Well, it was touch and go for a minute, there, but your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff is now in stable condition and recovering nicely, thank you. There we were, enjoying a nice, sedate Sunday and catching up on a week's worth of TiVo, when we made the near-fatal mistake of firing up the PowerBook to see if anything was shaking in the weekend world of Mac news. Considering that, news-wise, the action on Sundays generally falls into the "So Subdued It Might Be Dead" category, we simply weren't prepared for the massive shock of discovering that Adobe has finally officially announced a Mac OS X-native version of Photoshop. (Faithful viewer cbyoshi tried to warn us; if only we had thought to check our email first...)

Needless to say, despite the fact that we had (somewhat skeptically) already mentioned the possibility of such an announcement touching down today, our brains simply weren't prepared for the sheer psychic shock of seeing rumor become reality a full day early. As our heads grew light, our left arms became numb, our vision dimmed, and our all-too-pathetic lives flashed before our eyes ("Love Boat"... "Love Boat"... "Almost got off the couch"... "Love Boat"...), we idly pondered the Great Questions that would surely be answered in the afterlife: "Why are we here?" "What is our purpose in life?" "Who were the marketing wizards who decided to announce a long-awaited new product on Sunday, let alone the Sunday after a major trade show attended by a zillion potential customers who have been gagging for said product for ages, now?" Seconds later, we lost consciousness.

Luckily for us, while dozens of AtAT viewers saw the news and merely emailed us in hopes of securing a credit on the show, a few of our more astute fans immediately recognized that, having unexpectedly encountered the stark reality of an imminent Carbonized Photoshop, we'd most likely be twitching on the floor and swallowing our own tongues. Many thanks to whoever played the odds and had the ambulance sent over; your intuition is impeccable. We're expected to make a full recovery, though the doctors say we should take it easy for a while and avoid strenuous physical activity. Yeah, that'll be a tough change to accommodate. Where's the remote?

Incidentally, we probably owe our lives to the fact that Adobe's official press release states that Photoshop 7.0 won't actually be shipping for another couple of months yet (Adobe says "second quarter," while the pre-order links from Apple's spotlight page estimate "April"); had we encountered the phrase "immediate availability" in that context, our hearts would probably have exploded right out of our chests. And you know how tough something like that is for the legatees to clean off the furniture.

You know what they say: one iPod does not a Digital Hub strategy make. Plenty of people agree, and feel that the iPod is clearly just the first in a long line of digital appliances that Apple will eventually ship as a fleet of high-tech gadgets built to orbit its various and sundry Macs. Of course, being generally contrarian types, we often take issue with what "they" have to say, and given the existence of some pretty capable third parties making their own devices, we're not entirely convinced of the inevitability of the "Apple's making everything" scenario. But heck, it sure makes for some darn fine rumormongering, and who are we to stand in the way of progress? So we figured we'd round up a few of the more interesting "digital spoke" whispers floating around, toss 'em at the suspended ceiling tiles, and see if we can get any of 'em to stick point-first. Er, metaphorically speaking.

First up: iPod revisions. Well, the fact that the iPod is going to undergo an upgrade in the not-too-distant future probably is a dead cert, seeing as Toshiba will be shipping a 10 GB version of its teensy hard drive within the next thirty days or so; the question, however, is whether Apple is just going to bump up the product's storage capacity, or if something more significant is waiting in the wings. As faithful viewer Don points out, Mac OS Rumors is figuring on the latter option, claiming that iPods slated for later this year will boast such niceties as included Pro Speakers and a built-in FireWire CD-RW drive. Our own sources tell us that after that version ships, Apple will move even further away from the iPod's original ultraportable form factor to integrate a professional turntable, a mixing board, a smallish circular saw, a hibachi, and a portable gasoline-powered electrical generator. The tentative advertising campaign is reportedly going to be built around the phrase "iPod: two thousand songs in your U-Haul."

Moving on, surely you've heard all sorts of murmurs about Apple possibly whipping out an iCam, thus returning to the consumer digital camera market that it created eight or nine years ago with the QuickTake. Personally, we've always been slightly skeptical that Apple would tackle the digital camera again, primarily because there are so many companies out there like Olympus and Canon that are far better equipped to build a quality product at a reasonable price; the iPod was an attempt to make an MP3 player "done right," but the existing digital cameras on the market are far more mature and well-done than the MP3 players Apple sought to outdo. Nevertheless, if you're jonesing for an Apple-branded digital camera with an iPod-style hard drive, a blazing FireWire interface, seamless integration with iPhoto (and iMovie, given the iCam's alleged DV movie clip mode), and the legendary Apple fit and finish, you might like to drool over the iCam rumor over at Your Daily Mac as unearthed by faithful viewer John Mitchell. We're not getting our hopes up for a Macworld Tokyo unveiling as specified, but we're always happy to be pleasantly surprised.

Last but not least, what Digital Hub is complete without a PDA? And unlike the available digital cameras out there, the current crop of PDAs is arguably a lot farther away from the ideal Macintosh-style experience. If Apple were so inclined, it could make some huge improvements in this arena-- heck, even selling the same Newton MessagePad 2100 from four years ago would be a leap ahead of a lot of the dreck out there. Well, for those of you who continue to dream the impossible dream, faithful viewer Keith Isley points out three weeks' worth of rumors and discussion about "Navi," Apple's alleged "Newton 3" project. A Darwin-based, OpenGL-interface handheld that can run Cocoa Mac OS X apps with a quick recompile? Whatever, chief... belief-wise, somehow we're just not feeling the love. But if these mythical beasts ever do see the light of a store shelf, sign us up, because our digital hubs sure could use some shiny new spokes.

Enough, already-- we give up! This is us saying uncle: "Uncle." We hereby admit defeat and acknowledge that reality is cranking out way more soap opera melodrama than our writers could ever hope to make up. Yes, folks, as it turns out, truth isn't just stranger than fiction-- it's also much, much sleazier; the Sunday People article that faithful viewer Ryan forwarded to us proves that once and for all.

See, while we were sitting around wondering if we could crib dialogue for Steve Jobs directly from Alexis Carrington in old episodes of "Dynasty," reality was kicking our metaphorical behinds at the Apple-flavored drama game over in Jolly Olde England. We'll just give you the broad strokes, because frankly we're just really steamed that we didn't come up with this ourselves: it seems that Jon Molyneux, Apple UK's former Managing Director (as quoted in this old press release), was the target of a professional contract killing lined up by his own estranged wife... or he would have been, had his wife not made the poor choice of trying to hire an undercover reporter posing as a hit man and working with Scotland Yard.

It seems that after leaving Apple, Molyneux went on to head up a dotcom that crashed and burned (as dotcoms do), and his failure appears to have caused the final collapse of his "stormy 21-year marriage." Amid "increasingly bitter" divorce proceedings and the ultimate shame and horror of being married to a man who, after the dotcom bust, was forced to take a job as a non-executive director (gasp!), his wife decided that "the only way to hold on to her luxury five-holidays-a-year lifestyle was to pay for her heavily-insured husband to be murdered." Read the article for more juicy details-- if it doesn't satisfy your soap opera appetite, you should probably be shooting up pure essence of "Dallas" six times a day.

Mr. Molyneux is only alive today because of his wife's extreme incompetence in picking out a decent hired killer. (It's so hard to find good help these days.) Seeing as he was lucky enough for his wife to spill the whole plan to an undercover reporter working with the cops, perhaps he should pay special attention to the moral of this little story: buddy, you really should have stuck with Apple.