So how did you celebrate Apple's 25th birthday yesterday? A three-tiered translucent cake and two hundred of your closest Mac-using friends? A twenty-foot-high bonfire on the front lawn in the shape of a huge flaming "X" visible to planes flying overhead well into the wee hours? A late-night high-speed car chase that led thirteen squad cars on a tear across three states as you tried to shake them by lobbing retail copies of Mac OS X out the sunroof of your MacMobile?

We're guessing, "d. None of the above." You probably spent the day resisting the urge to disembowel the people who kept telling you your shoes were untied ("Huh huh, April Fool!"), and, if you happen to live in an area that observes Daylight Savings Time, trying to deal with the sudden disappearance of an hour off the clock. In fact, the odds are pretty good that you didn't know it was Apple's 25th birthday at all, and right now you're smacking yourself in the head and lunging for your car keys, clinging to a vain hope that Hallmark has a line of cards that can be delivered back in time. But don't beat yourself up about it; it's not necessarily your fault that you forgot.

After all, as the PowerBook Zone points out, Apple kept the event pretty low-key this year. Five years ago there was a lot of hoopla, and the company even released the special commemorative Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh to celebrate the milestone, appropriately enough, with one of Apple's highest price tags ever. But whereas two decades was deemed "a big deal," apparently a quarter-century is no big whoop, because Apple's web site lacks any and all mention of the Big Two-Five. Could Apple be getting age-conscious at the ripe old age of 25?

Perhaps the company is feeling some angst over moving up from the "18 to 24" to the "25 to 39" range when filling out marketing surveys and credit card applications. Maybe it's freaked out that the bag boy at the local supermarket keeps calling it "sir" and is actually younger than the Macintosh itself-- Apple's second computer platform. We imagine that age sensitivity among high-tech companies must be pretty harsh, seeing as the average life span of a computer manufacturer is probably, what, ten years? Fifteen, tops? So maybe that's the answer-- Apple's become a grumpy old computer company. We can't wait for the press release: "You kids today with your flin-flarn 'giga' this and 'dual' that... Back in my day, our processors ran at 1 MHz, we maxed out at 32 KILObytes of RAM, and our computers didn't even come with a case-- and we liked it! We LOVED it!!"

Apple may be getting up there in years, but it still hasn't lost all of its sense of humor-- not, at least, if its April Fool's Day antics are any indication. You may have noticed over the years that AtAT generally refrains from the deluge of fake news stories that flood the Mac-centric web every April 1st, in part because we're too tired from making stuff up those other 364 days of the year. Instead, we like to sit back, relax, and see what everyone else comes up with... all the while watching our inbox fill to bursting with mail from alarmed viewers who forgot to look at the calendar before firing up their browsers. (This year's best, at least from a sheer "pipe dream" perspective, is Visor Central's NewtonX Springboard module, which allegedly runs a variant of Mac OS X on the Handspring Visor. The Apple PDA rumor lives!)

Anyway, Apple's contribution to the chaos was reportedly to run a fake ad-- at least in Australia, according to the MacEvangeList, and possibly in the U.S. as well (though we doubt it). When last we checked, the EvangeList still had the ad posted to its web page, which happily introduces "the new beige iMac." Underneath, in the copyright fine print, you can read that "Apple Computer Australia Pty Ltd reserves the right to advertise silly products that don't exist on this date." Good one. Of course, we haven't seen the ad anywhere except for at the MacEvangeList site, so it's entirely possible that the ad is actually the list's prank, not Apple's-- but we doubt that, since we imagine Apple would have smacked them down something fierce by now for beigeifying the Apple logo without permission.

The sad thing is, we can imagine a certain subspecies of the IT world positively drooling over the prospect of an honest-to-goodness beige iMac. Such a product would obviate any need to continue ridiculing the iMac as a "toy" in order to downplay the fact that inside that garish, unbusinesslike exterior beats the heart of a reliable, inexpensive, and zippy little system that's ideal for a variety of corporate desk-jockey tasks. It's always been the iMac's color scheme that's barred the iMac from the corporate ecosystem, since even Graphite is way too flashy for that mindset. But beige? Lose the translucency in Apple's fake ad, and it'd be perfect for the business world.

Oh, and can it be bundled with Virtual PC so it runs DOS in full-screen mode? That'd really get IT directors opening their wallets...

So we've been using Mac OS X for over a week, now-- and even if we'd been writing non-stop since then, we still wouldn't be finished with a review even nearly as long and as in-depth as John Siracusa's over at Ars Technica. Heck, it'd probably take us nine solid days to read that thing, let alone write it. That's not a criticism, mind you, because we're big fans of John's previous articles on earlier builds of Mac OS X, and always find his points accurate and insightful. In fact, we agree with just about everything he says, so if you want our extensive and detailed opinion of Mac OS X 10.0 and what works and what doesn't, plow through John's seventeen-page analysis and then stick this on at the end: "Ditto. --AtAT"

While our experience with Mac OS X has generally been a positive one, John does a great job at homing in on those aspects of the operating system that clearly need more work-- and there are a lot of them, such as inconsistencies in the Finder, soggy performance, and hefty resource requirements. Don't get us wrong: the article isn't just a whine-a-thon. When a portion of the Mac OS X experience is nifty, props are freely given, but when things aren't right, that fact is objectively stated in no uncertain terms. Is there a smattering of opinion here? Of course, but it's clearly labeled as such, and we feel that John has done an outstanding job of describing Mac OS X's pros and cons from several perspectives, from newbie to geek. We're guessing that the vast majority of open-minded Mac users who examine his points will find that their own concerns are adequately represented. (Then again, being card-carrying Steve Jobs Fan Club charter members, what do we know?)

Anyway, many thanks to faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini for clueing us in on the Ars review. Our advice to any of you interested in Mac OS X would be to rustle up a big bowl of popcorn, take the phone off the hook, and settle in for some heavy reading. And our advice to the Mac OS X development team would be to treat the Ars article as pure gold, because it's probably at least as valuable as all the rest of the user feedback on the system that Apple has yet received; consider it a manifesto for Mac OS X 10.1. At the very least, you should check it out just to see what happens when you launch every single application installed with Mac OS X, plus a hearty helping of third-party apps. Now that's a Dock!