Hey, does everybody remember a few years back, when Apple chucked $100 million at Samsung in hopes of guaranteeing that it would be able to secure a reasonably steady stream of those hard-to-get LCD panels? Even back then, Apple had a tough time getting its hands on enough-- and that was when it only needed them for PowerBooks and iBooks. "We'll need more flat displays than ever going forward," said Steve, and he couldn't have been more correct; these days, aside from a couple of lowly G3 iMacs, the company's entire product line is LCD-based. It's like the next phase in Steve's grand scheme for world domination can't commence until there are a certain number of active LCD panels distributed among the populace or something.

And yet, despite having bribed-- excuse us, invested in-- Samsung in hopes of ensuring a reasonable supply of those crucial population-subjugating LCD panels, we can't help but notice that the flat-panel iMac is only just now starting to appear in reasonable quantities; meanwhile, last week Apple was forced to raise the iMac's sticker price by a hundred bucks in part because of rising LCD costs. All of which leaves us wondering what, exactly, Apple got in return for the hundred mil it sunk into Samsung. (A lovely fruit basket at Christmas, at least, we hope.)

Well, we never really kept on top of the story of just where Apple gets its screens, because frankly, we suspect that the finer plot points of LCD panel supply distribution are probably duller than beige-painted dirt. As it turns out, though, apparently Apple hasn't been getting its iMac screens directly from Samsung at all, but rather from LG Philips-- who we're sure is a fine company and all, but we suspect that it's had a bit of trouble keeping up with Apple's especially demanding demand. Things might be different if LG Philips found itself on the receiving end of a $100 million "investment," but that's pure speculation on our part.

Anyway, evidently Steve has had a wake-up call of sorts and has finally decided that relying on a single vendor to supply all of its iMac screens just isn't prudent-- not if he wants to overthrow the worlds' governments sometime before he turns ninety. So, according to DigiTimes, the company has just signed up a second vendor called HannStar. In May, HannStar will reportedly start shipping iMac-suitable screens to Apple at the rate of 10,000 per month, "which could then rise to 30,000" later on. Thirty grand per month? Our lightning-quick math skills tell us that that's enough iMacs for a thousand iMacs each day-- and that's not counting however many screens that LG Philips is still cranking out. Apparently Steve wasn't kidding about the iMacs hitting "volume production"; sounds like pretty soon he's going to have the amps cranked up to eleven.

Aw, nurtz-- we had heard from multiple sources that Alias|Wavefront (you know, the makers of Maya) had primed the press for some sort of earth-shattering announcement today that would change the world of 3D forever, so of course we started getting our hopes up that maybe it was connected to those rumors about Apple looking to buy A|W as yet another entertainment technology purchase to put on the shelf next to Nothing Real. (We've long suspected that, when it comes to the line of "Giants of Creative Software" action figures, Steve's working on collecting the whole set.) Imagine our disappointment when faithful viewer David H. Dennis informed us that all A|W announced was a price drop for Maya. Sorry, folks, no Apple-branded "3D Studio Pro" just yet. We had our hopes up in part because Maya is at 4.0 for every platform except Mac OS X, which is still running 3.5. Oh, the shame of it all.

But while it's nowhere near as interesting as an Apple buyout announcement, the Maya price drop is still pretty significant due to its sheer magnitude-- nearly 75% off for the "Complete" edition. Of course, that just means that Maya Complete is now $1999 instead of $7500, so it's still not exactly the kind of thing most people are going to be buying as stocking stuffers for the whole family once the holidays roll around. For what it's worth, Maya Unlimited (which is apparently Maya Complete plus some extra tools for modeling fur and cloth-- really!) drops from $16,000 to $6,999; that's less relevant to most AtAT viewers, however, because 1) unlike Maya Complete, Maya Unlimited isn't yet available for the Mac, and 2) most AtAT viewers are probably about as likely to rush out and blow seven grand on a 3D software package as they are to win the lottery while being struck by lightning.

Two thousand, though... that's almost within the realm of financial possibility. Between a $1999 price for Maya Complete and the recently-released free-for-personal-exploration Maya Personal Learning Edition, "regular people" now have some options to dip their toes into the world of professional 3D modeling and animation. By dropping Maya into the "prosumer" price range, clearly A|W (champion of the proletariat) is trying to bring high-end 3D to The People™. Well, either that, or they're feeling the heat from NewTek's LightWave 3D, which is Mac-compatible, recently dropped in price from $2495 to $1595, and most importantly of all, has been used to animate LCD iMacs dancing the Limbo on the beach-- your call.

And just because A|W's latest move just looks like a reactive counterstrike in a 3D price war, maybe it's not time to give up hope on that "Apple buys Maya" rumor just yet; Think Secret reports that Apple is poking around for 3D technology it can purchase and combine with Nothing Real's Shake and Final Cut Pro so that it can offer "integrated 'single-source' hardware/software solutions" for the creation of high-end special effects. Allegedly A|W was wooing Apple as a buyer, and Apple wasn't biting-- but things change, and if Apple is serious about selling turnkey CGI/special effects workstations, Maya is still a serious contender for the 3D slot in the line-up. In the meantime, sit tight and enjoy the price breaks.

You young'uns who have only been using Macs for the past few months wouldn't remember when Java performance on our beloved platform was a little less than stellar. Actually, it was pretty bad. Okay, fine: the Mac platform was where Java applets came to die-- is that blunt enough for you? Heck, it was ages before we could even run any Java on our Macs, because the only real Virtual Machine out there was Netscape's, and it didn't come to the Mac version of the browser for a really long time. When it did, it was buggy as all get-out and slower than rush-hour traffic in the Land of the Sloth People. Ahhh, those were the days...

Of course, this was before we could use the JVM in the Mac version of Internet Explorer, and it was before Apple's own Mac OS Runtime for Java showed up. And needless to say, it was long before the advent of Mac OS X, which promised to be the very best platform for Java, bar none. We're not big Java fiends down here at the AtAT studios (note the distinction between java and Java-- we dig our coffee, but our Java use is basically limited to occasionally loading up a crossword applet), so we're not really qualified to judge whether or not Mac OS X's Java lives up to the hype, but Apple claims that it's "blazingly fast." We've heard from a few Java developers who have been disappointed by the performance of their software under Mac OS X, however, so we've long assumed that, while Mac Java may be better now than it's ever been before, Apple's marketing folks might still be sipping from the Fountain of Hyperbole.

But hey, maybe we've been wrong. According to an InfoWorld article, Sun, the company behind Java in the first place, is "considering including some Apple-written code" in its own Virtual Machine to introduce a little extra zing. Apple claims that it tweaked Sun's Java HotSpot VM under Mac OS X by-- and try to keep up, here-- "mapping [shared system libraries] into memory at run time" to "boost loading speed and reduce memory consumption." Consequently, Apple claims that "Java applications load faster on Apple Macintosh systems than on other computers."

Hey, we'll take Apple's word for it; if it were just more marketing fluff instead of a real technical improvement, we doubt the company would be offering to share its changes with Sun. And we're thrilled to hear that our platform is finally apparently hot stuff when it comes to Java, although we can't help but shed a tear of nostalgia for those grand old days when we played the original JavaBowl in Netscape 3 on a Quadra 800 at about twelve seconds per frame until the system crashed at most two minutes later. Actually, no, wait... that really sucked. Things are much better now. Never mind.