Three days and counting-- and wouldn't you know it? CNET continues to complain about Mac OS X's missing features well in advance of the product making it out the door. Not long ago, Those Of The Yellow Sidebar issued a gloomy report focusing on the operating system's 1.0 warts, such as incomplete support for hardware graphics acceleration, performance bottlenecks, crashing problems, and-- horror of horrors-- its inability to play DVD movies. Not that any of those issues should be dismissed as acceptable, but come on; can we at least wait until today's media briefing takes place before we jump down Apple's throat?

Evidently the answer is a deafening "no," at least as far as CNET is concerned; after milking the showstopper "no DVD movies" issue for all it was worth, those folks have moved onto bigger and better feature omissions-- such as a lack of CD-RW support. Here we had finally come to terms with not being able to watch Coyote Ugly on our Mac OS X-booted PowerBook (we're recovering nicely from the ensuing stroke, thank you very much), and now it turns out that we won't be able to burn CDs, either? "Sources have previously said the new OS will not permit DVD playback or recording, but its inability to record CDs was not clear until now." Fetch the heart pills, Mabel, 'cause our left arms are going numb!

Seriously, let us get this straight; despite knowing full well that Mac OS X doesn't yet support DVD-ROM drives-- hardware that's been shipping in several Macs for years, now-- we're supposed to be surprised that the operating system doesn't yet support CD-RW drives which have only been shipping in Macs since January? Maybe we're just overly-realistic when it comes to teeny little efforts like a decade-long attempt to overhaul an operating system that hasn't changed its guts since 1984, but somehow the "news" that Mac OS X doesn't yet fully support a system component that's only been shipping for a whopping two months utterly fails to fill us with consternation and uproar.

We know, we know... Apple has been flooding the airwaves with its "Rip. Mix. Burn." message, and it's slightly incongruous that its new operating system isn't yet a part of that story. Believe us, the irony is not lost on us. At the same time, though, we fully appreciate that there's a reason Apple isn't shipping Macs with Mac OS X pre-loaded for another four months, just as there's a reason why the operating system's Saturday rollout will be low-key. Call us ol' softies, but we'll reserve the frothing moral outrage for really nasty stuff, like perhaps a kernel panic and crash that irreparably corrupts our separate Mac OS 9 partition-- we don't plan to waste it on a temporary delay in burning CDs and watching movies.

So what's with Apple's long-held belief that only consumers like color choices? Granted, the company's first and only foray into the "colors for pros" area didn't go over too well, what with the Blueberry-and-Ice Power Mac G3 looking more like a Smurf condo than a professional workstation, but surely something more muted like Indigo would have been simply smashing. And even with the blue-and-whites, while iMac customers had the freedom to run wild, it's not like the pros got to pick a hue that best suited their moods and/or environments. It was SmurfMac or nothing.

Ever since the blue-and-white, Apple's professional desktop systems have been Graphite, Ice, and Clear. For years, Apple's PowerBooks were plain ol' black-- and the latest PowerBook G4 is simply sort of silvery-looking, thanks to its titanium enclosure. C'mon, folks, just because Blueberry turned out to be an unfortunate choice for the G3 is no reason to banish the pros to a greyscale world. Nothing against Graphite, of course, which is gorgeous, and maybe it's just the advent of spring that's got us all keyed up for new hues, but we wouldn't mind a little splash of color to spruce up Apple's professional product line. And most importantly, how about some choice?

Well, there's no word on whether we'll ever get to buy a Ruby Power Mac or (dare we say it?) a Flower Power Cube. But Mac OS Rumors has more details on the rumor that the mighty titanium PowerBook may soon give up its monochrome ways. Apple's own web site coyly mentions the fact that titanium is easy to coerce into "a range of colors by anodizing or heating," and rumor has it that's just what the folks in the lab plan to do. When the first PowerBook G4 revision ships sometime allegedly between May and July, the "natural" titanium look will be supplemented with versions in green and blue-- and possibly red, purple, and black, if Apple's gnomes can figure out a way to make those shades look decent.

As Pismo users ourselves, while we lust after the PowerBook G4's titanium goodness, we can't justify a trade-up at this time. However, if we could buy a purple or green one, we'd probably be forced to find a justification that would explain the sudden $2599 hole in our available credit...

Ah, this wacky high-tech business world and all its strange bedfellows... you probably thought you knew who the enemies were, didn't you? Microsoft, for one; aside from the obvious fact that Apple represents the forces of good and Microsoft is evil incarnate, from a purely business perspective, Windows is obviously the Mac's biggest competitor for operating system market share. But don't you remember the Great Truce of 1997? Steve said Microsoft is our friend. After all, Redmond cranks out versions of Office and Internet Explorer for the Mac that are arguably even better than their Windows counterparts. Of course, that didn't stop Apple from testifying that Microsoft is the antichrist during the Redmond Justice trial, when it came out that Bill's minions threatened to cancel Mac Office outright unless Apple killed QuickTime. In front of the cameras, though, it's all smiles and handshakes. Situational alliances; ya gotta love 'em.

So you probably take the stance that Intel is the enemy on the hardware side, while Motorola is clearly Apple's ally (one year stuck at 500 MHz notwithstanding). Not so fast, Spanky! Sure, when it comes to chips, Apple's rooting for Motorola's G4 over Intel's various Pentium doohickeys, but how about when it comes to wireless networking standards? When viewed in that light, suddenly the sides switch with blinding speed.

Apple, as you know, was a pioneer in the field of wireless home networking, having released AirPort in 1999 as the first easy-to-use, integrated, and inexpensive architecture for getting home computers talking to each other with no wires and (hopefully) no headaches. AirPort is based on 802.11, an industry standard wireless Ethernet specification. But along came a new (and incompatible) standard, HomeRF, that threatened to confuse the market; you can't mix HomeRF and 802.11 equipment, so one of them is probably going to have to go. Needless to say, Apple bet a lot on 802.11, and HomeRF threatens that investment.

Well, get this: according to The Register, one "industry heavyweight" pushing for HomeRF is-- you guessed it-- Motorola. And while Intel used to support HomeRF in its AnyPoint wireless networking gear, the next revision of the product line will switch over to 802.11 instead. In other words, in the wireless game, Motorola = Bad Guy, Intel = Good Guy. We know, you need a score card to keep track of all this stuff. Wacky, no?