The man returned to the company he cofounded a quarter of a century ago, staunched a billion dollars a year in financial bleeding, restored the strength of the Apple brand, and introduced a paradigm-breaking all-in-one computer that prompted three straight years of profitability and launched a worldwide lust for bright colors and translucency in everything from toothbrushes to kitchen appliances. But what's he done for us lately? You're only as good as your last hit, and unfortunately, while the Cube captured rave reviews from the critics, it failed to race up the charts like the iMac. To make matters worse, the premium-priced Cube hit the market just in time for this here "economic slowdown" that's got all the pundits jabbering about people eating their own offspring and burning furniture for warmth; those aren't exactly ideal market conditions in which a $1799 art computer can thrive. Toss a still-not-ready-for-prime-time Mac OS X into the mix, and 2000 wasn't a particularly happy year for Steve Jobs-- free jet or no free jet.

Still, does Apple's impending plunge back into the red really form sufficient grounds for branding Uncle Steve a full-fledged loser? While personally we'd call that a little harsh, evidently CBS MarketWatch doesn't agree; Steve's been dropped on the "loser" side of the fence along with Al Gore, Jeff Bezos, and recently-departed Priceline.com founder Jay Walker. Is that fair? Priceline.com is on its last legs, much to the crooning Captain Kirk's eternal chagrin, and while Gore captured a majority of the popular vote in the last Presidential election, he walks away with zippo; meanwhile (barring further missteps), Steve's company has more than enough cash to ride out the storm, and we're pretty sure that sales are still growing, albeit at a slower pace. Considering that all computer manufacturers are going through a rough patch right now, singling Steve out as a loser might simply be a return to business as usual: the media's love of kicking Apple when it's down.

So buckle down, people; with Steve officially on a Loser List, it won't be long before we return to the heady days of news stories with an even more distinctly anti-Apple slant. Be prepared, because soon even positive news will be cast in a sickly light. We're just waiting for juicy headlines like "Apple Returns To Profitability; Delays Inevitable Collapse For Another Quarter" and stuff like that. Let the melodrama begin!

Amid the rabid Apple-bashing that is sure to surface in the media over the course of the next few months, it's nice to know that Uncle Steve won't be in the doghouse alone. Since Apple's not the only tech company facing nasty badness right now, hopefully we can expect a slew of negative coverage about all sorts of high-profile corporations for our unending entertainment. For instance, faithful viewers David Triska and Ted both noted a very visible article in the New York Times that basically tears Intel's Pentium 4 processor a new pipeline.

Yes, the P4 takes yet another whipping, and this time it's not on some obscure technical review web site; when something like this hits the New York Times, regular people are apt to sit up and take notice. The author notes that the Pentium 4 is both slower and more expensive than its predecessor, and also points out that it requires a different kind of RAM-- RDRAM, which "costs about $250 more per 128 megabytes than standard memory." So much for progress, right? And for Mac fans looking to dispel the myths that perpetuate the Wintel hegemony, the article gets even better: it plainly addresses the "Megahertz Myth" and even goes so far as to point out that "a 500-megahertz Macintosh chip is much faster than a 500-megahertz Pentium III." Zoinks-- and this from a mainstream, well-respected publication, no less!

Why the Mac-friendly Intel-bashing in the Times, you ask? Well, we'll let you in on a little secret: the article was written by none other than David Pogue, who, as most Mac fans are well aware, has his roots planted squarely in the Apple camp. He's written for Mac publications for years, and is a regular fixture at Macworld Expo. Isn't it nice that he's writing for the Times now? Why, perhaps he'll be tapped to write about Apple's imminent demise in the coming weeks and the company will be handled with kid gloves. Hmmm... maybe the AtAT staff should apply for a writing position in the tech department of USA Today or something, just to help the cause...

Do you ever wonder what happens to Apple's remaining inventory of existing Macs when a new line gets released? Generally Apple's pretty good at flushing the channel. Heck, with Commander Steve's Iron Veil of Secrecy firmly in place, that's one of the only ways that Apple-watchers can anticipate new hardware introductions; when Apple cuts prices and bleeds the channel dry, chances are there's a refreshed version waiting in the wings. Still, we have to assume that Apple can't ever sell all of the old models before the replacements show up, so what happens to the stragglers? Usually they just wind up marked down still further and sold at fire sale prices, but what if there are so many leftover previous systems, they'd cut heavily into sales of the new products?

We have a sneaking suspicion that Apple faced exactly that problem when the revamped iBooks surfaced this past summer. With some striking new colors, a refined enclosure, faster processors, lower prices, and options like FireWire and DVD-ROM, the new iBooks made the older Blueberry and Tangerine models look... well, not all that attractive anymore. So what happened if Apple had discovered, say, two or three forgotten warehouses full of last year's model that remained unsold? We suppose that the company could cannibalize them for parts, or donate them to local schools, or something like that-- but instead, it appears that Apple found a company willing to take the whole batch off its hands for cheap. Faithful viewer Chris Nolte noticed that Nintendo's latest incarnation of its venerable Game Boy franchise looks hauntingly familiar: take a gander at the upcoming Game Boy Advance and tell us that it doesn't remind you of a certain discontinued consumer laptop we all know and love.

Nintendo game machines that look like Apple consumer systems are nothing new; Nintendo 64 consoles have long come in colors almost identical to Apple's old iMac fruit flavor lineup. But this is the first time we've realized that Nintendo isn't just aping Apple's design sense-- the company is actually buying up unsold Apple inventory and then running them through some sort of ingenious miniaturization machine. Oh, sure, even though Nintendo's page (which happens to be plastered with photos of Blueberry and Tangerine goodness) tries to throw us off with a note about how the "actual system colors are not final and are subject to change," we know the real story. The only circumstance in which Nintendo will switch colors is if the Game Boy Advance is delayed until after the next iBook revision-- in which case we're sure it'll be available in Indigo and Key Lime.