Further evidence that we've all stepped through a time warp into the heady days of late 1996: everyone and his opinionated grandmother has a surefire plan to "fix" Apple. As first pointed out by faithful viewer Sandra Odorico, the lovely folks at Salon have evidently decided that today is Twist The Knife Day, and to celebrate, they've posted a trio of articles under the cheerful heading of "Is Apple falling?" The first is mostly a navel-gazing exercise in which the author ponders the anti-revolutionary climate of the personal computer industry as a whole. The third is primarily some guy complaining about how he bought a DVI Power Mac G4 and an ADC Studio Display without reading the specs and couldn't plug one into the other, and it's all Apple's fault (when, as we all know by now, it's only mostly Apple's fault). But the middle piece, "How Apple can be fixed," is the one that really had us on the edge of our couch.

Here's the nutshell version of the author's plan: Apple should ditch the PowerPC and instead port Mac OS X to the Athlon, ship Athlon-based Macs with Windows compatibility built-in, and rely on PowerPC emulation to get existing Mac software to run. Now, we've heard this plan before, although it's generally been tossed around as a potential strategy to get Apple out of Motorola's ever-deepening Megahertz Pit; this is a slightly broader take on the same idea, which has the added benefit of making the Mac "the most universally compatible computer on the planet." What could possibly go wrong?

What, indeed. Well, for starters, how about the instantaneous genocide of Mac-specific software? If you think it's tough to find Mac software now, just imagine what would happen if suddenly every new Mac sold actually ran Windows applications faster than older Mac apps. It doesn't take a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future to see a bleak and inelegant destiny at the end of that dark path: why would any developer invest time and money in the creation of a Mac version, when the Windows version would run just fine? Cripes, if you've ever lobbied for a Mac version of Windows-only software, you may have already heard the "there are no plans for a Mac-specific version because our product works on Macs with VirtualPC" line-- we know we have. Just imagine how much worse that would get if Macs all ran Windows apps natively.

What about Mac-only developers? Well, what better time to jump ship? Rather than learning how to program Mac OS X apps in Cocoa, they'd probably learn how to write Windows software instead-- since it'd still work on Macs, while also broadening the audience for their products tenfold. Instead of just waving buh-bye to the "classic" Mac interface, we'd essentially have to say so long to Aqua as well-- since, with only Windows software to run, we'd only ever see Steve's lickable gumdrop interface in the Finder.

So what Salon's "Utopian computer" would actually turn into is a pretty Mac with a pretty operating system that gets used exclusively to run ugly applications in a separate Windows compatibility environment. Technical hurdles aside, this is a scenario that would "fix" Apple at the cost of the Macintosh itself; it wouldn't be long before Apple jettisoned Mac OS X entirely for cost reasons and just sold the best-looking Windows PCs on the market. Maybe it's just us, but we're thanking the powers that be that Steve would never let that happen. Of course, he's been kicked out before...

Pardon us while we roll our eyes, but with Mac OS X so close to completion, we thought we'd seen the end of the Name Game. You know what we're talking about: the way that Apple avoids missing its deadlines by constantly moving the finish line. Apple bought NeXT almost four years ago. Originally the NeXT-based Mac operating system was dubbed "Rhapsody" and a schedule was announced-- it was so long ago, we don't fully trust our memories, but we're pretty sure it was a fairly standard "alpha, beta, release" sort of plan. Then the versions of Rhapsody got shuffled; Developer Release 1, Developer Release 2, Public Release 1, etc., and the release dates shifted with the name changes. Then in 1998, suddenly Rhapsody turned into Mac OS X, with more features and a new API, and the release date moved again. And most recently, Apple didn't "miss" the 1.0 release of Mac OS X this past summer, because as Steve Jobs told us all, the public beta we got instead was pretty much just a new name for what would otherwise have been the original 1.0 release.

Now, with Mac OS X finally rumored to surface at the end of February, we figured we'd seen an end to those types of shenanigans, but Mac OS Rumors hints that the game may not be over yet. "At least some form of new Mac OS X release" is apparently now in the cards for next month's Macworld Expo. It may be a new public beta version, which jibes with what RAILhead Design recently claimed (though the Naked Mole Rat disagrees). However, according to MOSR's sources, Apple may be feeling tremendous pressure to get Mac OS X out the door in order to satisfy some of the pent-up demand among people who have been putting off their Mac purchases until Apple's new operating system is released. Reportedly the company is desperate enough to fire up Mac sales that it might actually repackage the Public Beta 2.0 as something like "Mac OS X Power User Release" (it's not done, but it's not a beta; buy it now!)-- or even the holy grail itself, "Mac OS X 1.0."

Needless to say, if we do get Mac OS X 1.0 in January, it won't be as complete as the version planned for a later ship date-- but drivers, shmivers, right? And this wouldn't be the first time that Apple pulled something like this; Mac OS 8 may have been a nice upgrade, but it definitely wasn't the Mac OS 8 (originally Copland) we'd formerly been promised. In any event, it'll be interesting to see just how desperate Apple has become when Steve takes the stage in three weeks. We'll be able to tell a lot about the ulcer rate at One Infinite Loop by what the iCEO tries to sell us.

Hey, you all know about "honorary degrees," right? We're no experts, but it looks like a sort of seedy practice whereby a given institution of higher learning picks a famous individual upon whom to bestow a degree, without said famous individual having completed the necessary curriculum required for other less-famous people. The upshot is that the famous guy gets all the benefits of the degree, such as title, respect, a nice certificate to frame and hang in the study, etc.-- everything except for the actual education, but that's highly overrated in today's market anyway. Meanwhile, the college or university gets the publicity of having honored a celebrity while only paying the printing costs of ink on paper for the degree itself. Everybody wins!

Okay, so maybe that's an overly-cynical view of the whole process. We're sure that the vast majority of honorary degrees are conferred on deserving individuals (famous or not) who have shown themselves to be worthy of such an honor. For instance, take Jon Ive, Apple's veep of industrial design and the guy who's primarily responsible for the striking looks of all of Apple's neato computers. A Macworld article reports that his alma mater, the University of Northumbria, has just given him an honorary doctorate to add to his First Class Honours Degree in Design for Industry, which he earned the old-fashioned way. Congratulations, Dr. Ive!

The part we're not too sure we understand is that Dr. Ive's brand spankin' new honorary doctorate is in the field of "Civil Law." Did Jon transfer to Apple Legal and not tell us? Did he design the shirts for the legal department team, "the Translucent Sharks," in Apple's after-work bowling league? Or maybe it just comes from having designed the iMac, the Computer Than Launched A Thousand Trade-Dress Lawsuits. Who can say? Regardless, the man's got a doctorate now, so show him a little respect. And if the heads of any prestigious universities are watching right now, the AtAT staff wouldn't mind a few honorary degrees ourselves. The wall in the den is looking a little empty right now.