Isn't it funny how some things can be slightly shocking even as they're utterly unsurprising? For example, when faithful viewer Michael pointed us towards a Reuters article reporting that Motorola is planning to slash a whopping 4000 jobs from its semiconductor unit this year, we were indeed shocked by the sheer brutality of the act; those 4000 jobs account for a sizeable 12% of Motorola's semiconductor division, so this strategy qualifies less as "downsizing" and more as "amputation." Medic!

At the same time, though, technically speaking, we weren't all that surprised. After all, it was less than a month ago that the company announced the "trimming" of 2500 workers in its mobile phone division, in conjunction with the shutdown of its phone manufacturing plant in Harvard, Illinois-- all as part of a "long-term, company-wide strategy" to "improve financial performance." At the time we had suggested that if the company found its phone business floundering so badly, maybe it should consider waving the white flag, ceding the market to Nokia, ditching the phone game altogether, and focusing entirely on making the best computer processors on the market. Yeah, that idea sure went far. Now that one out of every eight people in Motorola's semiconductor business has gotten the axe, it appears the bigwigs at the company have ignored our suggestion as blatantly as they ignored Moore's Law for all of last year.

So, 4000 pink slips later (well, okay, not really-- some cuts will be made by "attrition," otherwise known as the "Let The Rats Desert The Sinking Ship" plan, while others will fall under the euphemistic umbrella of "voluntary and involuntary severance programs"), the big question on the minds of Mac users the world over is, what's going to happen to the PowerPC? More specifically, what's going to happen to our PowerPCs, the G3 and G4? Unfortunately, right now no one's got the easy answers. According to MacCentral, Motorola has publicly stated that it's "continuing to invest in R&D and build on [its] strengths to provide embedded solutions for the person, work team, home, and auto." Embedded solutions. Meaning, of course, that Motorola will sell you a processor for your fridge and one for your car (provided the company can scrape together enough pairs of hands to crank the chips out in the first place), but there's a distinct and potentially ominous lack of any comment whatsoever about chips designed for use in personal computers.

Meanwhile, we imagine that Steve and the gang are watching Motorola's latest spiral into beleaguerment with no small amount of interest. Avie Tevanian has probably been asked at least a dozen times since Friday whether or not that secret x86 build of Mac OS X is at feature-parity with the most recent PPC binaries. And Steve's probably got AMD's number on speed-dial by now...

Attention, all you still-waiting PowerBook G4 customers, who are probably feeling more than a little like characters in a Beckett play by now: we have good news and bad news. The good news is that many of your orders have shipped-- we repeat, your orders have shipped. Apple has kept up its end of the bargain, and to save time has sent your PowerBooks winging their various ways direct from the assembly plant in Taiwan. The bad news is that now you have to wait for the FDA to allow customs to let your titanium laptops into Alaska.

Okay, we admit, that's a little more surrealism than is generally called for on a Monday, but we just couldn't resist. So pour yourself an extra cup of coffee and shake off the last of the weekend fuzzies, because as faithful viewer Timmy pointed out, MacCentral is indeed reporting that many Apple Store customers tracking their PowerBooks via FedEx numbers are discovering that their orders made it all the way from Taiwan to Alaska, but are now "tied up in customs red tape." One customer states that FedEx went so far as to say "we have no idea when you'll get it now." (Hey, at least they're honest, right?) Another customer states that Apple is aware of the Alaskan logjam, which apparently affects "a large shipment" of the long-awaited PowerBooks.

Why the holdup in customs? Beyond the Kafkaesque nightmare that can only be expected when a governmental bureaucracy is involved, we can only guess. But one problem might be that we're dealing with not one bureaucracy, but two: Federal Express is apparently claiming that "the U.S. Food and Drug Administration" has leapt into the fray, due to its "jurisdiction over electronic products using lasers," which of course includes titanium laptops with nifty slot-loading DVD-ROM drives. Hmmm... Suppose this is the reason why Sony's VAIOs lack built-in optical drives? Steve called it a VAIO drawback, but evidently the man was too clever for his customers' own good; built-in DVD be damned-- if not for that feature, titanium PowerBooks would be cheap and plentiful! (Never mind that every other Mac on the market has a laser device, too, and rarely seems to get stopped in Alaska; clearly the presence of titanium changes everything.)

Anyway, this stuff actually all happened last week, so unless the slow-grinding wheels of the U.S. government are in particularly rare form, we're guessing that Alaska has since disgorged that PowerBook clot and the individual units are even now heading to their various and sundry owners. Of course, we've been unjustly optimistic in the past-- and those of you who just had to get your order custom-built with a bigger hard drive or more RAM are still subject to that pesky February 24th ship date. Of course, hopefully by then Apple will have greased the Alaskan rails a bit, so you won't have to wait even longer while some customs guy prods your PowerBook to see if a laser comes shooting out.

Heads up, everyone; with new iMacs almost certain to strut their CD-burning stuff at next week's Macworld Expo, it's already time to start thinking about what the less immediate future holds for Apple's cuddly consumer desktop system. Next week's models aren't likely to be much more than the existing units with CD-RW drives, more RAM, bigger hard drives, faster processors and graphics, and maybe a new hue or two-- but with the same basic chassis and design. But will this be it? There's little argument that the iMac's look is getting old, so after next week's revision, will Apple try to counter a sagging personal computer market (and flagging iMac sales, to boot) by turning the iMac into something decidedly other?

Let's consider the possibilities for a minute. There's the long-rumored 17-inch iMac, whose advocates hope would counter the growing feeling that the iMac's existing 15-inch screen is just too small. There's also the "monitorless iMac" idea that's been kicked around so much, which would let customers pick their own screen size, while freeing up Apple's industrial design folks to play around with a smaller footprint. And then there's that ol' LCD iMac concept, which has long been proposed as a great way to revitalize the line into the Next Big Thing™. Which, if any, of these are in the cards when Apple decides to shake things up a bit?

Well, if you believe Mac OS Rumors (and notice, of course, that we said "if"), in the shorter term, the 17-incher's the best bet. Monitorless iMacs would do a lot to wreck the system's "there's no step three" ease-of-use reputation, so that's pretty much a no-go, and LCD panels are still way too pricey to slap into a consumer-priced iMac. So MOSR states that the next iMac will feature a "larger, high-resolution display" without specifying a size, though we can't see Apple using anything larger than 17 inches-- and smaller would, uh, sort of defeat the purpose.

But the larger-display iMac won't just be today's iMac on steroids. Rumor has it that Apple is moving the ports closer to the front of the unit, while peppering the enclosure with "a denser arrangement of cooling vents." Oh, and about that enclosure? Apparently Apple's recent move away from curves (the Cube, the PowerBook G4) is filtering down into realm of the once-cuddly iMac, as well; prototype future iMacs feature "a more angular shape," and some even have "a smattering of exposed metal surfaces" to create "a more futuristic, industrial look." Zounds! Shades of Good Terminator at the end of T2! Sounds like the iMac's time as "the cute computer" might well be drawing to a close.