The naysayers had a jolly time last month when the iMac sales figures for December were announced. If you recall, everyone's favorite Bondi blue buddy had slipped from its number one November spot, to rest at number three during the holiday month-- and plenty of people announced that the iMac fad was on its way out. Oh, sure, when the quarterly sales figures were tallied up, the iMac was the best seller throughout the entire October-through-December period, and we welcomed that news, but the fact still stands that the iMac was "less popular" in December. So was that the beginning of the end?

Not bloody likely. First, there's the new fruit-flavored models with faster processors, bigger hard drives, a lower sticker price, and a hue for every decor. On top of that, there are all the "classic" iMacs still in the channel that retailers are shoving out the door for under $1000. And the price deals get even better... For instance, if you don't mind a refurbished unit, the Apple Store's got revision A's for $799 with Mac OS 8.5 and free shipping. Many retailers also have "open-box" deals on classic iMacs, and we've heard of such deals for as low as $540-- so shop around. Considering the mad dash by consumers to buy both the new iMacs and the cheaper classic models, January's numbers ought to look very good indeed.

But don't take our word for it-- according to MacCentral, the Mac reseller chain Computer Town is actually seeing an increase in iMac sales since the holidays. Their CEO notes that Computer Town sold 716 iMacs in December, and 850 in January, marking an 18% increase, and they expect that other resellers saw similar sales bumps. With that in mind, Computer Town fully expects to see the iMac back at the top of the charts in January. We'll know soon enough if that prediction comes to pass.

Hey, while the rest of the "cool" people are swapping Sherlock plugins and 32-bit icons for their G3 Power Macs running Mac OS 8.5.1, are you still puttering along on an LC III with System 7.1? We feel your pain, really we do. The simple fact of the matter is, older Macs just can't run the latest system software; indeed, even Mac OS 8.0 required a 68040 or higher. Anyway, for Mac users still in the '030 club, the only real upgrade path was to purchase System 7.5, and good luck buying that anywhere these days, right? But now you don't have to! Apple has just recently posted System 7.5 on its servers as a free download.

So grab it now! Think of all the benefits you'll enjoy: Stickies! Open Transport! Drag and drop, with clippings! A hierarchical Apple Menu! QuickDraw GX and PowerTalk! (Er, on second thought, scratch those last two...) Seriously, though, if you've got the RAM to support it, System 7.5 could let you squeeze a little extra life out of an older Mac... plenty of software still comes out for 68K machines, but we notice more and more that requires some variant of System 7.5 or greater. And lest you run screaming because of System 7.5's infamous instability, fear not-- the download from Apple's server actually gives you version 7.5.3-- and a free update to the much stabler 7.5.5 is but a click or two away.

Now, in our experience, even System 7.5.5 wasn't quite as stable as we remember System 7.1 to be, but it wasn't much worse, and the extra features made it all worth it. Unfortunately, even though the software is now free, the download is something like 22 MB-- broken into nineteen chunks. Still, plenty of users of older Macs will find the download very worthwhile. We think we'll stick with 7.1 on our 4 MB Mac SE, however-- it's kind of nice to have a little RAM left over to run an actual application, after all.

Goodness knows, we at AtAT aren't typically hurting for, shall we say, "imaginative" explanations for strangeness in the world of Apple. Heck, when Apple reversed its Super Bowl commercial plans, we were the first to blame aliens. And the cancellation of Mac cloning, that was because of aliens, too. The killing of the Newton project? Aliens. (Okay, so perhaps "imaginative" isn't quite the right word...) And yet, we're at a loss to explain one particularly bizarre factoid, pointed out by Apple Recon. We're not talking about Disney-Apple connections, or the imminent world domination by FireWire, or any of that stuff (since that's all easily explained once you start considering alien-human hybrids and secret government cloning projects). No, the thing that's got us stymied is mammals.org.

It's not often we urge our viewers to switch channels, but flip over to mammals.org and then come right back. Eerie, isn't it? For some unknown reason, the domain name mammals.org is mapped to Apple's web server. And it's not just some random yokel who registered the domain name and had it mapped to Apple's site without their knowledge, or anything... According to the InterNIC database, mammals.org is registered to Apple themselves. Okay, raise your hand if "Huh?" It was exciting to discover that Apple had registered macmate.com and myapple.com, but this mammals.org thing just freaks us out to no end.

So, uh, any ideas? The best we've been able to come up with is Apple's secret attempt to gene-splice an iMac and a Furby, creating a new mammalian life form altogether that will be the designer pet of choice among hip urbanites with a penchant for "cute yet disturbing;" the mammals.org web site will eventually become a sort of Internet users' group for owners of the new creatures to swap cute anecdotes, grooming tips, dietary considerations, and the like. Beyond that, we're at a loss. After all, even aliens wouldn't come up with something quite this weird...