'Tis the season for all the ghouls and ghosts and scary stuff to come creeping out of the closet. In Apple's case, the Fright Brigade includes earnings warnings, a jittery investor community, slow Cube sales, and that most insidious of bugaboos: rapidly declining Education market share. Aaaiiieeeeeeeee!!! But don't go stumbling panic-stricken into the woods clad only in a frilly negligee just yet; according to an Apple press release, the company has just enlisted some new blood to help fight that last nightmare from the inside. Though it seems her official title will be "vice president of Education Marketing and Solutions," please welcome Vanquisher of Evil, Cheryl Vedoe.

Who is this mysterious hero tasked with restoring Apple to its former glory, you wonder? Funny you should ask; apparently Ms. Vedoe is executing a rather Steve-like maneuver and returning to Apple to save the day. At some unspecified point in the past, she was the "vice president of Apple's Education Division," and that's enough of a qualification to satisfy us. After all, if Frankenstein's monster were here, he'd sum up the situation as "past Education sales good... now education sales BAD." So if Cheryl can work her magic to get Apple back onto the Education throne (where, according to at least one market research firm, the usurper Dell currently sits), we're all in for a happy ending.

Of course, it's not going to be easy. In addition to fighting a rising tide of zombified Wintel sympathizers shambling through the blood-stained halls of the school system, the brave woman also faces the daunting prospect of reporting directly to Steve himself-- a fate that would send most mere mortals screaming into the night. Still, we're sure she's up to the task, and we wish her the greatest success in her Steve-mandated goal: "to regain market share beginning in 2001." With a little luck and a whole lot of work, perhaps Apple can return to capturing the Education market share of its glory days-- and its competition will wind up getting liquified in a tree shredder. Mwaaahahahahahaa!!

Moooooooo. That's the sound of the legitimization of copycat design, and it's emanating from those holstein-spotted Wintel maniacs at Gateway. No longer are cheap impostors of Apple gear solely the domain of bargain-basement outfits like Future Power; now the big boys can get into the act, too. Not long ago we huddled 'round the campfire and told you all about Gateway's iBook ripoff, the Solo 5300-- complete with a curvy-patterned grey and white lid and a Gateway logo darn close to where that Graphite Apple should be. One would think that Gateway would be relieved to get away with such a shameless "borrowing" of Apple's industrial design and would then call it quits, but alas, no: the company's pushing things even further.

See, faithful viewer Andrew Borovsky decided to give us a Halloween scare by pointing out another Gateway laptop with a rather... familiar look. The Solo 1150 features a darker, subtler two-tone case, a curvier overall feel, and what appears to be a dual-textured paneled construction that immediately calls to mind all PowerBooks since May of 1998. Conjoined twins separated at birth? (Probably not, though if it were true, it's obvious which child was the "evil" twin.) Sure, maybe it's not enough of a likeness to get sued over, but the resemblance is undeniable. On the laptop end, we'd say Gateway's got Apple's product line pretty well covered.

But how about the desktop line? Well, things there aren't quite so blatant, but if you're unfortunate enough to remember the Gateway Astro, the company's attempt to make its own iMac, you're probably still having nightmares about that twisted lump of plastic. (If so, you may qualify for government aid.) According to a CNET article, following the Astro's inexplicable failure (something about too many customers vomiting uncontrollably) Gateway's skipping the CRT-based all-in-one form factor entirely these days, and leapfrogging Apple right into the flat-panel game. The new Profile 3 is clearly iMac-inspired in its aesthetics, but the inclusion of a 15-inch LCD instead of a traditional monitor is an obvious departure from Apple's blueprints.

Whether this latest Profile will do better than Gateway's previous attempts remains to be seen, but one thing's pretty clear to us: it's obvious how Gateway's saving on its design budget these days. Suppose Apple designer extraordinaire Jonathan Ive is getting any royalty checks from the Cow People?

FireWire! It's the coolest peripheral interconnect technology since sliced bread-- or, rather, it would be, if sliced bread were a really cool peripheral interconnect technology instead of just raw toast. Regardless, Apple's hot-swappable, plug-and-play, no-IDs-and-no-termination 400 Mbps industry standard bus has been fighting an uphill battle for acceptance for years now. The industry's reluctance to embrace it is partly historical, stemming from the tussle over the royalties that Apple originally planned to exact on every single FireWire port included on every single device manufactured. That mess has since been cleaned up in a more or less satisfactory manner, but even now the industry seems unwilling to adopt FireWire (or IEEE 1394, or i.Link, or whatever you want to call it) as quickly as one might have guessed. These days it's still mostly used just for the transfer of digital video between computers and camcorders.

But what happens if the cord goes away? Mac OS Rumors is once again talking about wireless FireWire (FireWireless?) reaching the Macintosh by the middle of next year. If it's indeed real, supposedly the technology will allow up to 400 Mbps transfer rates over a range of "50-200 feet"-- all without any of those cumbersome wires to trip you up or limit your movement. It sounds like a needless luxury at first (after all, how much trouble is it to plug in a hard drive?), but once we started thinking about shooting video on a FireWireless camcorder, editing the footage on a Power Mac in the den, and dubbing the results back out to a VHS machine in the living room, we started drooling at the possibilities of losing the cables.

And that's just the video end of things. Even near its 200-foot limit, FireWireless is rumored to support data rates of up to 150 Mbps-- faster than 100-base-T Ethernet. Since Apple's current 802.11-based AirPort wireless networking tops out at a respectable-but-not-mind-blowing 11 Mbps, we wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that FireWireless will be the basis for AirPort 2. In any event, a wireless version of FireWire might be just what the doctor ordered to get the support of the technology into prime time; of course, this might just be another pipe dream like the Apple-branded Palm device and the 17-inch iMac, but hey, slow news days are perfect for dreaming about the future...