Trust No One-- but your PowerBook. That's right; after years of watching Her Blessedness soil her dainty fingers on random Wintel dross, we were thrilled to see that in last night's episode of The X-Files, Saint Scully the Enigmatic finally used a Powerbook-- a machine worthy of her status. It more than makes up for the defection of Frank Black of the Millennium Group to the dark side.

But that's not all-- to top it off, perky geek goddess Willow from one of our new fave shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was researching the background of a spooky 50's mom-wooing robot (played by a disturbingly doughy John Ritter) on-- what else? An Apple Powerbook. We're in love. Of course, it didn't appear to be plugged into anything while she was searching for a past criminal record, but perhaps that IR port is far more useful than we knew...

So fear not: Even if Apple doesn't manage to bounce back in marketshare, they can always fall back on a promising future in supplying prop computers to our favorite supernaturally-themed TV shows. Heck, it's a living.

Well, AtAT staff finally took a trip down to the friendly neighborhood CompUSA to see the completed Apple salon store there. And while it marked a definite change from the old days, we saw quite a bit of room for improvement.

Yes, it was a kick to see Mac stuff there at all, including our first glimpse of the Powermac G3 up close and personal, but there were blemishes. For instance, that selfsame Powermac G3 with the speedy PPC 750 processor was labeled as a 603e-based machine. We couldn't locate a copy of Myth, or an ATI XClaim VR video card. We wandered around for a while looking helpless, but no store personnel ever approached us. And one of the most disturbing sights was a full rack of Powerbooks of all types (including the drool-worthy Powerbook G3), each missing its battery (presumably to prevent theft) and turned off. Wintel laptops throughout the store were powered on and purring away happily.

Hopefully, Apple's keeping an eye on the progress of these highly-touted salon stores. But even if they aren't, the Macs Only CompUSA Watch is.

Prepare for armageddon, because dogs and cats are living together... PC Week is reporting that the Mac version of Microsoft's Office 98 may ship before the Windows version ever sees the light of day.

Finished spraying your coffee all over your screen? Good. Microsoft is saying that they expect to ship Office 98 for the Mac in mid-1998, and the product is currently in beta. But the Windows version isn't that far along yet. Apparently the slew of incompatibility "issues" between Office 95 and Office 97 has persuaded Microsoft to take a more careful approach in its development of the next version. In fact, some sources imply that the Windows version of Office 98 may not ship until 1999.

A Mac version of Office shipping first... What next? Scott McNealy praising Windows?