There are only forty-eight or so shopping days left until Christmas, and depending on your holiday buying habits, your reaction to that fact falls somewhere on the spectrum between "I finished buying and wrapping my gifts in August" and "wake me in forty-seven days." As for your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, we generally like to get an early start on the annual consumer frenzy, so we're actually starting to sweat a little-- Christmas seems to be bearing down upon us like a runaway freight train and we're hard-pressed for gift ideas for many of our friends and relatives. And then there's Steve; he's been such a great member of our cast for the past three years, so we really feel we should send him a token of our esteem. But what do you get the iCEO who has everything?

The good news: faithful viewer Michael sent us a link to a fascinating San Francisco Chronicle article that's just chock-full of fantastic gift ideas. The bad news: you have to be a super-rich Option Baby to afford any of it. Yes, it's an article about excess in its purest form-- relatively useless consumer gadgets that cost more than the gross national products of several smaller countries, yet sell like hotcakes in and around San Francisco to the latest wave of Dotcom Riche. We're talking stuff like personal submarines for $20 million apiece. Too pricey? How about some jewelry? Earrings for $300,000, a ring for $500,000, or cheap gold necklaces for $33,500. If that's still too rich for your blood, $25,000 will get you an eight-foot-tall recreation of Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet"-- slap a bow on it and you're stylin' for Christmas morn. And at $7,900, the life-size, anatomically correct (!) model of Batman's butler Alfred is a steal.

Somehow, though, none of that seems quite right for Steve-- even if we did have money spilling out of every orifice. (Eeeyeeww.) Luckily, the article refers to Steve explicitly: "Apple Computer's Steve Jobs turns up regularly at the Union Square Armani outlet to replenish his closet... Jobs is especially fond of the $1,000 cashmere T-shirts." Now, this is clearly some new definition of the word "T-shirt" with which we aren't currently familiar. To us, a "T-shirt" is a garment bearing garish corporate logos and product advertising that is obtained for free at trade shows either by enduring humiliating audience-participation rituals or by beating the living bejeezus out of those standing near you and being the only one left standing when the garment is tossed in your general direction. It can also be a similar garment with or without product logos purchased for an amount ranging from fifty cents (at a yard sale or resale shop) up to $30 (at an arena concert of an overrated pop star, provided the "T-shirt" in question bears the image of said pop star). Like the fabled $5 shake, our sources tell us that the $1000 "T-shirt" is a similar garment, only much more expensive. We'll take their word for it.

However, we still won't be buying any cashmere T-shirts for Steve this Christmas. For one thing, spending a thousand dollars on a T-shirt seems as unnatural an act to us as cancelling a cable TV subscription. For another, since cashmere comes from goats (expensive and classy goats, we imagine, but goats nonetheless), it's not vegan. If Steve is really buying these T-shirts on a regular basis, then he's evidently not the kind of vegan who avoids wearing animal products and presumably he's got no problem with the potential exploitation of classy goats. However, given that he has to buy them to "replenish his closet," we strongly suspect that he's eating the T-shirts, and we don't want to be a party to such an expensive and unhealthy habit. Maybe we'll just send him a card instead.

Cupertino, we have a problem: Apple's sales forecasting seems to be returning to those exciting but financially unpleasant days when concepts like "supply" and "demand" were evidently declared outdated concepts unsuitable for Apple's execs. Warehouses were chock-full of dusty, rapidly depreciating Performas, while the appearance of a rare PowerBook at a retail outlet would inspire Cabbage Patch Kid-style riots by frenzied road warriors jonesing for a fix. And what do we have today? Warehouses full of dusty, rapidly depreciating G4 Cubes-- and not an iBook in sight. Faithful viewer Scott Pennington clued us in to a MacCentral article on the disappearing act of Apple's delectable consumer portable.

As you might imagine, this is a serious problem. The Cube captured rave reviews from the press for its innovative and beautiful design. You can't put a price on innovation and beauty-- but if you could, evidently it'd be less than $1799, because Cubes just aren't selling. On the other hand, Apple's got a grand slam on its hands with the latest revision to the iBook. Adding FireWire, an AV port, and a DVD-ROM option (as well as a spiffier-looking enclosure) prompted Bob Levitus to give the new iBook "two thumbs up-- way, way up," and other reviewers concur. Unlike the Cube, however, the iBook just feels like a great deal pricewise, and we bet consumers are lining up to spend their money. Unfortunately, there's nothing to spend it on, because due to an ongoing shortage, right now iBooks are nowhere to be found.

This is particularly painful because we're well into November, which means you can bet that at least some of those potential iBook customers are looking for holiday gifts. That means there's a deadline; if Apple can't provide a bountiful supply of iBooks soon, the less discriminating Christmas buyers will just buy another laptop from Dell or Gateway. Apple claims that the iBook situation is "expected to improve in early November," so hopefully the company won't lose too much holiday business due to the drought. But if you're in the market for an iBook to put under the tree, we suggest getting an order in sooner rather than later just in case.

Christmas isn't the only event hurtling toward us at deadly speed; two weeks later we'll we smack in the middle of yet another Macworld Expo again. That's only two months away, and you all know what that means-- it's time to commence the fall Keynote Speculation season. Actually, according to the "three months prior" purists, we should have started about a month back, but we like to wait until Mac OS Rumors posts its first big list of Expo predictions before we declare the season officially open. It's kinda like seeing the first robin of spring or something.

So without further ado, we encourage all Apple watchers to take a gander at MOSR's list of potential and probable announcements and start mentally filing them according to your personally ascribed level of believability. A lot of it is a virtual lock, especially on the software end-- a "firmer timetable for Mac OS X," for example. Since the next Expo Stevenote is on January 9th, you can bet that Fearless Leader will definitely be firming up that "early 2001" release date; our bet's on May 15th, as per the lockout date for the public beta. An Expo release of Mac OS 9.1 seems awfully likely, too, given how overdue it already seems to be. The "two new Apple multimedia applications" to which Steve first alluded in the last earnings statement are iffier, but not out of the question.

But what of the hardware? Most everyone agrees that if the PowerBook G4 doesn't finally show up, One Infinite Loop will be razed to the ground by rampaging hordes of impatient customers bearing torches and pitchforks, but we suspect the "Cube Portable" will keep most speculators guessing right up 'til showtime. Everybody noticed the conspicuously vacant sixth square in Apple's new product line grid when the Cube was added; will we really get to see the mysterious new portable a mere two months from now? And will it be Apple's return to the handheld market it pioneered, or is it the subnotebook we've been clamoring for since the PowerBook 2400 went the way of all silicon?

Perhaps most contentious of all will be the betting on Motorola's standing in the Megahertz Wars by then. Pessimists can't see the G4 budging past its current 500 MHz plateau in time for the Expo (personally, we're betting it'll drop back to 450 MHz just out of spite), but those with sunnier outlooks on life are expecting 550 and 600 MHz Power Mac G4s to join Steve on stage-- at least for an introductory test-drive, if not for a "shipping immediately" announcement. Polish up those crystal balls, because you've only got two months before all is revealed...