Can you believe it? Here we are, less than twenty-four hours away from His Royal Steveness's next address to his loyal subjects at Seybold, and the excitement level in the Mac community has reached a fever pitch-- if by "fever pitch" you're referring to lethargy, lack of appetite, and teetering on the brink of death. Whereas "Cube Frenzy" gripped the world prior to last month's Expo keynote, this time around no one seems all that juiced. And now that "Survivor" is finally over we can't even blame that as a distraction. So what's going on?

Well, simply put, nothing. Or, as ZDNet columnist Matthew Rothenberg puts it: "Nothing. Nada. Zip. Move along; there's nothing to see here." In his latest piece (sure to spur the "Rothenberg Was Mac the Knife" conspiracy theorists to foaming new heights, as Matt the Rothenberg veers dangerously close to dinnerware-style prose while dropping a couple of obscure links and references just to keep us guessing), he summarizes the points we've already made here before: that Seybold is a professional conference; that Apple just revamped the pro desktop line at the Expo; that by most accounts, the next PowerBook isn't quite ready yet; that Apple's engineers are unlikely to ship the Mac OS X public beta this far in advance of the "end of summer" deadline; and that, consequently, Seybold will be pretty much a non-event for the Apple drama fiend.

More to the point, Apple's decision not to webcast the keynote hints that nothing big is brewing for tomorrow's State of the Apple address-- and if you need still more evidence that Steve isn't going to floor us all with a PowerBook G4, a surprise 1.0 version of Mac OS X ("We discovered the beta is bug-free, so here ya go!"), or a six-slot nitro-burning Funny Mac with dual carbs, fuzzy dice, and flame detailing on the sides, perhaps you'll take Apple's own word for it: reportedly the company's PR flunkies are doing everything they can to quell expectations of major new product announcements tomorrow. One rep lays it bare: "This will basically be a reiteration of our product messaging [from July's] Macworld New York and just sort of skewing that as it relates to the creative space. We feel like the majority of our announcements were made a couple of months ago."

So there you have it: weep not for the Case of the Missing Webcast, since apart from Steve's boyish charm, you won't be missing much anyway. Unless, of course, Apple doth protest too much. We don't have too much trouble envisioning a scenario in which Steve, frustrated by the tainting of his Expo surprises by such factors as Cube leaks and ATI's premature revelations, decided to ensure a jaw-dropping keynote chock full o' shockers by sending his minions forth to repeat "there's nothing going on" to anyone who would listen. Cancelling the webcast may simply have been the masterstroke in a cunning plan to keep the masses in the dark. All we can say is, if tomorrow's keynote bears serious Mac fruit, we won't fall for that trick again.

Okay, we've calmed down a bit about Apple using Windows 2000 to power the beta version of its new Knowledge Base support site. We accept Apple's explanation that the software they're using isn't available for Mac OS X yet-- although since the software in question is apparently Apple's own WebObjects, they have no one to blame for that but themselves-- and that once it's ready, the Knowledge Base will be powered by Mac OS X through and through. In the meantime, Windows 2000 it is. Unfortunately, in some ways WebObjects under Win2K may be an improvement over the strange doings at Apple's support site... or the fact that Apple would let Win2K in the door may simply be just another symptom of a larger problem.

It's like this: MacInTouch noted a web-based comment form located at Apple's support site which allows customers to send feedback to the company about topics ranging from products to resellers to business policies-- people who mourned the recent passing of the Amelio-era "leadership@apple.com" email address may find this an acceptable replacement when it comes time to unleash a stream of unsolicited advice in the general direction of Cupertino. Sounds good, right? Except we were wondering just how customers would find this magical feedback form unless, say, a friendly soap opera provided a direct link to the page. So we headed over to Apple's main Support Page and started digging. Our first stop? The Support Site Index prominently linked at the bottom of the page. What we saw there was far too baffling for a sleepy Monday morning.

It's since been fixed, but the first several times we loaded up Apple's Support Site Index, it looked like this. Apparently the alphabet on Steve's home planet has 113 letters which, for the most part, look just like the letters in our own Roman alphabet, although several of the Steveworld letters seem to display variations too subtle for the human eye to detect-- we count eleven instances of what looks to us like a simple capital "S," though there's obviously more there than our pitiful human brains can grasp. Either that, or we're looking at a series of base pairs in the complex genetic code for Steve's alien race. In any event, it's most certainly not what Apple intended people to see when they went looking for a simple map of the company's Support Site.

Just for the heck of it, we decided to see what platform happened to be serving the Support Site Index's wacky fun. Ready for this? It's a Mac. It's not running Mac OS X, or Mac OS X Server-- just good ol' Mac OS and a version of WebSTAR that could use an update. Now, we certainly wouldn't want to give the impression that using the Mac OS as a server platform somehow leads to security breaches of genetic code files or odd reorderings of the alphabet, but we were struck by the juxtaposition between the main site and the Knowledge Base. Personally, our theory is that the Mac is upset at Windows 2000 having moved in next door, and occasionally gets flustered and throws quiet little tantrums. We suppose it could have just been a programming error, but what are the odds of that happening?

That's all folks-- run down the curtain and tip your waitstaff on the way out, because the Mac platform is "doomed." Oh, you haven't heard? According to MacWEEK, open-source guru Eric S. Raymond actually went so far as to call the Mac platform a "noble but doomed cause" because "the Mac community has had five years to find a counter [to Windows] and failed. The Linux community, on the other hand, has gone from nowhere to a desktop market share comparable to the Mac's in three years flat. That's a pretty powerful appeal."

Maybe it's just us, but that sounds like a deliriously naïve oversimplification to us-- and we love oversimplifications. The fact that Linux appeared in a market vacuum of hardcore geeks just waiting for a product that satisfied their noblest nerdy instincts hardly signals a death knell for a platform that holds elegance, attention to detail, and ease of use above all other concerns. Whether or not you consider it a good thing, we strongly suspect that non-geeks will outnumber the geeks for many more years to come-- and meanwhile, Mac OS X is barreling down on the future like a freight train. Or at least like a freight train moving really slowly. It's still going to arrive before the geek shall inherit the earth, though.

Hey, we have nothing against Linux. We like Linux. Some of our best friends use Linux. But we've used Linux, too, not all that long ago, and frankly, it's still got a ways to go before our parents are going to feel comfortable running out and buying a consumer computer running Red Hat. We don't relish the idea of explaining the syntax of chmod and major and minor device numbers in device files to an audience that, on the whole, can't even figure out how to get their VCRs to stop blinking "12:00" without covering the display readout with electrical tape. The average shmoe is still going to reach for Windows; the average shmoe who does his homework is going to reach for a Mac. As for Linux, call us when our moms can use it.