Silly us; here we figured that now that the Power Mac G4 has been announced (with "immediate" availability, no less), it might be easy for us to pick up a blue and white G3 for a song. Nobody knows better than our faithful viewers that AtAT could use a new server from which to broadcast our happy little show, especially after that roller coaster ride last week. Server up, server down, server up... well, okay, mostly server down. A brand-spankin'-new G3, we figured, is just what the doctor ordered. ("Why not just get a G4?" you ask. Whaddaya think, we're made of money? Besides, it'd be a crime to throw that gorgeous clear-and-silver-and-graphite case into a server rack where no one's ever going to see it.)

And yet, even though the whole world's gone ga-ga over the G4's hip new colors, "supercomputer" power, and fabulous new buzzwords like "Velocity Engine," sadly, prices on the G3s just aren't falling nearly fast enough to make our bank balance happy. Whereas a new G4/400 only costs $1599, the best price we've yet found on a G3 is a January-era 300 MHz model for $1299. That's not exactly what we'd call a "fire sale." It's more like an "uncomfortably warm and humid sale."

We suppose we should just give it a little more time; as far as we know, the low-end G4s aren't really shipping yet, so maybe reduced G3 demand hasn't trickled down to the bottom line just yet. According to MacCentral, G4 pre-orders are "through the roof," while the G3s just aren't moving out the door, despite Apple's "free printer or 128 MB of RAM" promotion. So once all those resellers want to stock their shelves with newly-available G4s, they're going to have to cut some pretty attractive deals to make room by unloading all that blue and white. At least, we sincerely hope so... Baby needs a new G3.

Geez, it seems like Mac OS 9 is the operating system at the bottom of the karma wheel-- the poor little OS just can't seem to catch a break. In fact, given the sheer number of irritating little annoyances cropping up, we hate to guess what heinous crimes Mac OS 9 must have committed prior to its incipient incarnation. Perhaps it was Windows in a past life? Or even Copland? One thing's for sure, though: whatever the sins of the past may be, Mac OS 9 is surely paying for them now.

First, there's the lawsuit. You've heard all about this: despite knowing full well that there's another operating system out there called OS-9, Steve Jobs just couldn't help himself. "Microware trademark be damned," he said. "Let's call this next release Mac OS 9. It just sounds so right." So Microware sued, and now only time will tell if Mac OS 9 actually ships as "Mac OS 9" and not "Mac OS 3+6" (as faithful viewer Tim Rzeznik suggests) or "Mac OS 3²" or "Lemmy" or whatever else Apple winds up having to call it. (Note to Steve: calling it "Windows 2000" is not a constructive, nonlitigious solution-- not that we wouldn't relish a little Apple-Microsoft lawsuit action.)

Next, there's this little matter of massive hard disk corruption that seems to have snuck into one of the latest beta releases of the software. We last saw it referenced in a Mac the Knife article; apparently Beta 6 of the Operating System Still Code-Named Sonata™ was pulled from Apple's developer servers due to a "File Manager bug that can on rare occasions cause disk corruption." Sure, it's better that they catch it in beta than hide under the desks later as thousands of irate customers storm the Cupertino gates with pitchforks and torches following widespread data loss, but still.

Lastly (for now, anyway), there's the fact that one of Mac OS 9's key features may get squashed before it even gets out of the gate. You know how Apple's touting Sherlock 2 as your own personal Internet shopping assistant, or whatever? One of the hip demos that gets trotted out every time a crowd gathers is Sherlock 2's comparison shopping feature-- tell it what you want to buy, and it returns a list of which e-commerce vendors have it, how much each of them charges, and whether or not it's in stock. Keen! But while in all the demos Sherlock 2 searches and returns results from online auction megagiant eBay, now if looks as though that particular feature might be dead in the water. A CNET article notes that eBay is working to prevent "outsiders" from accessing their databases, citing "site performance" concerns. Looks like Apple marketing dude Phil Schiller will have to cobble together a new demo...

Another day, another analyst upgrade, another record for Apple's stock. It's almost getting boring, isn't it? For instance, after AAPL closed at a new all-time high last Friday, analysts William Shope and Charlie Wolf of Warburg Dillon Read found themselves compelled to raise their price target. (Leaving it at a paltry $75 a share would have seemed a little odd, especially given that AAPL closed at over $73 last week.) So now Will and Charlie have set the bar at $90 a share, and we can only hope that Apple's up to the challenge. There's a neat CBS MarketWatch article on this whole rosy situation, which includes a handy little fourteen-year chart showing Apple's stock doing better now than it ever has in the past.

The analysts' reasoning behind the target increase? Oh, it's the usual suspects-- the probable grand slam known as the iBook, the industry buzz over the new G4, the likelihood of a "refreshed" iMac sometime within the next couple of months, etc. Wall Street reacted favorably, as AAPL rose almost another three points to close at over $76 a share, after reaching almost 78 during the day. Honestly, at this point we've given up any hope of ever predicting where things will level off. We thought price-taking would have knocked a few points off and broken the momentum long ago. Which is, of course, why we're not day-traders over here in the AtAT trenches.

But like we said, while this is great news for Apple and its stockholders, it's really getting kind of boring. Not that a dizzying thirty-point drop would make us happy-- it wouldn't. But at least it'd give us something exciting to talk about. After all, we're not shareholders, so we wouldn't be losing anything from such a precipitous nosedive, and we'd probably get a guilty charge out of seeing all those "I struck it rich" AAPL investors squirm just a little. But fear not; the nosedive won't happen, and the simple reason why is this: we at AtAT aren't investors. If we owned a couple hundred shares of Apple stock, we can pretty much guarantee AAPL would be in the toilet by now; that's just our financial luck. So by not buying AAPL at $16 a year and a half ago, we virtually guaranteed its meteoric rise and fivefold increase. If you're awestruck by your appreciation of our supreme sacrifice for the good of the platform, don't applaud-- just throw money.