Heads up, eager shoppers-- Steve promised us four more Apple retail stores in August, and MacMinute claims to have the skinny on the where and when. If you tuned into the keynote last week (or even just browsed through the rough notes we took), you already know the "where" part: the next four Apple stores are slated to open in the Dallas, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Boston areas. Since AtAT headquarters is but a short drive from the Peabody, MA location that Steve announced, we're sure you'll understand that we're getting antsy about scheduling an opening date. After all, we may not have bothered to line up for Phantom Menace tickets (thank heaven for small mercies), but we're obviously going to have to camp out for the Apple store opening, and we'd really like to keep our calendars clear.

Sadly (well, for us, anyway), MacMinute indicates that the next Apple store to open its doors will be the Dallas one, located at the Willow Bend Mall in the suburb of Plano. Nearby Mac fans should start staking out a spot in line now, because reportedly the joint will start jumping on August 3rd. For those of you having a hard time keeping track of how quickly this year is whizzing past your heads, August 3rd is a week from this Friday, or a mere nine days away. If you need to do anything special to prepare for the event (like, say, get your legs waxed, or dye your hair translucent Indigo, or tattoo the AtAT logo and URL on your forehead to display your undying allegiance to our little show, here), you'd better hurry, because time's a-wastin'.

Those of you in the Twin Cities area have a little more time to prepare; MacMinute reports that the Apple store at the glorious Mall of America will open a week after the Plano boutique, on Saturday, August 11th. That means you've still got a whopping seventeen days in which to put together something far more elaborate, if you so desire. (We imagine few things in this world would catch Steve's attention like a full-scale musical production number involving twelve turtleneck-clad Jobsian lookalikes in a kick-line belting out a rousing rendition of "Banana Split For My Baby" while waving sparklers. So get rehearsing.)

As for us Boston-area shopping fiends, unfortunately MacMinute can't give us a solid date for the Peabody opening, though as far as we know, Steve's "sometime in August" deadline still stands. That goes for you Chicagoland denizens as well-- we know you're eager to descend upon Woodfield, face Cupertino, and remain in the mall fasting and praying nonstop until the store opens, but at this point we'd consider such an action to be ill-advised. Hang in there, though, because we're still no more than five weeks away from retaily hijinks. For those of you living in areas that still haven't been blessed with an Apple store announcement, chin up: remember, there's a handful of the "twenty-five locations by the end of the year" whose locations still haven't been revealed yet. So keep those fingers crossed and maybe you'll get as lucky as we did.

If you're still obsessed with the notion of a next-generation iMac and you haven't gotten a wink of sleep since last week's Expo no-show, we have one little piece of advice for you: if you're looking to find out just when Apple plans to take the wraps off its next revolutionary consumer desktop Mac, don't go asking Miss Cleo for her mystical input on the matter. Imagine our shock and dismay when AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae Katie unearthed an Associated Press story about how everyone's favorite TV psychic is being sued by the state of Missouri for "allegedly violating the state's no-call law and consumer fraud." Miss Cleo's lawyer states that his client never charges consumers for calls placed by minors without parental consent, except when those minors "lie about their age." Um, hello-- who's supposed to be the psychic around here, again?

Anyway, rather than call a Jamaican woman who evidently can't even tell when a seven-year-old is claiming to be thirty-nine, you're better off piecing together next-generation iMac clues on your own. For example, faithful viewer Matt Smith recently noticed something interesting about Seybold's keynote web site: The first slot for Tuesday, September 25th currently lists only that there will be a "Special Keynote" delivered by an as-yet-announced speaker. Is that just the good-spin way of saying "we haven't been able to find anyone yet," or could it be that Uncle Steve is keeping a Seybold appearance under wraps to generate an aura of mystery? (He isn't listed in any of the other keynote slots, yet.) If the Mystery Guest does turn out to be Steve, suppose he'll have something up his sleeve other than speed-bumped CD-RW PowerBooks and Mac OS X 10.1? Like, say, a certain LCD-sporting iMac that's got everyone's knickers in a twist?

Actually, maybe not; Seybold is very much a professionally-oriented show, and the iMac is a decidedly consumer-targeted device. So how about an iMac unveiling at the Apple Expo instead? Faithful viewer Wayne W. Winder kindly pointed out a Go2Mac article that claims that "a source" (well, you know how that goes) talked to Apple Europe bigwig Pascal Cagny, and was told "unofficially" that "the new LCD iMac (Tessera)... will be announced in Paris during Apple Expo on 26-30 September 2001." (Incidentally, the same source claims that the new "Onyx" PowerBook will debut then as well.)

It's interesting to note that Seybold and the Apple Expo mostly overlap, so we're curious to see how Apple spreads its presence across both shows-- and which event will get what announcements. As for the iMac, if we had to choose between the two, we'd bet on an Apple Expo unveiling, given the product's target audience. If we asked Miss Cleo, she'd probably tell us that the new iMac won't be introduced until the 2002 Chicago Auto Show next February. Sigh... There are no heroes left in this world.

We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that, according to MacNN, last week's Macworld Expo had the highest attendance numbers ever, when it comes to the summer East Coast event: over 64,000 Mac fans flooded the Javits Center over the annual three-day Apple lovefest. The bad news, however, was evident to anyone who attended these things on a regular basis: while the number of attendees keeps going up, the show itself appears to be shrinking.

At first we thought it was just us, but we heard it again and again as we walked the floor: "wow, the show is really small this year." To us, it seems like with each passing year, while there are more and more Apple fanatics cramming their way into the convention hall, there are fewer and fewer actual exhibitors out on the floor. According to our calculations, if things continue at this rate, by the year 2007 Macworld Expo will consist entirely of the Apple booth and a couple hundred thousand attendees sitting around and grooving to Apple's brilliance. In other words, it'll be kind of like the original Woodstock, only with a higher concentration of Mac geeks and maybe fewer actual hippies.

And here's where things get really sketchy; faithful viewer Jim Boulter forwarded us a MacUser UK exclusive in which the publication claims that Apple was actually desperate enough to get exhibitors to show up to its big shindig that it "offered to pay for stand space and expenses for a number of major developers including Macromedia and Adobe." Adobe? Uh-oh... Didn't Adobe say that it was skipping the show due to "financial constraints"? Well, if Apple really offered to foot the bill and Adobe still didn't show up, maybe there's something to those rumors of "strained relations" between the two companies after all.

Then again, what's the point of exhibiting if you've got nothing to exhibit? The article quotes one Expo attendee who said, "Where's Adobe? I really wanted to talk to them about where they're at with an OS X version of Photoshop." Well, given that Adobe's answer would most likely have been "a what version of who?", maybe it's best that fans were simply left wondering. And while there are plenty of reasons why Apple and Adobe may be experiencing a bit of a rift (Apple creating Quartz from the public PDF spec instead of licensing Display Postscript from Adobe, Apple having released Final Cut Pro to compete with Premiere, Apple allegedly working on its own "iPhoto" image editing application that might cut into Photoshop sales, etc.), the marketing director for Adobe Europe claims that "the relationship between Adobe and Apple has never been stronger." Of course, if you make a habit out of believing what marketing people tell you, you've got bigger problems than worrying about the number of exhibitors at Macworld Expo...