So there we were, parked on the couch and three hours into our daily grueling TV-watching routine. We were carbo-loading as we went (you really have to keep your strength up for the serious marathon sessions, you know) via the judicious ingestion of low-fat Ruffles, when suddenly our intense televisual concentration was broken by a sight so rare, so magical, that even reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show couldn't hold our attention: lo, we had discovered a potato chip that looked exactly like Steve Jobs. From the chiseled good looks to that mercurial impish grin, all the way down to the black turtleneck and the bottled water-- it was Steve in potato chip form. And as we gazed upon this remarkable and supremely rare find, we thought to ourselves, "wow, this must be how Motorola feels when it actually finds a 1.2 GHz G4."

What we're trying to tell you, in our own endearingly circuitous fashion, is that Mac OS Rumors has fanned the flames of Gigahertz Fever even higher. The site now claims that Motorola, while still publicly topped out at either 533 MHz or 733 MHz (depending on whether or not you're only counting shipping systems), hasn't just breached the gigahertz barrier-- it's forcefully punched right through the top. Apparently Motorola's lab rats have actually produced a 1.2 GHz PowerPC 7450, the latest iteration of the G4 architecture that's going to be used in Apple's 667 and 733 MHz Macs. (Thanks to faithful viewer David Triska for the heads-up-- clearly the man is well on his way to attaining his unstated goal of racking up the most mentions on AtAT in history.)

The problem, however, remains one of production: in three words or less, the yields suck. MOSR hints that Motorola's engineers continue to kick much chip-designing booty, but with only Apple buying G4s, the company just doesn't have the impetus to get its subpar manufacturing processes up to snuff. It's rare enough for Motorola to find a 733 MHz G4 or two, so a 1.2 GHz one is as precious as, well, a Steve Jobs-shaped snack food instance. That's why Apple is rumored to be enlisting the help of IBM once again, in order to bring such nifty advancements as silicon-on-insulator technology and smaller wiring processes to the 7450's successor: the "Apollo" 7460. If/when that alliance comes to fruition, it's possible we may see G4s running as high as 1.4 GHz-- even in PowerBooks.

In the meantime, the existing 7450 can reach 1.2 GHz-- but we're not holding our breath for Motorola to be able to produce more than three or four of them, so don't expect them in Macs anytime soon. And if you wanted to see the Steve Chip, sorry, you're too late; he has been dipped, masticated, and digested. Oh, sure, we could have gone to the news and amassed fame and fortune for our discovery, but this way we absorb Steve's power.

It's official: Steve Jobs is no liar. (Well, this time, anyway.) At the last Stevenote, he told us that the titanium PowerBook G4 would ship by the end of January, and by cracky, apparently he kept his word. Go2Mac is reporting that a couple of readers have written in to say that some Apple Store orders for the new laptops are no longer in "Being Assembled" purgatory: they've officially graduated to full-fledged "Shipped" status. That's right; if the reports are accurate, even now titanium PowerBooks are winging their way through the skies. Some reportedly shipped as of Monday morning-- giving Steve two full days to spare. Score!

There's no word on when these lucky folks actually placed their orders, but we'd have to guess that they were among the very first to slap down their plastic after the keynote. Actually, one of the customers (whose PowerBook is listed as having shipped via FedEx, despite the fact that he or she only paid for ground shipping-- suppose Apple's trying to counter the reports of delays?) is a developer, which may have pulled a little weight, order-wise. But another seems to be a "regular" customer whose build-to-order PowerBook is slated to ship late today or early tomorrow-- once again beating the end-of-month deadline. So even some custom-built PowerBooks are sliding out the door before January ends. Color us appropriately impressed.

Now, granted, this rejoicing is all based on data from the Apple Store web site and sales personnel, so the more skeptical souls among you may well opt to withhold your applause until someone reports having his brand-spankin'-new PowerBook out of the box and on his lap, merrily supercomputing away. We suppose it's always possible that His Steveness, upon seeing that he couldn't meet his publicly-announced ship date, concocted a diabolical scheme to alter Apple Store database entries and coerce personnel to report fake ship dates that will eventually somehow be blamed on Federal Express-- but given the man's seeming indifference to missing ship dates in the past, somehow we doubt he'd go to all that trouble. After all, there are world powers to subvert and virgins to taunt!

Apple's investors are starting to breathe a tiny sigh of relief, as the company's stock price finally hovers in the $21 range; granted, that's just slightly off its split-adjusted yearly high of $75 or so, but hey, it's a big step up from that $13 it was flirting with some weeks back. The poor folks who bought in at $70 probably aren't smiling yet, but seeing as we got in at an average buying price of just over $16, we're feeling a smidgen more relaxed these days. Of course, since we're trading online and it's all just numbers on a screen instead of green pieces of paper multiplying or vanishing before our eyes, there's a certain liberating detachment at work, here, anyway-- it's kind of like playing with Monopoly money. Ah, the wonders of the modern world! Ain't technology grand?

Anyway, now that AAPL looks like it might finally be making the long, tough trudge back uphill, we're a bit more comfortable discussing the factors that sent it plummetting to its apparent doom in the first place. Yeah, there's the obvious stuff like those earnings warnings and the quarter-billion-dollar loss, but we thought we detected some other kind of resistance that was dragging Apple's price down. Unfortunately, we lack even the most basic skills or knowledge to unearth what this possible external force might be. Heck, we barely know what P/E ratio is. (Yes, the AtAT staff invests online while possessing only the merest shred of understanding about how the stock market works; us with an Ameritrade account is not unlike a chimp with a loaded gun.)

Luckily, there are others who do understand this arcane market-type stuff, and one of them seems to think that Microsoft is partially to blame for Apple's depressed stock price. Remember back in 1997, when Bill Gates's Big Giant Head appeared on the projection screen at Macworld Expo Boston and announced that Microsoft would be investing $150 million in preferred Apple stock? Well, according to faithful viewer Rodg, Microsoft appears to have exercised its option to convert that preferred stock into common stock-- and dumped almost all of it over the course of the past few months. We're talking about tens of millions of shares, people-- something like a whole twentieth of all shares outstanding. That much selling certainly sounds like it could drive AAPL's price through the floor, doesn't it?

Rodg has posted his complete analysis and reasoning over at The Motley Fool, and while most of it is Greek to us, heck, we think the guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about. If he's right, there are a couple of bits of good news, here... the first is that Microsoft doesn't own much more Apple stock to dump, so if all that selling indeed helped to keep AAPL down, that's one fewer hurdle to clear. The other is possibly even more uplifting: had Microsoft kept that common stock, it sounds to us like Bill's boys would have had a 5% voting stake in Apple, which is a scary thought. Instead, it was sold to people like... well, like us. And we promise not to vote like Bill with our massive 0.00009% stake in the company.