Blame what you will: the devastating loss of Bungie to the Dark Side of the Force, rumors that Apple's new full-size keyboard has gained forward-delete and "end" keys but lacks a space bar and the letter "e," massive and sudden backlash from investors who don't like The Cure... All we know is, on Tuesday night Apple's stock was up over 100, and by Wednesday morning it had dropped to about 50. That's a 50% decline in a single day! Why, we can't recall AAPL shedding so much value in one trading day since, oh, about June 16th of 1987, on which AAPL dropped from 79 to about 41. We've currently got all our financial experts (read: a copy editor wearing a Quicken t-shirt) working the phones, trying to shake loose some inside info that might explain these two fascinating and frightening price plunges.

So far, all we've managed to scare up is a couple of intriguing coincidences. Get this: on both dates, not only did AAPL's price plummet to approximately 50% of its day-before value, but the number of outstanding shares seemingly doubled. Mysterious indeed. Even stranger, reports from the field would appear to indicate that these doubled shares are appropriately distributed among all the shareholders; people who went to bed with a five hundred shares woke up with a thousand. We're starting to think that some evildoer with a bone to pick with the Cupertino crowd once hatched a nefarious scheme to drive Apple's stock price down by printing up a ton of counterfeit shares and flooding the market with them-- but was clever enough to spread them out perfectly among the entire shareholder community so as to allay suspicion. This shady character (who, for narrative purposes, we'll just randomly call "Bill G.") then laid low for thirteen years, waiting for the heat to die down-- but now, as Apple enjoys its new Wall Street success, he appears to be up to his old tricks again.

The only other reasonable explanation we've come up with involves the thirteen-year spawning cycle of AAPL shares, which are actually sentient paper-based life forms from the planet Daytraydr. Once every 156 months, they reproduce by a division process akin to a whole-organism version of cellular mitosis. It's a slightly less likely scenario, but we're investigating it thoroughly nonetheless-- one stockholder thought he heard the sweet, soulful sounds of Barry White and Marvin Gaye coming from inside his vault the night before he discovered that his shares had doubled, so maybe there's something to it after all.

Incidentally, the other slightly odd thing about those two dates is that, on both, AAPL underwent something called a "2:1 Stock Split," but we assume that's just a random and meaningless coincidence. Or perhaps it's not a coincidence, but a sort of "stock price harbinger of doom." Perhaps if we could predict one of these mysterious "stock splits" ahead of time, we could all make preparations for the halving of Apple's stock price that it heralds. Actually, no, forget it-- that's just goofy. The answer obviously lies with either a grudge-bearing counterfeiter or alien reproduction. Don't let those Wall Street snake-oil salesmen convince you otherwise.

Okay, so these days everyone's all hepped up on Mac OS X hype, but who remembers when Rhapsody was the Mac's imminent salvation? Lest you think that all Apple did was change the name, let us remind you that Rhapsody was pushed as a multi-platform operating system; we were supposed to be able to run Rhapsody on a Mac, on Intel hardware, and maybe even on UNIX workstations from the likes of Sun and Hewlett-Packard. Even more promising was the cross-platform nature of developing Rhapsody applications. Apple promised that programs developed with the "Yellow Box" APIs (now referred to as "Cocoa" in Mac OS X) were going to run not just on Macs, but on high-end Rhapsody workstations, Rhapsody-enabled Intel systems, and even-- get this-- standard Windows systems, sans Rhapsody, via a set of Yellow Box runtime libraries. It was a developer's dream: write once, run just about anywhere. Like Java, only... not.

Now here's the really interesting bit. Apple actually promised that those golden Yellow Box runtime libraries would be free, meaning that if developers wrote software for Rhapsody, they could ship a Windows version at no additional development or licensing cost. Sounds great, right? Almost too good to be true. Or maybe that "almost" is inaccurate. According to MacRumors (who quotes a Stepwise article we can't load, for some reason), the whole cross-platform nature of Yellow Box development has dissipated into vapor. Apple has no plans to ship Mac OS X for any hardware other than Macs, and all promises of free Yellow Box runtime licenses have been "yanked away." Reportedly, when asked about them, Uncle Steve's response is, "Why not sell your product on the Mac?" Well, Steve, not being developers ourselves, it's probably a little dicey for us to speak on their behalf, but our answer to that question would be another question: "Why not increase the Mac's market share to an installed base even remotely resembling the potential customer pool on the Windows side, so we can make money?"

Anyway, the reason this whole Yellow Box issue caught our attention is, we started wondering whether this was the plan all along. Oh, sure, it's possible that Apple planned to ship and support Rhapsody for Intel and give away those Yellow Box runtime licenses, and then changed its mind once the new Mac hardware started to catch on sales-wise. But we can't help wondering if Apple's broken promises were never meant to be kept-- if they were just the carrot on the stick keeping developers from bailing even faster than they already were. Think about it: it's 1997. Mac market share is at ridiculous lows, the product line is a shambles, developers are deserting for Windows's greener pastures at an alarming pace. But you're Steve, and you know you're going to have a lot of kick-ass hardware coming out in a couple of years. How do you keep those developers on the hook until the Mac is back? Promise Windows compatibility for future Mac applications. That stems the defection, and then when the new Macs are shipping and Apple's the darling of the media again, suddenly it's "What Yellow Box runtimes?" True? Maybe. Clever? Yup. Underhanded? Undoubtedly. Steve? Oh, my, yes.

Zounds! Something's terribly amiss in the world of entertainment metafilter web sites. Faithful viewer Dave Murray wrote in to mention some disturbing incompatibilities with The Dialectizer. You know about this handy little toy, right? Basically, you pick a dialect (such as, say, Redneck), enter the URL of any other web site on the 'net (like, for example, http://www.whitehouse.gov/), click "Dialectize!" and bickety-bam-- you get the White House page with altered text like "Whut in tarnation's Noo: Whut in tarnation's happenin' at th' White House." It's all in good fun.

Unfortunately, there's been a bit of a copyright flap recently, since The Dialectizer is effectively altering other site's content without permission. In response to various threats of legal action, the site's proprietor has enabled other webmasters to "block" their sites from being dialectized. And what Dave found out was that "Apple.com has requested a block so that 'The Thoughts of Chairman Steve' cannot be rendered as if by Elmer Fudd." Now, that's not terribly surprising, since it's a known fact that the Apple of today isn't exactly known for its sense of humor-- especially when it comes to humor at its own expense. But what is surprising is that Dave was also unable to dialectize AtAT into "Swedish Chef" or any other mode.

What's this? AtAT afraid to be laughed at? Not hardly. Believe us, we definitely didn't block our site from The Dialectizer's magic; if anything, we're annoyed that it doesn't work. Apparently our server is "incompatible" with the service. Now, we're using WebSTAR, the premier web server software for the Mac platform (yes, a Mac site served from a Mac-- they're rare, but there are a few of us out here), so we decided to try to dialectize a few other WebSTAR-served sites. MacInTouch? No go. The Army's home page? Nope. So basically, it does indeed look like WebSTAR just won't work with The Dialectizer. Which means that a large percentage of Mac-served sites out there aren't open to this particular brand of parody.

So the question is, how much did Steve Jobs pony up to ensure that most web sites served by his company's computers could not be viewed in Pig Latin? Oh, sure, it could just be unintentional, but really, how likely is that? Oh, well. At least you can always cut and paste any text you want into The Dialectizer. It's not as much fun as seeing a whole site transformed, graphics and all, boot et leest it's oone-a vey tu see-a AtAT in "Svedeesh Cheff" mude-a.