We're back! Didja miss us? Yes, we finally stumbled back into AtAT's Boston-area studios last night, thus bringing the most technically disastrous AtAT Midwestern Holiday Tour on record to a much-welcome end. In addition to our wonderfully dramatic PowerBook death at 30,000 feet, we also endured two rather bracing Visor hard crashes (complete with painful data loss, of course), and upon our return, we discovered that the boot disk in AtAT's primary production workhorse had apparently kicked its little read/write head in the air and moved on to Magnetic Storage Heaven. We have since revived the system, but it's still feeling a little rickety. After all, it's a PowerTower Pro that's almost four years old; that's, like, 120 in computer years, and even the company who made the thing kicked the bucket ages ago. This latest mishap has us thinking even more seriously about biting the bullet and buying a sparkly new Mac.

And what timing, right? We take a few days off for the New Year, figuring that not much could possibly be happening in the world of Apple right now, and we almost completely miss the fact that Apple has seemingly transformed itself into Crazy Steve's Discount Mac Outlet. Have you seen the new prices? Over the weekend, the sticker prices of all of Apple's "professional" systems suddenly dropped through the floor; according to the San Jose Mercury News, the discounts ran "as steep as $1000." You don't have to take their word for it, though; just poke around the Apple Store and drool at the low, low prices. A top-of-the-line, dual-500 MHz Power Mac G4 for only $2499? A primo, 500 MHz PowerBook for just $2199? "Must... resist... urge... to buy!... Credit cards... maxed... out!"

Now, even if you're still hung over from your New Year's celebration, you've probably drawn a couple of obvious conclusions from Crazy Steve's latest round of insane price cuts. For one thing, Apple didn't have a very merry Christmas; evidently all those rebates didn't get the job done, because desperate price reductions like these mean that Apple is doing everything it can to clear the channel of excess inventory short of stapling heart-shaped tags to each system, calling them "Beanie Macs," and announcing that "Sawtooth the Power Mac" and "Pismo the PowerBook" are about to be "retired." (Indeed, PC Data reports that Apple's sales dropped by a factor of 40% during the holiday buying frenzy. Yowch!)

But the other obvious conclusion is that Apple needs the current Power Macs and PowerBooks out of the channel now, now, NOW because Steve will be taking the wraps off the 2001 models in less than a week. For anyone who's still skeptical about faster Power Macs and a new PowerBook G4 on deck for the Expo, a quick gander at the jaw-droppingly low prices at the Apple Store ought to erase any lingering doubts. Notice, also, that with the new low prices comes a decided lack of configurability; in its desperate bid to get last year's models out the door, Apple has eliminated built-to-order options on both the Power Macs and the PowerBooks. (The discounted Cube retains its build-to-order capability, so consider its price reduction an admission of overpricing in the first place.)

Decisions, decisions... should we get a cheap G4 now, or stick it out for another week and see what else we can spend our money on? Oh, heck, we'll probably just wait. As much as we'd like to help Apple get those soon-to-be-obsolete systems out of the channel and into our studios, we're suckers for the Next Big Thing, and now that we've endured the year-long 500 MHz drought and the endless wait for Mac OS X, six days hardly constitutes a wait at all. But don't let us stop you from picking up a kickin' Mac at fire sale prices.

Surprise of surprises, CNET has a-- gasp!-- slightly negative spin on Apple's recent price cuts. Alert the media! Okay, okay... for the most part, it's not really all that negative, but the article does address Apple's ongoing inventory problem, and the news isn't good. You may have missed it in the veritable flood of bad financial mojo during Apple's last earnings warning, but the word on the street back at the beginning of December was that Apple was sitting on a whopping eleven weeks' worth of channel inventory heading into the heart of the holiday shopping season. Following Apple's relatively aggressive December marketing push (and more rebates than Imelda Marcos had shoes), CNET reports that Apple has emerged in January with... eleven and a half weeks' worth of inventory.

Yes, according to CNET (who in turn quotes market researcher ARS), all those Jeff Goldblum ads and rebates intended to help reduce Apple's inventory woes wound up leaving the company slightly worse off than before. See what a 40% drop in sales during a holiday season can do? These revised inventory numbers may certainly explain Apple's sudden panicked price plunge on overstocked systems last weekend. Why, an independent observer looking at these figures might well form the opinion that Apple is in danger of imminent collapse under the weight of its own unsold inventory.

But wait! Just because CNET says it doesn't make it so. We're not sure who CNET talked to at ARS to get that eleven-and-a-half-weeks number, but according to MacCentral, analyst Matt Sargent estimates Apple's inventory to be "about six to seven weeks" at the end of December. Oh, sure, analysts frequently disagree on estimates of stuff like this, but of particular note is the market research firm for whom Mr. Sargent works: ARS. The very same people who (allegedly) told CNET that Apple's inventory problem had actually increased slightly, instead of decreasing by 35-45% as Sargent estimates. Either Mr. Sargent's been at the Jekyll-and-Hyde mix lately, or CNET is misreporting the facts. We'll let you decide for yourselves which scenario is more likely.

Wow, and we thought we were pessimistic about Mac OS X's release date! As most of you are aware, when the AtAT staff took the public beta out for a test drive a few months ago, we concluded that the operating system was unfinished enough to place our personal prediction for its 1.0 release sometime in May of 2001. At that, a clamorous hue and cry ballooned forth from the glass-half-full crowd, who (conveniently suppressing all memory of Mac OS X's already hideously late development) insisted that Apple would never set a release that late after the start of the new year. While only a few congenitally optimistic Mac fans insisted that Mac OS X 1.0 would be released at next week's Macworld Expo, most figured on an introduction in February. Or maybe March. May? We were almost boiled in oil for suggesting such a thing.

These days, you all know that the smart money is indeed on a late February release-- February 24th (Steve's birthday) has been mentioned more than a few times, and Macworld Expo Tokyo is slated to kick off on February 22nd. Even we, the morose doom-and-gloomers at AtAT, have since come around to the likelihood of a February ship date. Imagine our surprise, then, to discover that when it comes to predictions among "people who should know," we were actually walking on the sunny side of the street with our original blasphemous May guess. As faithful viewer Robert Fernando noted, when Macworld asked a team of nine Mac "experts" when they expected Apple to take the wraps off the finished version of Mac OS X, the responses were almost uniformly pessimistic.

Of the nine, fully four of the pundits agreed with our original projection of a ship date in May, coinciding with the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. Of the remaining five, one said March, one said "March-April," and three predicted release dates even later than May: two said July, and one went way out on a dark, depressing limb and actually pegged September, 2001 as the point at which Apple would finally get Mac OS X out the door. Of course, Mr. September-- Leo Laporte of TechTV-- not only admits that he's "ready to be surprised on this one," but also acknowledges that he's primarily a PC guy, so take his opinion how you will. Still, we're a little freaked out by not having the latest release date prediction out there. Nuts. We knew we should have said November...