Man, Captain Steve sure has his covert black-ops ninja sabotage team working overtime these days. Regular viewers are no doubt all too familiar with AtAT's seemingly futile struggle to maintain a steady broadcast signal over the past few weeks, and judging by the contents of our inbox, more than a few conspiracy-minded viewers are looking askance at the sudden vaporization of Mac OS Rumors about a week ago, as well. Consider the timing, if you will: AtAT suffered its most recent outage in the wee hours of last Friday morning, and service was restored at about 10:15 AM EDT. According to MacSurfer's archives, mere hours after we made bail on our last stint in Dead Air Jail, MOSR landed in the klink. Coincidenza?

Whereas our dead air has ostensibly been due to phone company incompetence (an eminently believable cover story-- we have to hand it to the forces that conspire against us), MOSR's downtime appears to have been due to a problematic server upgrade coupled with domain name registration troubles. The site did come back up briefly on Monday at a raw IP address-- but then vanished again so quickly, we didn't even have a chance to load the page. (Interestingly enough, it contained some dirt on the new hardware that Apple is expected to unveil at the May 1st event that's got the whole community abuzz. We find that fact rather... noteworthy.) And then when MOSR finally resurfaced yesterday afternoon, it was less than twelve hours before AtAT was once again plunged into the inky blackness of the void. Again, how about that timing? It's almost like Steve laid off the whole ninja sabotage team and is now doing all the black ops rumor-scuttling on his own, in classic micromanagement fashion.

And so currently we find ourselves in the brief interval between Steve severing our line and flying back to MOSR in his private jet armed with a pair of wirecutters and a blowtorch. Therefore, while we're down and MOSR is up, we should probably echo the juiciest tidbits from their latest Mayday report in our own production-- in preparation for the next inevitable downtime flip-flop. Here's the gist: according to MOSR, new iBooks and multiprocessor Power Macs are "almost certain" (though the site's details on the revamped iBook are somewhat at odds with what Go2Mac has proposed; MOSR refers to a "larger display," for one thing). Mac OS X Server 2.0 is also rumored to be ready for a May 1st intro, and a long-awaited announcement of the whole Apple retail stores plan is slated as "less certain" but still a possibility.

Nothing too earth-shattering, as far as we can make out, but hey, evidently Steve thought it was important enough to go crawling through the brambles at midnight with black paint on his face and a portable degaussing machine in his teeth. We notice that AppleInsider is uncharacteristically silent on the Mayday shindig; perhaps they're playing it safe until they're sure that Steve is out of wire-snipping range.

Whither the Cube? Apple has expended an unusual amount of energy to insist that the slick but unfortunately slow-selling product isn't going away anytime soon. Steve categorically denied rumors that the Cube development team had been laid off, for instance (that's interesting in itself, since the company's policy is never to comment on rumors), and Apple has continued to juice its compact little hexahedron with better feature options, like a CD-RW drive and an nVIDIA GeForce2 MX graphics card. But we just can't shake this nagging suspicion that the Cube is sadly not long for this world.

Certainly that's what AtAT's Little Birds™ are tweeting: that production on Cubes is about to cease and that once Apple's sizeable stock is gone, the Cube will quietly vanish from Apple's price list, with nary a eulogy to mark its passing. Bearing firmly in mind that believing anything a bird tells you about the goings-on at One Infinite Loop is at best a dodgy practice (and at worst something that can get you committed), all we can say is that the latest numbers make that scenario pretty plausible. In a recent Ziff Davis Internet article, longtime Mac dude Matthew Rothenberg reveals that while Apple sold a whopping 115,000 titanium PowerBooks last quarter (a figure that Apple trumpeted from the hilltops), the company only managed to move 12,000 Cubes into the channel. That's particularly frightening considering that it represents a steep 59% drop from the still-anemic 29,000 Cubes it sold the quarter before. (Cue ominous chord.)

Perhaps the most upsetting thing about the Cube possibly dying a slow, ignominious death is the fact that every Cube owner we hear from-- really, every single one-- loves his or her Cube like a first-born child. Between the unparalleled critical acclaim and the raves from the people who actually bought it, it's a shame that the Cube did so poorly at the box office. We're still pulling for a delayed-action "sleeper hit" sort of dynamic, but the chances of that ever happening seem to be dropping off sharply. All we can say is, if you want a Cube, we wouldn't wait too long to buy one if we were you.

We're starting to suspect that someone really wants his crown back. Rack up another initiative in Apple's both-guns-blazing push to get back the education market share it lost to Dell: as outlined in an official press release, the company's latest strategy involves a new program called the Apple Teacher Institutes, a bunch of "hands-on technology workshops" at which K-12 teachers can learn how "to effectively utilize technology to maximize planning and instructional time, expand their individual areas of expertise, engage an increasingly diverse student body, and discover new ways to individualize instruction." In addition, we're told that attendees will also learn the value of utilizing buzzwords and how to effectively split infinitives.

We're going to go way out on a limb, here, and assume that the "technology" that Apple plans to teach these educators to "utilize" will be-- dare we say it?-- Apple technology. (Try to contain your shock.) So when the web site lists "digital media, mobile computing, and the Internet," you can probably substitute "iMovie, iBooks with AirPort, and PowerSchool/iTools for Education." Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course; Apple's totally up front about its sponsorship of the seminars, and indeed, if the Apple Teacher Institute workshops focused on the deployment of Dell PowerEdge servers in K-12 schools of various sizes, we'd expect to see Cheryl Vedoe's head on a stick.

What's particularly cool about these seminars is that they're not actually going to be run by Apple itself; instead, teachers who attend will be "led by a team of educators who have effectively integrated these technologies into their classrooms." In a way, it's sort of the weeklong, non-retail, all-teacher version of Demo Days: Apple products demonstrated by real people who use them. And since "Apple will underwrite the cost of the seminar content and materials for all attendees," hopefully attendance will be high. It's a smart move; school districts may try to base their computer purchases entirely on cost, but if Apple can get enough teachers standing up and demonstrating how much better Apple technology is for the faculty and the kids, the school boards may eventually be forced to listen. Let's give it a year and see how it works.