Leave it to the AtAT staff to find themselves stuck in a former top-secret government bunker in West Virginia during one of the most inopportune three-day spans in recent Apple memory. One of those three days just happened to mark the grand opening of Apple's first retail stores, and another was the kickoff for the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Needless to say, a whole lotta relevant stuff happened while we were stranded without wireless 'net service in a facility fifty miles from the nearest EarthLink dialup node. When we recaptured our first taste of civilization during a brief layover in the Pittsburgh airport yesterday afternoon, we frantically OmniSkied like mad, devouring whatever info we could from every Mac news site available for a blissful twenty minutes. Passersby got to witness the terrifying yet fascinating spectacle of information junkies getting their first fix after an extended withdrawal.

Now, granted, West Virginia is a whole lot closer to McLean, Virginia than Boston is, and yes, we did consider renting a car and driving four hours each way to be present at Apple's first retail store on its first weekend of operation, but the logistics weren't pretty; given the realities of our schedule, we would have had only an hour at Tysons Corner in return for eight hours of chewing up highway. Would it have been worth it? Maybe; certainly it would have cut the length of our information withdrawal considerably, if we had really been able to soak up the retaily ambience of Apple's latest wacky scheme. But based on what we've been reading about the store openings, it sounds to us like we may not have even been able to set foot in the store with only an hour at our disposal.

While the official numbers released by Apple indicate that "over 7700 people" visited the company's first two stores during their first weekend of operation (and spent $599,000 during their pilgrimages), those stark facts don't tell the whole story. A MacCentral story on the grand opening of the Glendale store notes that an estimated 1500 people were waiting in line by the time Apple opened the doors, and it sounds like we may have had no better luck in McLean, where (according to a Daily Mac article) the wait may have been just as bad: "the line for the store reached approximately 300 ft. out to the main entrance [of the mall], then wrapped around the door for another half length by about 9:40 AM and steadily grew longer throughout the day." Plenty of people appear to have waited in line for three hours or longer before even crossing the threshold. So the odds are pretty good that we'd have spent eight hours driving for the privilege of standing in line for an hour and catching a glimpse of the front of the Apple Store from afar. (If you want a seriously visceral impression of how long the lines were, one fan has a very impressive QuickTime video up over at HomePage that shows the line at the Glendale store extending all the way out into the mall's parking garage. Yow! Take that, Gateway Country!)

So it's probably a good thing we didn't try to make the trip. Instead, now that we're back, we're content to soak up everyone else's accounts of the experience-- and Apple's expanded web coverage of its retail initiative is helping, too, with its QuickTime VR panorama and a video tour of the location-- complete with Steve playing the part of tour guide. Now we're not feeling so left out after all. By the way, off-topic memo to Steve: if you were planning on ever staying at the Greenbrier, you may want to reconsider. You can't even wear blue jeans in the main lobby, there's nothing even remotely vegan in any of the hotel restaurants (and there are dress codes in there, too), and the decor... dear sweet heaven, the decor. The picture doesn't do it justice. Let's just say that a man with taste and an appreciation for sleek, clean design such as yourself would likely need years of therapy to come to grips with the horrible sights that those walls contain. Pink and white wallpaper, bright green carpeting, and floral-print curtains? Consider yourself warned. The Apple Store it ain't.

Funny thing-- maybe we're going to have to pay more attention to the innuendoes of our breakfast foods from now on, because today the cryptic omen we found in our Alpha-Bits last Friday came true: according to an official Apple press release, starting today, every single Mac that Apple sells will come pre-loaded with a shiny new copy of Mac OS X. That's a solid two months ahead of schedule (well, ahead of the most recent schedule, anyway-- remember when Mac OS X was going to ship by the end of 1999?), and we see this as happy times split three ways.

First of all, Apple benefits by getting the future of the Macintosh into the hands of more users as early as possible. Meanwhile, with a bigger installed base, software developers suddenly have a lot more incentive to get their Carbon and Cocoa wares onto shelves-- the money's there for the harvesting. And all those diverse Mac users buying new rigs who would previously have had to spend another $129 to get that shimmering Aqua goodness can now blow that extra cash on whatever else is on the shopping list: peripherals, extra software, storage media, baby formula, hedge clippers, Fabergé eggs, firearms, smack, whores, etc. It's a win-win-win situation! (Note: smack and whores are not currently available in Apple retail stores; we suspect firearms will be stocked in the "Etc." section of some locations, however.)

