"So where ya been, AtAT?" Glad you asked. Well, let's see, here... you last heard from us late Friday afternoon, after which we collapsed in a heap from prolonged sleep deprivation. On Saturday morning we arose at some ungodly hour typically reserved for chickens and farm reports and motored on up to Peabody, Massachusetts to attend the Apple store grand opening. On Sunday we returned to that illustrious boutique to get the "let's see it when it's less crowded" perspective, before moving on to a family barbecue and finally heading down to Providence to catch Hey Mercedes and Jimmy Eat World at Lupo's. And yesterday was Labor Day, so of course we spent the hours 'twixt dawn and midnight fasting and meditating as according to divine law. (We hope for the sake of your karma that you did the same, as Labor Day is second only to Arbor Day in spiritual import and significance.)

So as you can see, we had valid reasons for our dereliction of duty-- we couldn't broadcast yesterday due to religious reasons, and Viewer Mail once again had to take a back seat to an Apple retail experience. And don't go telling us we should have been answering Viewer Mail on Sunday night instead of indulging in indie rock bliss across state lines; one of the inalienable rights granted by living in the modern U.S. of A. is that one need never apologize for rocking out. Besides, Bob from Hey Mercedes is a Mac guy; as faithful viewer Brian Hall pointed out, he uses a titanium PowerBook G4, and we therefore bestowed upon him an AtAT t-shirt and stickers. He just might wear that shirt during an upcoming performance, thus netting AtAT some free publicity-- so that show was a business trip, pure and simple.

While we're spinning excuses, we should also mention that for the forty-eight hours following our initial trip to the Apple Store Northshore, we were far too disoriented to get any actual work done. Not that the grand opening was a wild and crazy affair, by any means; on the contrary, it was a far more mellow experience than the previous week's festivities in Woodfield. We're talking shorter lines, far fewer rabid AtAT fans (evidently we're much bigger in the Midwest than on the East Coast-- but do we play in Peoria?), and a surprising lack of music blaring as the doors were opened. What, no Love Shack? What would Steve say?

No, the distressing part of the experience was the store's actual layout. In our last episode we made a big deal about how all Apple stores would probably be almost identical, other than square footage and the like. Indeed, upon entering the Northshore location, we were suffused with a warm feeling of familiarity originating from our trip to the Woodfield store just a week earlier; there were the same wood floors, the same black shelves, and (generally speaking) the same beaming, enthusiastic salespeople. But only moments after setting foot inside, we became gradually aware that something was... askew.

We walked over to the Kids section-- or, we should say, what should have been the Kids section-- and found ourselves in Photos instead. Stumbling forward into where Music should be, we instead arrived in Movies. Confused, we stumbled back to the Genius Bar, only to find shelves of scanners, printers, and other peripherals. That's right, gang: the entire Northshore store is a mirror image of the standard Apple store layout! According to store employees, everything had to be flip-flopped because of how the space was set up; for one thing, there's a giant pillar sitting right where the Genius Bar is supposed to be. When viewed as a single retail entity, it's no big deal, but if you've already committed Apple's standard floor plan to memory, we don't mind telling you that the effect is disconcerting as all get out.

So after an experience like that (not to mention narrowly avoiding death when our discombobulation nearly led to a head-on collision when we drove part of the way home on the left side of the highway), our only reasonable course of action was clear: an extended return to the Apple store to acclimatize ourselves to its looking-glass layout, followed by a therapeutic barbecue and a heaping helping of out-of-state indie rock-- and most importantly of all, no work. We're happy to say that our treatment regimen appears to have worked, and all traces of hysterical dyslexia have since subsided. We're ready to take on the challenges of soap opera production once more, and we're gust jlad we suffered no pernament neulorogical madage...

