Well, let's skip right over the told-ya-sos and try to ignore the wailing cries, the tearing of hair, and the gnashing of teeth for a moment, shall we? It's tough, we know, what with all those former optimists railing in disbelief over the sheer injustice of a Stevenote with no new gear. The fact that Apple just revised over 60% of its hardware line a mere six weeks ago? Immaterial. The complete and utter lack of a webcast for a domestic keynote? Irrelevant. Apple's own PR flunkies explicitly warning people that there would be no major new Apple products during Seybold? Neither here nor there. No matter what reason, logic, or public statement dictates, everyone knows that when Steve is on stage, he delivers his spiel, and then always says there's "one more thing." Except this time.

So-- no PowerBook G4, no revised iBook, and no Mac OS X public beta. (There was also no Macs-for-handguns trade-in program, but that was pretty much a long shot even by yesterday's standards.) But let's focus on what we did learn from Steve's latest public address, shall we? The biggest news, of course, is that Mac OS X finally has a solid release date. Well, okay, no, it doesn't-- the 1.0 version of Apple's fresh-faced new operating system is now due "very early next year," which could mean two days before June ends, for all we know. But what we do have is an actual set date for the release of the long-awaited public beta: September 13th, a mere two weeks away and a full ten days before Steve's self-imposed "summer" deadline. In other words, folks, we're getting it early. Just keep telling yourself that.

Now, frankly, we don't know what to do with ourselves. We've been waiting for some form of Mac OS X (in our opinion, for various reasons, Mac OS X Server doesn't count) for so long that two weeks seems like an infinitesimal length of time. It's been over three months since we were told the public beta would ship this summer. It's been almost nine months since we were first given a tantalizing glimpse of Aqua. Over fifteen months have elapsed since we first heard the name "Mac OS X" (and we were told it'd ship by Q3 1999). Over three and a half years have tumbled by since Apple bought NeXT and promised us a new, modern Mac OS called Rhapsody. And if you want to count the Copland years, too, well, you're talking over five years total-- more, if you dig back to the Taligent and Pink days. In short, two weeks is a mere eye-blink compared to the time we've all done in OS jail so far-- we can do this standing on our heads.

Of course, it's only really two weeks if you're lucky enough to be attending the Stevenote at Apple Expo in Paris, where we strongly suspect that all attendees will be given public beta CD-ROMs free of charge. The rest of us will probably have to order a copy for $20 or so and wait for it to arrive by mail. (The size of the operating system, as well as the underlying complexity of its installation, implies to us that an Internet download won't be an option.) Even factoring in snail-mail delivery times, though, the bottom line is that the beta is close. Very close. And we can hardly wait to play the high-tech equivalent of Russian Roulette by blithely installing that dangerous pre-release operating system on everything in sight, productivity and uptime be damned. "Unsupported configuration" our Aunt Fanny. Bring it on!

"Pull a Gates": v. intr., to demonstrate new technology in front of a large audience only to see said demo fail; to crash and burn onstage. First usage circa April 1998, following a demonstration of Windows 98's support of the USB standard by Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates at Spring Comdex; upon connecting a USB scanner to the demo computer, the system crashed in front of thousands of viewers. [syn. botch, blunder, trip, stumble, screw up royally and embarrass yourself beyond the limits of endurance.]

So did Steve pull a Gates yesterday? That depends whom you believe. CNET, among others, reports that when our Fearless Leader tried to show off a nifty new feature of Mac OS X by waking a sleeping PowerBook in one second, "the computer froze." However, some eyewitnesses claim that the PowerBook did indeed wake up, but it took about ten seconds instead of the one second Steve was touting. We weren't there, and there's no webcast to examine frame-by-frame, so we're stuck poring over the transcript for hints as to just what happened. (Not to trivialize a national tragedy or anything, but the JFK conspiracy theorists get to study the Zapruder footage frame by frame, and all we have to go on is a stinkin' transcript. Figures...)

First, the setup. Steve explains things as they are today: "Another thing that's in the beta has to do with portable. Of course, the Public Beta works on PowerBooks. And as you know, when you put your PowerBook to sleep and wake it up, it takes some number of seconds to wake up. And this is what it takes under OS 9. If the networking is turned off, it takes 8 seconds to wake up. If the networking is turned on and connected, it takes 16 seconds to wake up. And if the networking is turned on but not connected, it takes 22 seconds to wake up." So Mac OS X supposedly improves upon that, and he tried to demonstrate that fact. But what happened?

"I have a camera pointed at a PowerBook that's been asleep the whole time. See the sleep light there blinking? Right? Let me go ahead and wake it up. I hit a key, boom, I am now awake. And, whoops, huh, well, didn't work for me here. Let's try this again. I have now shut it down into sleep. And I can go wake it up. Boom. And it should wake up... Well, something's going wrong here. But when it works, which it should, it actually wakes up in about one second. Mac OS X on a portable wakes up in about one second, except for that portable right there."

Things obviously didn't go as planned. However, judging by the fact that Steve was apparently able to put the afflicted PowerBook back to sleep in order to try waking it up again, we have to conclude that the system did not "freeze," as CNET claimed-- although the vaunted "one-second wake up" certainly wasn't happening, either. So it was an awkward failure, to be sure, but hardly anything on the order of an operating system crash. Maybe next time we'll see a more spectacular disaster to make the CNET folks happy; something along the lines of a Cube catching fire might be right up their alley.

You know, there's something else kind of interesting about Steve's Seybold keynote yesterday; despite the fact that Seybold's focus is on graphics professionals, there was a noticeable lack of news about graphics hardware for the Mac. Oh, sure, Steve made passing references to the "fast graphics" built in to every shipping professional Mac, but never once did he mention them by name-- there were no references to the ATI Rage 128 Pro in the Power Mac and Cube, nor was the word "Radeon" uttered even once.

Interpret that how you will. One possibility is that Steve didn't want to say that the Rage 128 Pro is used in current Macs because Apple plans on replacing them soon-- with the Radeon, which perhaps still isn't quite ready for an onstage demo. (Or maybe Steve's still miffed at ATI for wrecking his Expo surprises last month.) Even more intriguing is the possibility that ATI's on the way out completely, due to some combination of poor performance and an inability to keep corporate secrets; if you want to crawl way out on the Limb of Wild Speculation, you might even think that Steve's reluctance to mention ATI in public is due to a new OEM deal in the works with NVIDIA, who's been making baby steps into the Mac market lately. Or maybe it's 3dfx, instead, whose latest cards are available for the Mac and racking up huge points with users tired of ATI's mediocre performance and notoriously buggy drivers.

Oops-- hang on. Apparently the wonderful world of patent litigation might throw a wrench into the glorious dream of serious competition in the Mac graphics arena. According to Semiconductor Business News, NVIDIA has just sued 3dfx, alleging that the VSA-100 chip used in 3dfx's latest Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 cards infringes five NVIDIA patents. 3dfx's response? In a press release, the company states that "NVIDIA's filing of a suit is clearly an attempt to force a settlement of our existing patent infringement lawsuit against NVIDIA, and we believe [it] demonstrates a lack of confidence in their current defense."

Duelling lawsuits! What could be more fun? Well, except for maybe both NVIDIA and 3dfx not being distracted by lawsuits and instead channeling all their energy into fighting for Apple's lucrative OEM business by cranking out incredible new graphics cards for the Mac-- thus forcing ATI to get on the stick, too, and leading to a massive three-way no-holds-barred cage match (graphically speaking). Here's hoping those legal differences get settled quickly, because an injunction barring the further sale of Voodoo5 cards could really get unpleasant-- for 3dfx and graphics-hungry Mac users alike.