Well, originally we had opted to ignore Business Week's latest "Street Wise" article on Apple's alleged return to beleaguerment in hopes that the author, Sam Jaffe, would eventually realize that he has a problem and admit that he wrote it after having licked a certain species of toad. Unfortunately, the likelihood of such an admission is dwindling by the minute, and we assume now that Mr. Jaffe's probably too busy to apologize because he's out chasing hallucinogenic amphibians with a net. (We'd schedule an intervention, but we've got holiday shopping to do.)

And so, in light of the umpteen faithful viewers who urged us to do so, we feel morally compelled to direct you, our viewing audience, towards Mr. Jaffe's drug-addled prose poem about Apple's imminent demise. It stands as a cautionary tale about the dangers of approaching the keyboard while watching the colors swirl and listening to various smells. While the man makes some valid points about Apple's recent financial stumbles, anyone who considers even for a second that "Steve Jobs has no white rabbits left in his hat" is clearly bucking for a poster-boy position for Toad-Lickers Anonymous. As a matter of fact, as if we needed more proof, Mr. Jaffe's use of the phrase "white rabbit" is an obvious reference to the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane song of the groovy '60s and therefore a thinly-veiled cry for help. (One pill makes you smaller, right, Sam?)

Furthermore, while Business Week readers unschooled in Apple's product line or the elements of relative computing performance may not notice anything wrong, the rest of us had to wonder why the article wasn't titled "Why Can't Sammy Add?" Apparently Sam decided to do a little research for his article while toaded-up to the gills, and cruised the Apple Store looking for evidence that Macs are too expensive. His comparison? A dual-processor 500 MHz Power Mac G4 versus some Gateway box with a single 700 MHz Celeron-- which Toad Boy refers to as a "similar model." Sir, back away from the mouse and keep your hands where we can see them!

Okay, okay-- comparing a dual G4/500 to a single 700 MHz Celeron (geez, he couldn't even dig up a PIII?) might purely be the result of raw organic stupidity, but there's more: Sam priced the G4 at $7598, evidently failing to notice that the sticker price included $3999 for a 22-inch flat-panel Apple Cinema Display. That goes way beyond natural thickheadedness, people; the man is clearly abusing some kind of controlled substance. Otherwise he wouldn't have made a slew of other mistakes, too: the claim that the fastest Mac "boasts only a 500 MHz processor" (instead of two); the claim that IBM is no longer developing the PowerPC; and the claim that IBM (and not Motorola) is to blame for Apple's clock speed drought.

Hopefully Sam will get himself some help. In the meantime, kids, don't let this happen to you; read his article and see what a life of drug abuse can do to a formerly functional adult. It would almost be funny if it weren't so sad. Remember, everyone-- just say no to toad-licking.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have seen the dark side of human nature-- and believe us, it ain't pretty. Do you really want to know why Apple can't rely on stunning industrial design as the primary method by which it can grow its customer base? It's because taste is a virtue in awfully short supply out there in Consumerville. While Apple might be able to lasso a few converts from the Wintel world who wound up there by accident in the first place, the sad fact appears to be that there are plenty of people who honestly can't tell the aesthetic difference between a Power Mac G4 Cube and... well, this thing. (Warning: graphic depictions of the emptiness of the human soul ahead.)

Yes, faithful viewer Mike Walsh sent us a link to an eBay auction of what we can only refer to as "the Bizarro Cube," because it appears to be a dangerously misguided attempt to-- well, we hesitate to use the word "duplicate"; perhaps "hold up to a dark mirror"?-- Apple's luscious Cube in the Wintel universe. It's like some kind of Satanic Mass-style mockery of all that's good and decent. Instead of no fans, this behemoth's got at least three-- and two of them appear to be mounted right on the front for maximum noise and ugliness. Right above them are three LEDs: red, yellow, and green, in a perverse and perhaps unintentional replication of the Mac OS X Aqua window controls. The whole thing is transparent, but instead of subtly revealing the elegance of the underlying design, the clear case just shows off a nasty mess of parts stuck together willy-nilly. The LCD digital temperature readout doesn't help matters much, either, and the "Intel Inside" logo is right on the front, just to make things really scary-- but hey, at least you can turn out the lights and bathe the thing in classy blue neon.

As Mike says, this just proves "yet again that some Wintel users really don't get it." The seller boldly claims that "you will not want to put this under your desk!" Okay, we agree with that; we'd rather put it in a closet. Preferably in someone else's house. But the really scary part? Not only did someone build this monstrosity, but at broadcast time, two other people had also actually bid on it. (Granted, one of them goes by the handle "intelengineer," but still.) Great... here come the nightmares...

So are we slipping in our old age? Well, yes, but that's not why we completely missed last Friday's Naked Mole Rat update. See, the previous NMR report was filed a mere nine days prior, and it was at that point that we had firmly established what we assumed to be the Rat's immutable six-week posting cycle-- so you can see why a new update less than a week and a half later took us completely by surprise. Not only that, but last Friday was the twentieth anniversary of John Lennon's death, so we figured that the Rat, of all people, would spend the day in silent mourning or whatever. (If he ever posts on Lou Reed's birthday, then something is horribly, horribly awry.)

Anyway, we missed it, and it fell to faithful viewer Reefdog to fill us in on the Rat's surprisingly prompt reappearance. Whereas last time around the Gay Blade regaled us with tales of Mac OS X's January Expo no-show, in this installment he tackles the thorny issue of Mac OS X Server-- the Operating System Formerly Known As Rhapsody which essentially amounted to a PowerPC port of NeXTSTEP with a Mac OS Platinum appearance, some Mac-friendly file-serving capabilities, and a notably untransparent "Blue Box" compatibility environment. It was, in short, a pre-Mac OS X Mac OS X, and it's had a spotty record of support from the Apple Store, from which the product has vanished and reappeared on a number of occasions. (It is there now, should you want a copy.)

So the future of Mac OS X Server has been in doubt, what with the impending release of the "actual" version of Mac OS X due any month now. According to the Rat, here's what's going to happen: Mac OS X Server 2.0 will actually see the light of day when the next Worldwide Developers Conference throws down in May. Rather than being a whole separate operating system (such as Windows 98 and Windows 2000), the new version of Server will actually be a host of services that sits atop the standard Mac OS X, and adds such scrummy serveresque features to the "client" OS as remote-administration capabilities, NetBoot, WebObjects, QuickTime Streaming Server, and more. Think of it sort of like AppleShare IP on steroids. So fear not, Mac OS X Server trailblazers-- it appears you aren't being orphaned after all.