Ah, the age-old slot debate: is Apple shooting itself in the proverbial foot by including only three PCI slots in its upcoming Yosemite professional Macs? Well, actually, the latest rumors state that Yosemite really has four slots: three 64-bit slots and a single 66 MHz 32-bit slot that will come pre-loaded with an ATI RAGE 128 graphics card. Still, the fact remains that several professional Mac users need more than three slots free, and until vendors start coming out with multi-function cards that group features together on a single card for the 64-bit slots, there's going to be a need for more open slots. That's where the third-party expansion chassis comes in.

Now, the primary arguments against the expansion chassis plan as a feasible solution are price and complexity. First of all, we've heard that the chassis (which will give Yosemite a total of six or seven free slots) might cost as much as $1000, though we'd guess it'll be more like $700 or so. Cost aside, the fact that some people will have to hang a bulky and ugly box off the back of their beautiful new El Capitan Mac gives a lot of users pause-- and rightfully so, if the rumors of the new Mac casings are at all accurate. It'd be a crime against taste to stick a beige box next to the translucent midnight blue of El Capitan.

But what's this? According to Mac the Knife, whoever is making this expansion chassis is taking a page from the iMac peripherals vendors. Just as the release of the iMac led to a slew of translucent teal-and-white drives, speakers, keyboards, and the like, the Knife reports that the Apple-endorsed expansion chassis for Yosemite will match the nifty stylings of El Capitan. So there's no need to worry about a clash in styles, especially if you also get one of Apple's forthcoming Studio Displays, code-named Moby and Chablis. We can't wait to see all this matching gear hooked up and on display. While the rest of the world eagerly awaits the advent of Christmas, is it wrong of us to be more excited about the start of Macworld? Especially since we're not even going?

Remember way back in the days of the Quadra AV series and the very first Power Macs, it seemed like Apple was blazing the trail in the field of computer voice recognition? Those Macs supported PlainTalk, a cool technology that would allow you to speak commands to the Finder, like "empty the trash" or "put this in the Apple menu." The speech recognition module came with several "speakable items," and you could make your own by putting together simple Applescripts. It was both occasionally useful and a seriously cool "gee-whiz" feature that never failed to impress people. But ever since PlainTalk showed up, speech recognition on the Mac has pretty much stayed still while all kinds of advances were made on the Wintel side. Most importantly, while PlainTalk lets you issue commands to your Mac, it doesn't let you dictate text. For that, the only real choice is PowerSecretary-- now discontinued-- which was hideously overpriced for a long time, because it was the only game in town. And even though it's priced a little more reasonably these days, it still uses an old speech engine that requires the user to pause unnaturally between words. Meanwhile, there are a ton of "continuous speech" packages available for Wintels that allow dictation under relatively normal speaking conditions.

So one of our Christmas wishes for our poor, aching wrists this year is for a decent and reasonably-priced continuous speech dictation product for the Mac. Apple has been rumored to be working on some kick-butt speech technologies in secret, which may be one reason that other vendors don't want to take a chance on it right now. However, MacInTouch notes that Apple's been engaged in lawsuits with the makers of PowerSecretary and some other speech products since 1996, and that may account for the relative stasis in Apple's efforts. The only other real hope for Mac dictation out there right now is MacSpeech, a company who is fighting the Mac market share current and trying to raise funds to complete their own continuous dictation product. We salute their intestinal fortitude, and we'd like to mention that one of the ways they are raising funds is by selling "Founder's T-Shirts," which cost $99 but will grant the owner a $79 discount on the product when it ships-- and wholesale pricing on two future releases. If you're chomping at the bit for dictation software for your Mac, consider investing in a Founder's T-Shirt this holiday season.

In the meantime, though, for those of you who have never messed around with PlainTalk's speech recognition capabilities, we recommend that you give it a try. In our opinion, it's not necessarily terribly useful-- but it's a lot of fun. Being able to come home from work and say "Honey, I'm home!" to trigger a connection to your ISP, the downloading of your new email, the launching of your "browser of choice," and the loading of your favorite daily web page (which, of course, would be this one, right?) is a real hoot. If you want to get really nuts, you can even hook up your Mac to your household appliances via X10 interfaces and have it brew you fresh coffee in the morning when you yell out, "Mondays suck!" It's just one more way that your Mac can feel less like just a computer and more like a friend. (For those of you with iMacs, PlainTalk isn't officially iMac-compatible yet-- but a Christmas hack from MacSpeech works as a temporary patch until Apple releases its next version of PlainTalk next year.)

You hardly hear anyone talking about whether Apple's ever going to hire a permanent CEO these days, but a year ago it was a hot topic. And it got hotter once Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, irrepressible scamps that they are, "gave" the post to one Michael Murdock, via a couple of email messages that made for some good AtAT material. Yes, it's the first anniversary of the infamous email prank, in which Jobs and Ellison both sent messages to Murdock telling him he had the job and asking him when he could start. (Murdock had been emailing them repeatedly with ideas about how to save Apple and run the company right.)

Some people thought the prank was funny; others thought it was just mean. But the one thing we can all agree on is that it's over. Steve's still plugging away in the "interim" CEO position, Ellison's still on the board, and Michael Murdock's moved on, too. He sent us wishes for a Merry Christmas on the anniversary of the prank, and included this little tidbit for publication:

Former Apple CEO Candidate vying to be the next Mayor of San Francisco. Michael Murdock, the only person on the planet to be offered the job of CEO of Apple Computer, is now shooting for a higher star: to be the new Mayor of the City by the Bay. With solutions to the homeless problem, traffic jams, fixing Muni, the Bay Bridge, improving parking, and making land more affordable, Mr. Murdock is generating a grass-roots campaign to challenge Willie Brown for his chair. Murdock has promised to not wear a fedora at anytime during his tenure as Mayor, unless it is to portray a gangster. Film at 11.