Man, it's like Motorola's got some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. On the one hand we've got a company whose semiconductor arm is spurting red ink like a busted fire hydrant and who spent a year and a half trying to punch through the 500 MHz barrier while the competition duked it out to 1 GHz and beyond; on the other hand, according to faithful viewer Eric, the same exact company just discovered a commercially viable method to combine silicon and gallium arsenide (two great tastes that taste great together) to create a computer chip that an Associated Press article describes as "35 times faster than today's models." What's up with that?

What's up, indeed. At least one analyst at a technology research company is saying that "this could go down in history as a major turning point in the semiconductor industry." Well, at least now we know why Motorola was so loath to sell off its semiconductor business when the going got tough-- this enticing little development may have been considered an ace up the sleeve. The company's plan to license this silicon/gallium arsenide technology to other companies "widely and quickly" might well pull in enough moolah to make the unit profitable again. (Conversely, the pessimists out there might argue that Motorola's announcement is purely an exercise in boosting its asking price when the semiconductor business does go on the auction block.)

Now, for those of you who are drooling onto your shoes at the prospect of gallium arsenide-laced PowerPCs boosting Macs to thirty-five times their current speeds, cool your jets; for one thing, Motorola doesn't expect products housing the new Si/GaAs chip to emerge until 2003. For another, as far as we can tell, this technology doesn't actually apply to CPUs-- at least, not yet. Certainly the AP article avoids any mention of the PowerPC, and instead talks about "cell phones and DVD players," "radar systems to help automobiles avoid collisions," and "new semiconductor-based lighting systems." That doesn't give us a lot of short-term hope for insanely zippier Macs.

In addition, faithful viewer Steven C. Den Beste directed us towards an Electronics Times story which apparently confirms that the gallium arsenide technique isn't destined for the Mac right now. We say "apparently" because any article that tosses around phrases like "strontium titanate dielectric layer" and "molecular beam epitaxy" is so far beyond our limited attention span that we might as well be trying to watch CSPAN. Therefore, we'll take Stephen's word for it that Motorola's breakthrough technology is "intended for things like analog microwave receiver and transmitter components and optoelectronic devices" and that it's "unlikely to appear in the PPC anytime soon." Still, anything that's good for Motorola's financial situation is potentially good news for the Mac platform, so consider this a happy development nonetheless.

The good news (if you're the type who has no qualms about taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others) is that another PC manufacturer has gone kablammo. The bad news is that it's not Dell. On the plus side, though, according to faithful viewer Oren Krinsky, it is Compaq, who only a couple of years ago was looking to be the ruler of the roost. And while the company hasn't exactly imploded, filed for bankruptcy, and sacrificed its CEO to an angry mob to avoid widespread destruction and horror at the hands of creditors wielding pitchforks and torches, it's not a massive stretch of the imagination to interpret Compaq's $25 billion "merger" with Hewlett-Packard as the "let's just sell ourselves and go play golf" exit strategy of a shrinking giant with its back against the wall. After all, the post-merger entity will apparently be called Hewlett-Packard, not Compaq.

According to a CNN article, this merger (which has been unanimously approved by the boards of both companies) will "create a new Hewlett-Packard with a total revenue of $87.4 billion," second only to IBM's $90 billion. More importantly, the genetically-spliced HP-Compaq Brundlefly will have Dell beat in another vital area: whereas Dell has only laid off about 4000 people to offset the effects of the slowing economy, Compaq and HP combined have laid off twice that many-- and now plan to axe another 15,000 positions due to the merger. Now that's some cost-cutting carnage! (Meanwhile, Apple is woefully behind, having trimmed a mere fifty jobs in the past year. It's rather pathetic, isn't it?)

More to the point, though, unless the new Hewlett-Packard decides to keep selling Pavilions and Compaq's Presarios (heck, they look enough alike) in the embattled home market, one of those product families is about to go bye-bye-- which means there will soon be even more room for Apple to assert its destiny as the king of the consumer computer. Don't forget, barely two months ago analyst Tim Bajarin predicted that when the dust settles, it'll be Sony and Apple still left standing as companies catering to the consumer market while all other manufacturers will have self-destructed or left for greener pastures. Are we witnessing history in the making?