Again! It happened again! Mike Dell's worship of All Things Steve has sunk to a new low-- by virtue of having sunk to an old low. Remember last year, when the normally-financially-overachieving Apple issued an earnings warning due to the scarceness of G4 processors? Remember how, less than a month later, the usually-financially-solid Dell issued its own earnings warning, thus firmly shifting what we had formerly classified as Mike's "unhealthy obsession" squarely into the category of "freaky stalker-type psychosis"? Well, if you're up to speed on all that, then these latest developments won't seem particularly new or surprising-- just sad. And a little creepy.

Faithful viewer Tim Rzeznik (who, suspiciously enough, also alerted us to Apple's surprise earnings warning over a year ago-- coincidence?) was the first to report the news of Dell's most recent plight. According to CNET, the company is seeing slower-than-expected revenue growth; apparently it's looking at only 7%, instead of the 10% it originally forecast. In a Reuters article about this appalling turn of events, Mike blames the shortfall on Europe, stating that Europeans "have been significantly less inclined to make expenditures in terms of technology." (In short, he's saying that Europeans are cheap, euro-pinching bastards responsible for the impending collapse of the New Economy. Well, okay, that wasn't much shorter. Whatever.) As a result, Dell's quarterly revenue will come to a piddly $8.2 billion. We find it amazing that the company can even keep its doors open.

Unfortunately for Mike, his company's revenue warning wasn't nearly as effective as Apple's bombshell. Dell's stock only dipped a few points in after-hours trading, from roughly $28.50 to $25.50. Compare that to Apple's far more impressive downward spiral, in which its stock lost half its value overnight; a week ago, AAPL was hovering above $50, and now it's struggling to stay afloat at $23. In fact, Apple's decline pulled the rest of the market down with it. Now that's an earnings warning, baby!

So, just as the now-discontinued WebPC failed to capture the hearts and wallets of the market as the iMac did, Mike's second copycat financial warning fell far short of its potential. Perhaps when Apple issues an earnings warning next year, Dell will follow up with a doozy that'll decimate its stock price, cripple the economy, and send the board of directors leaping to their sorry deaths. Third time's the charm.

It's been several weeks now since the first copies of the Mac OS X public beta sailed merrily into the hands of drooling Mac geeks jonesing for a lick. In that time frame, exactly 9,127 online installation logs, first impression reports, in-depth analyses, and ceaseless, ranting Dock critiques have sprouted up on the 'net like a particularly stubborn weed infestation. (Yes, we counted.) Too much of a good thing is wonderful, but too too much is, well, too much. If you're suffering the same overexposure we are, even if you're not using the beta, you're probably already sick to death of Mac OS X-- and version 1.0 won't even be out for probably another six months. What's a poor overdosing fool to do?

Fear not; we've cut through the chaff and found two insightful and intriguing Mac OS X reports that, when combined, provide a well-balanced view of the beta without requiring you to wade through thirty reports which consist almost entirely of stuff like "the Genie effect is kewl" and "my CD burner doesn't work, this beta sucks." First, to appeal to the left brain (commonly considered the seat of logic, reason, and rational thought), it's tough to beat Ars Technica's voluminous report. Author John Siracusa has posted insanely long and detailed technical studies of each Mac OS X build since Developer Preview 2, and his latest contribution is a staggering sixteen-page opus that can easily chew up an entire afternoon for the interested reader. In fact, it's almost too much to read in one sitting, but that's okay, since the article is also organized into bite-sized chunks on everything from QuickTime performance to overall stability. It's a supremely detailed, focused, and unbiased look at what works and what doesn't. Two big thumbs up from the left brain.

If all that strenuous logic and reason has your ears feeling a mite pointy and you can't seem to stop making V-shaped hand signals, nothing satisfies the right brain's craving for Mac OS X goodness like Steven Johnson's latest article in FEED. Faithful viewer Jens Baumeister forwarded us this wonderful bit of introspection, which centers on the emotional response that Mac OS X provokes, and ponders the ways in which operating system releases are today's cultural events echoing the album releases of the past. More to the point, Johnson considers the release of Mac OS X to the Mac community as a unifying and defining moment as significant as the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1st of 1967. A stretch? Maybe-- but he makes some mighty compelling arguments, and it's a solid think piece that'll have you looking at Apple's upcoming operating system as far more than a collection of technical buzzwords, candy-colored widgets, and translucent shadow effects. And everyone knows that Uncle Steve is a rock star, right?

So were you a little suspicious with Apple's Mac-vs.-Wintel bake-off at last July's Macworld Expo keynote address? You know the routine; every time Apple introduces faster processors (or, in this case, two processors for the price of one) at one of these big shindigs, federal law mandates that Steve drag out one of Apple's top machines and run it side-by-side with whatever Wintel system happens to be the fastest at the moment. The idea, of course, is to prove that megahertz ain't everything-- and in Steve's orchestrated demos, the Mac always wins hands down, while Phil Schiller's PC is left choking on the dust. When he demonstrated the dual-500's Pentium-crushing power last July, Steve proclaimed that its performance in Photoshop (one of those exceedingly rare Mac applications that is written to take advantage of both the G4's Velocity Engine and the presence of multiple processors) was twice that of a 1 GHz Pentium III.

The folks at PC Magazine, unsurprisingly, were a tad skeptical of those claims. So, as faithful viewer Wayne Parkhurst told us, they decided to run some tests and see for themselves. The results of the benchmarks are either surprisingly good (if you've always taken Apple's performance demos with a couple hundred grains of salt) or surprisingly bad (if you're so thoroughly susceptible to Reality Distortion Field energy that you seriously believe that a 500 MHz G4 will always trounce a 1 GHz Pentium in any scenario because it's a "supercomputer"). Since Apple's claim was that two 500 MHz G4s were twice as fast as a single 1 GHz Pentium III, PC Magazine decided to pit a dual-G4/500 against a similarly-configured Wintel box with two 1 GHz Pentiums. The result? The Mac won the Photoshop tests, albeit barely-- winning three of the seven races, losing two, and finishing the remaining two in a tie. Yes, for Photoshop use, apparently Apple's top-of-the-line Power Mac really is faster than even a dual-processor 1 GHz Pentium setup. Color us impressed.

Of course, it was the single-processor tests in which the Mac got stomped like a grape at a wine-making festival. In a battery of eight tests comprising actions in applications such as Illustrator and Bryce, the Mac lost all but one. But wait a minute, here-- we're not entirely sure these tests are on the up-and-up. For one thing, PC Magazine doesn't say which operating system the dual-1 GHz Pentium box was running. Windows NT/2000 supports symmetric multiprocessing, so were those single-processor tests really only using one processor on the PC side? And even more suspicious is PC Magazine's description of how the Mac was configured: "We turned virtual memory off for Power Mac applications and set each application's memory to 128MB minimum and 180MB preferred... both systems had 128MB of RAM installed." What's wrong with this picture? Say, perhaps, that if PC Magazine is telling the truth, the Mac wouldn't have been able to launch a single one of those applications after booting? We smell a rat...