Note, though, that while all new Macs will indeed have Mac OS X on their disks and ready to rock, they'll actually be configured to boot into Mac OS 9 by default. Those of you who are already using Mac OS X are probably breathing a collective sigh of relief for Apple's customers, its tech support staff, and the welfare of the Mac platform as a whole-- nice as it is, Mac OS X 10.0.3 still isn't exactly as user-friendly as it needs to be before Apple unleashes it upon the user community as a whole; applications are still lacking, perceived speed is a mite sluggish (according to an article in The Register, Apple knows and speeding things up is currently its top priority), and overall, Mac OS 9 is still a lot more polished-- for obvious reasons. So we think Apple's made a best-of-both-worlds decision: customers who want to use Mac OS X can leap right in without needing to spend any extra money or time, while everyone else is still greeted by Mac OS 9's super-welcoming face.

However, we still believe that Macworld Expo this July will be Mac OS X's real "coming-out party," as Apple calls it. At that time, we're guessing, to coincide with the introduction of a spiffy new line of iMacs, Apple will throw the big cartoony toggle switch and all new Macs won't just come with Mac OS X pre-installed-- they'll come configured to boot Mac OS X right out of the box. Until then, the company's development gnomes will be busily polishing Aqua and its underlying guts to a bright, healthy sheen suitable for consumption by Mac fans and newbies alike. There's still a lot of work to do, and two more months isn't likely to produce perfection, but we're confident that Apple will come as close as humanly possible.

And thus does another rumor come to pass: during his WWDC "fireside chat" (and subsequently in yet another press release), Uncle Steve revealed that Apple has become the first computer manufacturer to move its entire line of displays to LCD flat-panel technology. Yup, kiss the venerable CRT buh-bye, because as far as Apple is concerned, it has already long outstayed its welcome. You just know that if the pricing realities had let him, Steve would have tossed the CRT out with the floppy drive years ago.

The company's lone remaining CRT, the $499 17-inch Apple Studio Display, has just been discontinued and replaced-- with another 17-inch Apple Studio Display. Naming confusion aside, we assure you that you won't mistake the new one for the old; Apple's latest display replaces the bulky cathode ray tube with a light, thin, and gorgeous LCD flat-panel. It looks just like the 15-inch model but, well, bigger; this is the "Peter" in Apple's LCD Brady boys lineup. You also probably won't mistake the price-- $999 for the new 17-incher, twice as much as the CRT version it replaces. But don't freak out too much just yet; that's an excellent price for a 17-inch 1280x1024 LCD, in our opinion (especially one that's guaranteed to be as high-quality as Apple's is). Meanwhile, the prices of the 15-incher and the 22-inch Apple Cinema Display have both dropped-- to $599 and $2499, respectively. Yes, that means that Apple's cheapest display option is now $100 higher than it was yesterday, but evidently that's the price of progress.

All of this means that the only CRTs still in Apple's product line are the 15-inch tubes installed in every iMac-- and you can bet that Apple won't be keeping those around for much longer, either. With the standalone 15-inch LCD display now selling for $599, we're entering pricing territory that will finally let Apple introduce a very different flat-screen iMac without raising the product's price much (or, hopefully, at all). With LCD prices continuing to free-fall, we're going to assume that an LCD iMac will make its debut this summer, even if Apple has to trim its iMac margins to the bone at first just to get them out the door ASAP.

By the way, cost-conscious Mac fans aren't the only ones wincing at Apple's all-LCD stance; graphic artists are also likely bemoaning the extinction of the CRT in Apple's product lineup. CRTs may be big, hot, heavy, and energy-inefficient, but they still seem to output better color fidelity and uniformity than even the best LCDs yet available. Of course, no one's forcing people to buy Apple displays for their Macs, and this may be a golden opportunity for a third party to fill the gap by offering a professional-quality CRT with an industrial design that complements Apple's sleek lines and silvery tones. Of course, such a display would probably use a standard analog VGA cable instead of Apple's all-digital (and all-proprietary) ADC connector, but hey, there's always a trade-off somewhere...