Apple watchers with an overly-developed sense of corporate bloodlust were licking their chops when word of the infamous earnings warning came over the wire. So Apple would miss its quarterly estimates by up to 30% or so-- surely the red stuff should have flowed through the streets of Cupertino in the days to follow, right? But no; Uncle Steve placated the troops with word that no layoffs were planned. Instead, the company planned to get its financial house in order by taking the passive route: Steve announced a hiring freeze, and the potential trimming of "nonessential products" without reducing headcount. So much for a Roman-orgy-style bloodbath.

Okay, so there would be no pink-slip carnage as a result of the sales slump. What about punitive beheadings? Missing earnings by roughly $50 million in a quarter is more than a little "oops." We're not talking about taking up two parking spaces in the company lot, here; prompting a stock meltdown that caused the company to shed several billion dollars from its market capitalization overnight probably demands that heads should roll. Even though it's almost certainly no one person's fault, the sacrificial scapegoat has long been a (disposable) fixture in the corporate landscape. But a week passed, and still the bloodthirsty hordes were denied their thrills; Apple seemed to be back to business as usual, albeit with a severely pummeled stock price and a freshly-tattooed "beleaguered" tag across its forehead.

But wait-- what's this? Could an Apple press release signal the end of the mollycoddling? As faithful viewer Thomas McBride first told us, Apple's senior veep of worldwide sales Mitch Mandich is retiring at the end of this year. Or is that "retiring"? While it's true that Apple's stated reason for Mitch's departure is that he wants to "spend more time with his family" (one of the best reasons to leave any job), it's tough to ignore the timing factor. A week and a half after slow sales prompted the cratering of Apple's stock and a return to the heady days of fervent anti-Apple journalism, the director of sales "retires." Hmmm...

Of course, the fact that Mitch is staying on until the end of the calendar year sort of puts a damper on the whole "ousted" theory. If he were really playing the part of "scapegoat with dotted line around neck," one would expect he'd be sent packing at the speed of sound to appease the shareholders. Indeed, Apple's stock is down as we broadcast this, so Mitch's departure is hardly for Wall Street's benefit. And even if he were leaving as a direct result of the earnings warning, the quiet and gradual way in which he's departing still isn't the violent bloodbath some people were hoping for. It's more like a vigorous massage followed by a nice cup of coffee. Personally, we suspect that Mitch just doesn't feature sticking around to try to clean up this enormous mess. So, farewell, Mitch... give the kids a hug for us.

The Mac OS X public beta has been kicking around for about a month now, and that's been plenty of time to get a sense of the operating system's, er, "weaker points." Most complaints seem to focus on performance issues; some aspects of the beta, such as the swoopy Genie effect, stutter noticeably on Macs towards the bottom of the "supported hardware" food chain, while others, such as live window resizing, are dog slow even on faster hardware. And that's on systems that comply with the beta's seemingly outrageous requirement of 128 MB of RAM. What'll happen when the final version ships and people want to install it on their 64 MB standard iBooks?

Of course, the old "it's only a beta" excuse only goes so far; eventually we need to know just what that really means. What's not in the beta that's going to be included in the final release? Luckily for us, faithful viewer William Bonde forwarded us an interesting ZDNet article in which Adam Gillitt chats with an Apple rep about just that very subject. Director of Mac OS Product Marketing Ken Bereskin may not be in the trenches churning out code, and he may be one of those dreaded "marketing" people so you should take his comments with a couple of shakers of salt, but hey, at least it's something.

According to Ken, Apple hasn't yet fully leveraged the possibilities of the most modern Mac hardware to optimize the Mac OS X user experience. There's only partial Velocity Engine support in the beta, so all those whiz-bang effects like the Genie deal and live resizing should get lots faster on G4 equipment. Does that mean G3 users are out of luck, stuck with a "what you see is what you'll get" scenario? Hardly; window performance is "a work in progress" and the development team hasn't "finished optimization by any stretch"; most notably, for some effects, there's apparently zero hardware acceleration of Mac OS X graphics performance on certain Macs right now. The goal is apparently to make absolutely sure that when it's done, Mac OS X will run "well" on "first- or second-generation iMacs that have 233 or 266 MHz processors." So in theory, even those very first Bondi Blue buddies should be able to run Mac OS X (provided they've had their RAM upgraded from the base 32 MB).

Speaking of the memory issue, Apple has said all along that the 128 MB minimum is a requirement of the beta, not of the final operating system itself; Bereskin confirms once again that when Mac OS X ships, it'll be "able to run on lower memory configurations." We expect that means that the box will list 64 MB of RAM as the final minimum, though performance will degrade due to increased reliance on everyone's favorite slowdown factor, virtual memory. That said, we should note that we installed and ran the beta on a 64 MB PowerBook for a few days before our RAM upgrade showed up, and we didn't even notice the difference. Of course, we also hadn't been using the Classic environment, which is currently what makes that 128 MB limit more realistic. But by the time Mac OS X ships, we won't need Classic, because everything will be Carbonized. Right? Right?

We've said it before and we'll say it again: your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff is clueless when it comes to matters of high finance and the finer points of modern capitalism in action. For example, we don't really know how the stock market works, but we like to watch the pretty red and green numbers go up and down. When big companies like Apple issue their quarterly earnings reports, our eyes tend to glaze over at the details and we just listen for the bottom line. But then there's taxes. While we don't know all that much about taxes, we do know that we pay them. A lot. Every week we see vast chunks of our hard-earned wages get funneled away by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and some FICA guy, after which it is theoretically transformed into those goods and services on which we all come to depend, like military bands and really high-quality hammers.

Now, far from complaining about having to pay taxes, we do in fact generally subscribe to the rather naïve view that it's the patriotic duty of every wage-earning individual and corporation to pay his, her, or its fair share. The definition of "fair" is up for debate, of course, and how those taxes are actually spent is a whole different story. But in any case, one would expect that, say, the biggest corporations in the country who are making gazillions of dollars by plying their trade in this free market paradise of a nation would be responsible for throwing a pretty hefty wad of cash into the tax pool, right? At least, that's what we would have thought, in our own lovable fresh-off-the-turnip-trunk way of looking at these things.

Imagine our shock, then, when faithful viewer Eric Wright notified us that two of the biggest names in the new economy, Microsoft and Cisco, actually managed to avoid paying any federal taxes at all last year. That's right; AtAT paid more to Uncle Sam than Microsoft and Cisco combined. Heck, in all probability, so did the guy at the 7-Eleven who rang up our last Slurpees. See, according to CNET, "corporations are allowed to deduct the gains of their workers' stock options because the profits are regarded as employee compensation, just like regular wages." Since both companies did so well on Wall Street last year, they actually managed to wipe out their entire tax bills simply by virtue of having a high stock price.

Maybe it's just us, but that hardly seems fair-- partially because Microsoft, in particular, was found guilty of antitrust violations, meaning that it made much of that money illegally, and yet because of its ill-gotten success, unlike the rest of us, the company doesn't even have to pay a dime towards keeping the lights on in the very Justice Department who prosecuted it. Given how well AAPL had been doing for the past couple of years, we wonder just how much Apple wound up paying in taxes. (Well, we don't wonder enough to bother finding out.) It's probably time for AtAT to incorporate, IPO, and get in on this happy little tax dodge. Or maybe we should just found the tax-free Church of AtAT. Who's in?