Here we are, facing yet another Monday-- the first day in a brand new week. After a somber weekend, those investors who took a bath on AAPL after it shed half its value overnight are back at work and nursing some nasty hangovers (assuming they reached for the Jim Beam instead of the Drano). For Apple, today is also the first weekday in a brand new quarter; we expect the company would like nothing more than to put the events of last week well behind it, but unfortunately, the effects are likely to linger like a bad cold. A company doesn't just issue a profit warning and walk away from the crash-- especially if the company happens to be Apple, whom the media and financial gurus have been lazily circling like vultures ever since the comeback became undeniable. "How long can it possibly last?" has become "See, we told you it couldn't last forever."

In a way, this whole debacle has been a terrific stroll down memory lane; the panic, the consternation, the way that Wall Street and the media at large have been so quick to kick Apple in the teeth-- not for losing money (it isn't), not for shrinking revenue (it's growing), but for not growing as quickly as the analysts expected. As The Register notes, a "whole bunch of previously pro-Apple analysts" has been quick to downgrade Apple's stock. Hmmm... we should have guessed that eleven or so consecutive Street-beating quarters would come back to haunt the company someday. Apparently you can only prove those guys wrong so many times before they get snippy on you.

The greatest wave of nostalgia, though, comes from the media's resurrection of a term we'd feared long dead and buried. Faithful viewer Michael noted that, in addition to likening Apple to a "sinking ship" (ah, those were the days!), Wired has revived the "B" word: "Analysts hurried to lower their ratings of the beleaguered company's stock." Now, before you fire up the virtual flamethrowers and wave them in Wired's general direction, it's worth noting that the article itself is actually relatively balanced in tone, quoting several fans who cite reasons why Apple's current troubles are merely a temporary glitch, so we've got to assume that the use of the "B" word was strictly for the benefit of all of us old-timers reliving history. And for that we're grateful, because in troubled times, what's more comforting that the old, familiar trappings of the past?

As of broadcast time, AAPL was still slipping to around the $25 mark, but there's some surprisingly good news in all of this bloodshed and carnage. Faithful viewer Michael Norris pointed out a BBC article about how Apple's dive sent the rest of the market into a tailspin: "as expected, technology stocks took the brunt of the falls... there was a knock-on effect for fellow computer makers, with Gateway falling 16%, Compaq 10% and Hewlett Packard more than 9%... but losses were across the board." How about that? Apple's finally got enough pull these days that when its stock tanks, it actually affects other PC manufacturers. Success at last!

Meanwhile, the true Mac geeks of the world were less fazed by last week's earnings warning than by Motorola's status in the Megahertz Wars. The fact that the company's G4 processor tops out at 500 MHz while the competition has at least announced chips running at three times that frequency leaves us with an unshakable image of German tanks rolling into Poland in 1939. Last week's drama-- in which Motorola announced a 550 MHz G4 coming "soon" and then promptly edited its press release to remove any mention of that 550 MHz chip-- did little to put anyone's mind at ease.

Faced with a marketing handicap that would make even P.T. Barnum wet his britches in fear, Apple's only recourse was to stick two G4s into every high-end Power Mac. There are a few problems with this approach, however... for one thing, back when Intel and AMD were slugging it out over 1 GHz, two 500 MHz G4s may have seemed like a reasonable alternative, but now that 1.5 GHz is the speed to beat, we expect Apple's going to have to leap right ahead to quad-G4 boxes to compete. Mac OS Rumors claims that the company's going even farther-- how's the prospect of eight G4s grab ya? Or four inside the egg-shaped shell of an iMac? There's even talk of dual-processor PowerBooks and iBooks now that Motorola's new low-power 7410 G4 chip is out. (Disclaimer: we here at AtAT no more believe that Apple will ship eight-processor Macs in the next year than we believe that MTV will soon start airing old episodes of "Hee Haw" -- but hey, anything's possible.)

Of course, the other teensy little problem is that right now, most people may as well yank out those extra processors and use them as decorative paperweights, because the Mac sure isn't using them. As most of you are aware, Mac OS 9 only uses one chip-- and unless the Mac is running an application that was specifically written to use additional processors (such as Photoshop), the extras are just dead weight right now. Mac OS X is supposed to change all that, of course, but realistically, it's not going to ship until perhaps next May. Until then, it's true that we do have the public beta... but as faithful viewer Jens Baumeister reveals, some of those who expected Apple's first public release of Mac OS X to unleash their dual-processor systems' full potential are finding out the true meaning of the word "beta."

See, instead of using both processors, apparently sometimes the public beta prefers to use neither instead. We've been hearing the occasional complaint from owners of dual-G4 Macs who have been completely unable to get the public beta to install on their systems at all. This problem doesn't afflict every dual-G4 Mac, but for those it does, as Jens points out, one reader over at MacInTouch found a workaround: turn off the second processor. No joke! Booting into Open Firmware and setting the number of CPUs to "1" allows the public beta to install and run on certain dual-processor Macs that otherwise fail. Apple is "actively working on a fix," but in the meantime, it looks like Mac OS X's promise of symmetric multiprocessing is a hit-or-miss proposition. Hopefully Apple will have that whole thing ironed out by the time that thirty-two-processor Cube hits the shelves.

In other news of why the Mac OS X public beta isn't the solution to world hunger, rampant homelessness, and why bad things happen to good people, you've probably heard that it doesn't support AirPort yet. We find that rather odd; since Apple has gone to great lengths to make its entire product line support the almost magical wireless networking architecture, we naturally assumed that AirPort compatibility would have been a top priority for the feature set of the beta. Instead we find that while something as seemingly low-priority as iDisk support is built in, our AirPort-enabled PowerBook is grounded on the runway whenever we're testing Mac OS X.

What's stranger is that many, many people have made it clear that AirPort was supported in the last developer preview release of Mac OS X-- which means that Apple removed it from the beta on purpose for some reason. Presumably it was deemed too unstable or quirky for general consumption. But luckily for us, just as we thought we were condemned to work tethered to a desk instead of on the couch, faithful viewer David M. Putney pointed out a helpful discussion thread over in the MacNN Forums: some clever folks discovered a workaround to re-enable AirPort capability in the beta. All it takes is "about twenty lines of XML code" to get the bits flowing wirelessly again.

Interested viewers should note that this hack is pretty limited in what it can do; essentially it just allows the use of AirPort as an alternate Ethernet-type connection, so don't expect to be able to use your Base Station for dial-up. Oh yeah, and don't expect to be able to send any email, either, since there appear to be "issues" with SMTP when the hack is active. Still, it's just the fix we need to let us "test" Mac OS X while watching TV in the living room. Unfortunately, our test bed PowerBook is currently in between a couple of real airports, as Katie, AtAT's resident fact checker and Goddess of Minutiae, takes it to Seattle on non-AtAT-related business for a week-- so it'll be a while before we can give it a spin. It'll also be a while before AtAT gets its fact checker back on duty, so if you notice any glaring factual errors before Katie gets back from Idaho, blame her.