May all your days be Bondi and all your steps be numbered two or fewer! Yes, that's right, kids-- our use of the traditional International iMac Day greeting means that it's that time of year again. As all attentive Apple-watchers are keenly aware, and as Apple's Hot News page unnecessarily reminds us, it's the iMac's third birthday: the first models hit store shelves exactly three years ago today. (For those of you thoughtless cads who forgot to buy translucent plastic flowers for your faithful, doting iMacs, hurry-- there's still time.)

Three years; can you believe it? We here at AtAT still remember it like it was yesterday: piling into the AtATmobile and driving two hours out of state to snag three of the luscious blue-green space eggs on their very first day out of the gate. We could hardly believe it was really that long ago, except that we remember thinking that $85 for 32 MB of RAM was a really good deal at the time. (Chronologically comparative RAM prices: it's the technological equivalent of counting the rings in a tree trunk.) Anyway, our iMac is still in active duty, though our iBook sees more action because we can use it in front of the TV. But the iMac keeps chugging away, mostly as an email station and a Palm sync depot.

Sadly, we don't have any thrilling iMac-related tales of danger and adventure with which to regale you, or else we could fulfill Apple's request. See, the company is soliciting stories about how "this precocious three-year-old has changed the lives of its owners." While we'd love to weave a wondrous narrative of how we managed to liberate a repressed country from the iron grip of an evil despot while rescuing the princess and discovering cures for all known diseases-- all with the help of our iMac, mind you-- the reality is far less interesting. We plugged it in. It worked. Three years later, it still works. While commendable, that's not exactly movie-of-the-week material, there. (If you've got a better story involving your iMac, mail it in to birthday@apple.com; maybe you'll get famous.)

Meanwhile, birthdays aren't always a cause for celebration; as they stack up over the years, eventually they become portents of imminent doom. We imagine it's particularly rough for computers, since the life cycle of technology is something like (gulp) three years. But don't you dare call our Bondi Blue wonder past its prime! She still looks spry for her age-- 64 MB of RAM, 4 GB hard disk, 233 MHz G3, and Rage II graphics chip notwithstanding. That said, this latest birthday just underscores the fact that Apple really needs to get a new iMac out the door, and soon. Graceful aging aside, come its fourth birthday, the current iMac design is going to be Methuselah-grade ancient. Break out the Oil of Olay!

For better or for worse, it looks like the heyday of online stock trading has been over for quite some time. Whereas recklessly e-trading with money from the kids' college fund was once a bigger fad than the hula hoop ever was, evidently consumer America's love affair with the stock market evaporated as soon as everyone made the startling discovery that stock prices can actually go down, too. Go figure. Combine a skittish trading community with an economy running on fumes, and you've got a stock market only a mother could love... unless she's a mother who bought AAPL at $60, that is.

Yes, while Apple's stock hasn't been hammered nearly as badly as many tech stocks (don't ask us what we paid for our first batch of PALM-- another crying jag might send us over the edge), its current hovering-around-$19 price tag is significantly down from its year-high of $64. That's perhaps not so good if you already own a bunch of shares, but for investors who haven't lost everything they own on Red Hat stock and might be bottom-feeding for some artificially-low bargains, AAPL might actually be an attractive pick right about now. At least, that's what a handful of Wall Street analysts have concluded.

Faithful viewer Robert Fernando tipped us off to a Sacramento Bee article in which analyst Tim Bajarin is quoted as saying that since Steve Jobs wants his company to become the "major consumer digital company of the future," Apple "may be the only traditional PC company to survive and move into the digital world." Of course, we've heard that sort of thing from Bajarin already, so his continued opinion that AAPL's a good risk might not carry as much weight as it otherwise could. But hold up-- the article notes another analyst, A.G. Edwards's Brett Miller, who calls Apple his "best pick in the PC sector" due to "increasing gross margins, declining operating expenses, one of the best inventory managements in the business and a rock-solid balance sheet." Woo-hoo! Could this be the boost that AAPL needs to start climbing to more appropriate levels?

Well, since the article came out yesterday and AAPL is currently down another half a buck, evidently not-- more's the pity. Still, Apple customers know a thing or too about sticking it out for the long haul; if you think Apple's got a solid chance of outshining the pack when (if?) this economy finally turns around, you might want to keep AAPL on your "potential bargain-basement stocks" list. We'd buy more ourselves, but pretty soon we're probably going to be investing heavily in more Apple hardware instead of more Apple stock. Mmmmm, Quicksilver...

Are you bored with crafting elaborate theories regarding a secret version of Mac OS X being prepped by Apple for standard Intel x86 hardware? Has repeatedly signing the "OS X on Intel" petition lost its appeal in recent weeks? Have you gotten tired of the sheer technical plausibility of the whole concept, given Mac OS X's NeXT roots, and NeXT's Intel heritage? Well, then, it sounds like you're burned out, and you need something even wackier to break out of your rut. Don't worry, we've got just the thing for you: Windows XP for the Macintosh!

No, we're not talking about Windows XP in VirtualPC on a Mac, which is utterly dull in its absolute certainty; we're talking about a boxed copy of Windows XP, complete with a thin layer of Microsoft's slime still clinging to the shrinkwrap, which is compiled and ready to run natively on Mac hardware. Okay, so it's not completely impossible, since Microsoft had been working on a PowerPC version of Windows NT back in the PREP/CHRP days, but you have to admit, it's far enough out there on the "Ain't Gonna Happen" limb that it makes for a nice break from the slightly-less-absurd "OS X on Intel" theory.

Faithful viewer Jonathan Patt was thoughtful enough to point out two threads-- one in the MacNN forums and one in the OrangeInsider message boards-- in which certain individuals claim to have "friends" who have gotten/are getting prerelease copies of Windows XP for the Macintosh. No, there's no actual evidence, nor is anyone swearing up and down that it's actually happening. It's all speculation of the "well, my friend claims that..." and "this couldn't be true... could it?" type. In other words, there's just enough substance there on which to hang a nice little side-conspiracy-- you can always get back to predicting the Intel version of Mac OS X tomorrow, right? Enjoy!