Oh, sure, you noticed the lack of new episodes since Christmas Eve and thought your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff was taking some much-needed time off for the holidays. Or you just thought we were slacking-- same difference. In either case, you were wrong. In reality, we were recuperating from the embolisms we suffered because of Hiawatha Bray's latest pro-Apple column in the Boston Globe. Yes, Mr. Bray continues his recent hiatus from Apple-bashing, but with his latest foray into Mac-friendliness, he's gone way over the line.

See, in all of Bray's recent articles lauding some Apple technology (he loves AirPort and FireWire, for example), while we were shocked to find anything positive at all, we were protected from any real psychological trauma by the fact that any compliments were tempered by a slew of insults. For every compliment about AirPort's convenience, there was a dig about the iBook's excessive size and weight, etc. But this time around, we simply weren't prepared for what is, in essence, a completely positive review of the iMac DV Special Edition. That's right; Bray liked everything about it and gushes enthusiasm in every sentence. Needless to say, such unchecked Apple-positivism from Hiawatha "The iMac Will Be A Dismal Flop" Bray damn near put us in the hospital. In fact, it was only Bray's occasional digs at the previous iMac model's shortcomings that kept us off of life support. Some of you might consider Bray's column a Christmas miracle, but it was almost our last gasp.

Now, lots of you wrote in to point out the article, which isn't too surprising. But several of you independently surmised that Bray had been eliminated and replaced by an Apple-engineered alien hybrid clone. Can we just say how proud we are that you're all starting to catch on? Two years ago, nobody would have made that assumption without us mentioning it first. Unfortunately, in this case, you're wrong; we have it on good authority that Bray is the real McCoy. His new Apple-friendly tone is truly the result of some excellent products issuing forth from Cupertino these days. (Well, that and the mind-altering chemicals that undercover Apple operatives have been slipping into his coffee every day.)

The rumors continue-- horrible, ghastly rumors of experiments with anabolic steroids and gene-splicing technology in Apple's underground labs. Remember back when everyone thought the consumer portable was going to be a subnotebook, weighing less than five pounds? What we got, of course, was the iBook-- a behemoth that's both larger and heavier than even Apple's professional PowerBook G3. What most people don't realize is that the iBook was a subnotebook at one time in its development-- before the steroid treatments and induced mutation, that is. Someone high up at Apple firmly believes that bigger is better, and the through-the-roof iBook sales numbers are only reinforcing that belief.

Which means that the rumored Macworld Expo debut of a bigger iMac in a couple of weeks is becoming increasingly likely. According to Apple Insider, the "P7A" won't be ready to ship until February at the earliest, but a few pre-production models have already broken their restraints and emerged from Apple's labs-- big, hulking versions of the current iMac DV Special Edition, complete with the long-awaited 17-inch screen. And the treatments had another interesting side effect, as well: P7A's medical chart shows its G3 processor has been boosted to 500 MHz. Other than that, P7A is just like today's Graphite iMac DV SE-- only bigger, stronger, and faster.

Now, if this indeed turns out to be true, we really have to wonder just how many G4 sales Apple would cannibalize. Your AtAT staff, in particular, has a hard time justifying the purchase of a Power Mac G4 when the P7A has just about everything we need: a 17-inch screen, USB and FireWire, a RAM ceiling much higher than we need, and a processor that beats the living daylights out of our current 200 MHz 604e workhorse. About the only thing we'd miss would be some PCI slots, but we're more than willing to give those up provided the P7A represents a significant price savings. We guess we'll know in a couple of weeks whether P7A is real, or just more Apple misinformation concocted to keep us on our toes.

While we're adrift in the traditional pre-Macworld Expo news lull, we'd like to share a personal experience with you all. We recently visited the home of a young nephew to drop off his holiday gift-- an edutainment software title starring Dr. Seuss, whom he loves. Upon tearing off the wrapping paper, he voiced his desire to try the game out right away. His father dutifully went about the task of installing the software. Unfortunately, our nephew's computer is a Wintel box, and while it's usually a pretty well-behaved system, this particular installation was a rocky one, at best.

First, the installer program noticed the absence of QuickTime on the system, and proceeded to load it-- version 2. Then, strangely enough, it proceeded to install QuickTime 3 on top of the older version. Then the application software itself was loaded, the installer quit, and we were ready to go. Or so we thought. The program started up, music was playing, the Cat in the Hat was singing, and suddenly-- nothing. The music cut out, the video stopped mid-frame, and we were forced to kill the application from the Task Manager. What could be the problem? Too low on disk space? The system did seem to be swapping an awful lot. He uninstalled a few older programs they no longer use. Still no go. Strange, the Control Panels showed two versions of QuickTime loaded-- but he couldn't uninstall the earlier version because the files were in use by the system. Even a restart didn't fix that-- though a Windows dialog assured us it would.

Uninstalling QuickTime 3 appeared to work-- but the control panel remained. And regardless, the game still froze at the exact same place. Disable virtual memory? Same freeze. Disable graphics acceleration? Same freeze. In frustration (enhanced by his son's impatience at having been teased with only the beginning of a song over and over again) he tried re-running the software installer. For some reason, this time it began to load DirectX, which it hadn't before. It also updated the sound card's driver. There appeared to be light at the end of the tunnel, and yet, trying to run the game still yielded the same twenty seconds of video and music followed by an icy crash.

By this time, an hour had passed, and it was time for the family to leave for a party. The Windows system still was no closer to running our gift. Our nephew then burst into a frustrated temper tantrum and had to be sent to his room, screaming. All in all, not the happy holiday scene for which we had hoped. And we should probably point out that the boy's father is not your Average Schmoe-- he's a systems guy for an accounting firm, so he knows his way around Windows. Seeing him struggle with getting a children's edutainment title to run was, well, a little harrowing-- and a great reminder of why we use the computers we do. Maybe by next year we'll have won the lottery and we can buy the kid a Mac...