn't fit into the P1's expected $1000-$1200 price range. Realistically, some of those features just aren't going to make the cut. For crying out loud, the iMac has a pretty minimalistic feature set (no floppy, SCSI, standard Mac serial, or ADB) and it still costs $1299. That's why, sad as the news might be, we're inclined to believe the "reality-adjusted" P1 specs reported on O'Grady's PowerPage.

According to the PowerPage, one source has come forward to say that the P1 will not include built-in wireless Internet access. From a price standpoint, that makes a lot of sense, even though it flies in the face of all kinds of news reports flying around for the last couple of weeks. While some P1 prototypes included this capability, it would seem that it's been left on the cutting room floor. Still, we find ourselves unable to shake one crucial datum from our collective skull-- Steve Jobs' CAUSE98 keynote, in which he alluded vaguely to a portable system that was always connected to the Internet. Who's right? To be honest, it doesn't matter. The P1 is so far from a public unveiling, whatever the right answer is now may well be wrong tomorrow, or in a week, or a month. Our money's still on P1 shipping with some kind of wireless net capability, though.

So, uh, how many of you are blissfully uninvolved in any Year 2000 shenanigans? (From a day-job perspective, we're not, hence the rant-- please bear with us.) It's a darn shame and dreadfully unfair, but just because you had the good sense to choose a Mac doesn't mean that you can ignore the Y2K bug entirely. Unless the company you work for does its payroll on Macs, for example, when 2000 rolls around you may suddenly find yourself sans paycheck, since the system thinks you won't start working there for another 95 years or so. Then there's the banks, the power grids, all that good stuff that holds the fabric of society together. And don't even get us started on the truly frightening stuff, like the reports of massively non-Y2K-compliant computer systems controlling the world's nuclear weapons...

Not that we're trying to be alarmist, or anything. It's just that no one really knows what's going to happen when the clocks strike midnight on New Year's Eve, 2000. Some say it'll be armageddon, other think that what few computer systems fail will be more of a nuisance than anything else. Just about the only thing that's certain is that your Mac stands a much better chance of taking the whole thing in stride than many of the computer systems out there; as Apple's Year 2000 Compliance Statement makes clear, Macs have been aware that the century was going to end since the first one rolled off the assembly lines back in 1984. Sure, that doesn't guarantee that your third-party software is free from any Y2K-related bugs, but in our personal experience with this stuff, as a general rule, Mac software seems to be put together by people with more of an eye for little details than those who build software for certain other platforms. (Plus, Mac programmers would presumably use the Mac Toolbox date functions-- which handle the year 2000 just fine-- rather than reinvent the wheel and write their own date code.)

Don't you wish everyone used Macs? Especially your bank? And the electric company? And the U.S. government-- particularly the Department of Defense? Hey, look on the bright side-- on January 1st, 2000, while the rest of the world is looting and pillaging the darkened streets as the missiles streak across the night sky, you can use the last two hours of charge in your PowerBook batteries to update your ClarisWorks-based CD catalog database, secure in the knowledge that it'll all function just fine. ;-)