Computer Reseller News may be calling it all bunk, but rumors have been flying that none other than Lee Iacocca may become the next CEO of Apple. It may sound farfetched, but there's a resonance to the story which propels its propagation, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum.

As far as we know, the story started last night when MacOS Rumors reported that Iacocca had been touring the Apple facility with Steve Jobs. Apparently the two even flew between Apple facilities via helicopter. According to the Rumors reports, after the tour, the two met with the board of directors, after which Jobs left in a huff. Could Steve's snit have indicated that Iacocca would take the CEO position only if given free rein? Meaning, did the board tell Steve he's a no-go for the chairman slot?

CRN's debunking of the rumors includes quotes from Apple board member (and fellow turnaround king) Jerry York, who states that "nothing could be further from the truth." As for an emergency Apple board meeting yesterday, according to York, no board meeting occurred-- emergency or otherwise. He suggests that since Iacocca and Jobs are friends, perhaps Lee was just giving Steve some pointers. (Hey, where's official naysayer Katie Cotton in all this? Is she on vacation?)

Meanwhile, there may be trouble in paradise for longtime lovebirds Intel and Microsoft, according to a Washington Post article. Barely twelve short months after they nervously asserted that network computers were impractical and no threat to their PC marketshare, Intel has announced that they are working on their own design for a low-cost "lean client" architecture.

Why does this signal a potential rocky patch in the Wintel marriage? Because these new Intel machines will run a variety of operating systems, without favoring Windows. Or, rather, Intel doesn't feel any particular loyalty to Microsoft's OSes-- anyone who wants to play can come and get it. IBM, for instance, is helping to make these new machine "operating system agnostic." And that could hurt Microsoft, unless they play their cards right.

Microsoft, however, is saying they have nothing to worry about, as things haven't changed; Microsoft wants Windows to be "the common link" between these new systems, and Intel wants their processors running at the center. They insist that there's nothing fundamentally different between the NC market and the PC market, except that the former is still emerging and is therefore not yet "well-defined." It'll be a couple of years, most likely, before we start to see the outcome. Who knows? Perhaps thin clients will flop altogether; it's entirely possible that, in real life, their benefits will be crushed under the weight of their drawbacks.

Gotta love that pre-emptive multitasking and non-half-assed (full-assed?) virtual memory scheme... While we haven't heard of anyone trying this stunt on a Powermac running Rhapsody DR1, MacNN has a neat item about some basic stress tests of the Intel version. Despite some initial installation woes, the new OS packs a nice punch.

This particular MacNN reader, in a praiseworthy fit of wanton destructive behavior, decided to try to crash the system. And while he succeeded, hearing that it required him to open twenty-four applications eight at a time in order to break things in this developer release is pretty encouraging. And to push the limits of the OS in actual practice, he opened applications one at a time, waiting for each to load before launching another. After getting thirty-four applications running simultaneously, he ran out of applications to launch. (The system finally crashed when he inserted a floppy and then tried to eject it.)

Not half bad for a Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM! We at AtAT are particularly pleased, since this bodes pretty well for Rhapsody's performance on our 200 MHz 604e with 48MB... Counting the days until Premiere...