Attention, Apple-handheld conspiracy theorists! We've got yet another piece for you to cram into your elaborate jigsaw puzzles of shadowy PDA-building intrigue: surely you've got room for yet another chunk of blatant speculation, right? The last time we raised this issue, somebody over at Morningstar.com was making purely conjectural noises about Apple possibly buying Handspring. This time around, someone thinks that Apple may be looking to snap up a slightly bigger fish: none other than Palm itself.

For those who haven't been following Palm's recent spate of bad luck, the company is hurting in a big way right now. Basically Palm announced its new m500 and m505 handhelds waaaay too far in advance of actually being able to ship them, thus causing sales to crater when demand for its older PDAs dropped through the floor as customers waited for the new gear. So, after fumbling its supply chain and new product intros so badly that even a 1996-era Apple would have winced, Palm's stock price is hovering at about six bucks and change-- down from a year-high of just over ten times that value. And things may get worse before they get better; as faithful viewer Steven Den Beste pointed out, last Friday the company announced that it's going to hand out still more pink slips this summer, in addition to the ones already announced last April.

Which is why CNET alleges that Palm may be considering looking for a buyer: some company with deep pockets like IBM, Sony, or-- you guessed it-- Apple. While the Sony and IBM speculation is based largely on perceived market fit, the Apple possibility is far more intriguing because it's got some real history behind it. Everyone knows that Steve Jobs admitted to trying to buy Palm a few years back when the company was still privately held, and he was politely told exactly where he could cram his stylus. As recently as two weeks ago, Fortune published a very interesting Stevebite: "I still wish we had been able to buy [Palm]," he said, and when pressed on whether he'd still be interested in acquiring the company, the Inscrutable Mr. Jobs replied, "I don't know what you're talking about." He then "glanced at the ceiling, smiled, and... changed the subject."

It's important to note that neither of the proposed Apple-buys-[insert PDA company here] scenarios are based on a whole lot of actual fact, but we seem to recall Steve using the "I don't know what you're talking about" line before-- in response to a question about the then-still-"secret" Apple retail stores. Palm, for its part, flatly denies that it's considering a sellout; "Our intention is to remain an independent company," claims a company spokesperson. But no public company is going to go on the record with a statement like "Good lord, yes, we screwed up massively-- somebody buy us cheap, please!" And since Palm is a public company, there's always the distant possibility of a hostile takeover. Suppose Steve's preparing to dig that pirate flag out of the attic?

We can say this for Mac OS X: it may not have a whole lot of application support yet, it may scratch its head in befuddlement when introduced to most peripherals, and it may still feel slower than molasses on quaaludes in January-- but at least it's rock-solid stable. In two and a half months, we've experienced exactly two kernel panics, and they both occurred when waking our PowerBook from sleep after disconnecting it from an Ethernet LAN. (It hasn't happened since 10.0.3 came out, though that may just be a coincidence.) Overall, we're enjoying stability the likes of which we haven't encountered since... well, since using other versions of UNIX.

However, that's not to say that Mac OS X is truly uncrashable. (Yet.) We appear to be somewhat lucky on the stability end, whereas some other hapless customers are not. For instance, take Tony Smith over at The Register; the poor man nearly reached his wit's end trying to keep his Mac OS X-loaded blue and white G3 from taking frequent and unplanned trips to Crashville. (Spookily enough, Tony's crashes left him with "nothing but a blank, mid-blue screen"-- is Apple hard at work reverse-engineering Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death?) After multiple reinstalls, he eventually figured out what was causing his grief: an aftermarket PCI ATI Radeon graphics card, which he determined was not supported. Replacing it with his original OEM Rage 128 card left his system solid as a rock. Or so he thought.

Once he got around to reinstalling his third-party fonts, his crashes came back. And so, by adding one font at a time, he was eventually able to isolate the real cause of all his woes: "a single Star Trek symbol font... OS X doesn't like it one little bit." So while Mac OS X is able to use his zippy Radeon card after all, Tony will sadly have to boot back into Mac OS 9 whenever he wants to stick the Starfleet Insignia into one of his party invitations. Now that's a problem that Apple's really going to have to fix before Mac OS X will ever catch on as a mainstream operating system.

What concerns us about this whole sorry tale-- well, aside from Mac OS X's devastating lack of support for science fiction-themed novelty fonts, which will surely be the operating system's downfall in the long run-- is that a bigwig at an IT web site endured multiple reinstalls and hardware swaps before he finally isolated what was rendering his Mac all but unusable. That doesn't sound like an operating system that's quite ready for prime time or the "mom test." But hey, Apple's still got over a month before it starts shipping iMacs that boot right into Mac OS X; hopefully that's enough time to smooth out most of the rough edges and add support for Star Trek typefaces. If not, well, it's going to be a bumpy summer...

As usual, Apple's ads are turning heads-- even if most of those heads belong to existing Mac fans and people in the advertising business. Over at AdReview, columnist Bob Garfield gives Apple's current TV spots three stars for "perfectly, charmingly" conveying the Mac's capabilities. Want to tout the fact that Macs excel at burning custom audio CDs, or highlight how the new iBook can edit digital video on the go? Evidently Garfield thinks Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day are right on the money by sticking Gen-Xers in an empty theater and in a middle seat on a plane, respectively. Hey, we're not going to argue with him; we're big fans of both "Concert" and "Middle Seat." Kudos to Apple for winning the approval of the ad industry as well as the Mac community.

What's interesting, though, is that Garfield calls Apple's new ads a "180° turn" from the original "1984" ad that introduced the first Mac, because instead of evoking "the essence of a new machine," this latest campaign "hammers at the products' physical features." Well, okay, he's not wrong-- certainly a guy editing a movie on a plane says a lot more about Apple's product than a blond woman in running shorts tossing a hammer through a video screen. But the biggest criticism we continue to hear about Apple's ads is that they still aren't feature-centric enough. "Concert," while brilliant, is admittedly pretty oblique; there's no mention of iTunes or how its integrated CD-RW support makes burning custom music CDs a simple prospect. And we wouldn't be terribly surprised if some people watch "Middle Seat" and come away thinking that they don't want a laptop which requires three airplane tray tables to get any work done.

The bottom line, though, is this: no matter how hard some Mac fans may wish, we're not likely to see hard-hitting Apple ads that compare Apple's price-performance ratios to those of the competition in our lifetime. Apple isn't about numbers and components, remember? Apple makes the "whole widget." Given that reality, Apple can't entirely separate its products from its corporate image, but we agree with Garfield that the company's on the right track in the way it's "selling the product on its merits, and not as a conscientious objection." In other words, the latest message isn't "buy a Mac to strike a blow against the status quo," but rather "buy a Mac because it's a killer widget that works." And when all's said and done, that's going to say a lot more about Apple than any list of specs and prices.