Alas, we fear the worst of the storm has passed, with nary a single disembowelment to be seen. The way that Apple and IDG World Expo have been behaving lately, we felt sure there'd be bloodshed by now-- but apparently our best hopes for extreme and brutal violence have been dashed by that consarned new-fangled invention called the "telephone." Had today's bicoastal conference call instead been a good ol'-fashioned face-to-face meeting, we bet there'd have been some good ol'-fashioned fist-to-face action, too. We feel cheated.

As for the outcome, well, there are no surprises so far; faithful viewer Q notes that, as reported in a CNET article, IDG has backed way the hell off of its weekend threat to ban Apple from the San Francisco show unless the company also dragged its hinder cross-country and put in appearances in New York and Boston, dadgum it. An IDG statement now indicates that, yes, Apple and Steve are welcome at January's San Francisco show. Meaning, of course, that Charlie Greco predictably punked out on his tough-guy threat, possibly because he heard that Steve's been working out, can bench two-twenty, and has his own private jet to fly across the country for the sole purpose of twisting Charlie into a human pretzel with a whole new concept of pain.

How about Apple's participation in the East Coast shindig? Well, it's still up in the air-- both sides have "agreed to hold ongoing discussions about Apple's role" in the New York and then Boston shows, which isn't a heckuva lot of progress as far as IDG is concerned. Then again, while it's no "East Coast East Coast Rah Rah Rah," it's still presumably a good sight better than Apple's prior "We wouldn't set foot in Boston even if you blackmailed us with compromising video footage depicting questionable activities with farm animals" stance.

Mind you, this hubbub ain't over yet, bub; what with negotiations continuing over whether or not Apple will bother to show up to New York and/or Boston, there's still a chance that some day a bunch of representatives from both sides will meet up close and personal and mayhem will ensue. Picture an Apple staffer clubbing a hapless IDG rep about the head and shoulders with said rep's own raggedly severed arm and you've got the gist of the sort of Sweeps Month stuff we're looking for. We can but hope.

Hey now, it's been pointed out to us that there's something slightly fishy about those latest sales numbers from IDC that had us fretting about Apple's market share plummeting ever earthward-- to wit, there's a minor discrepancy between IDC's count of Macs sold and Apple's own reported number of units shipped. How minor a discrepancy, you ask? Mmmmm, well, a ballpark potential difference of, say, thirty-seven frickin' percent. So, no biggie.

Here's the thing: faithful viewer Michel Benevento noticed that IDC states that Gateway sold 729,000 systems during the third calendar quarter. Fair enough, we suppose; after all, that's how many Gateway itself claims that it sold, and we've never known a cow to lie. (Then again, we've never known a cow to speak, either, so maybe that's not exactly an unimpeachable endorsement of talking bovine ethics.)

Meanwhile, IDC claims that Apple sold only 462,000 Macs last quarter, which made Michel a mite suspicious-- since Apple's own quarterly results press release indicates that the company "shipped 734 thousand Macintosh units during the quarter." Okay, fine, "shipping" 734,000 Macs isn't quite the same as "selling" them, but we're having a tough time figuring out how Apple might have sold only 462,000 of the Macs that it shipped. Especially since during the earnings conference call, Apple indicated that it had managed to reduce its channel inventory from six and a half weeks to five weeks, which implies (to us, anyway) that Apple sold more units than it shipped. Unless we're missing something (and, as always, there's a damn good chance that we are), it sounds to us as if Apple sold more computers than Gateway.

Armed with this information, we hunted down some lackey at IDC, taped his head to the bumper of our car, drove nice and slow, and politely asked him how his research firm had set about determining the number of Macs sold last quarter. He replied that they let a Psychic Chicken™ peck at corn kernels scattered over a numeric keypad and then just rounded down.

And thus the mystery is solved. So how come we, your typically skeptical AtAT staff, took an uncommon detour into unquestioning credulity when we first encountered the IDC numbers? Simple, really; when we looked at IDC'S press release it was about four o'clock in the morning-- and the principle upon which the entire infomercial empire is based is that people will believe just about anything at 4 AM. Which also explains the six Ab Forces in our hall closet.

Regular viewers may have noticed that we here at AtAT generally shy away from incorporating desktop publishing developments into the plot; sure, for some of you the lack of a Mac OS X version of QuarkXPress might constitute a life-or-death situation and edge-of-your-seat drama, but for us it's practically Snoozeville. Nothing personal, you understand, but it's just a matter of what floats one's boat, and our particular watercraft simply isn't buoyed by the world of CMYK and halftones and all that jazz.

Of course, if a desktop publishing situation arrives dripping with drama and has a Mac slant to boot, well, then that's something we can use without drifting off to Dreamland in the middle of a scene. What luck, then, that faithful viewer Tara Keezer tipped us off to a Macworld UK article about Quark's sudden decision to flee England so quickly and so thoroughly, you'd think they knew something we don't. Something about an imminent invasion by the Normans, perhaps? According to Macworld UK, Quark now has exactly two remaining UK staff, presumably left behind as bait to slow the advance of the conquering hordes who will pause to strip the flesh from the stragglers' bones before pillaging the rest of the country.

Okay, so maybe it's not an invasion that Quark's worried about; Macworld UK actually quotes one former Quark employee as reasoning that CEO Fred Ebrahimi wanted his company out of the UK because he "does not like the Macintosh platform." Uhhhh... say what now? Is this meant to imply that the head of Quark thinks that the UK is a bastion of Mac users? The AtAT staff was in the UK last year, and Mac users were harder to spot than gibbons running loose in Piccadilly Circus. Either things have changed drastically in the year since we left, or ol' Fred there needs to lay off the cough syrup.

No shills for Adobe are we, but it seems to us that an unnamed source stating that Quark is run by a Mac-hater (with an odd sense of demographics, apparently) might push a few fence-sitters who were waiting for a Carbonized Quark over into the InDesign camp-- but again, that's a tussle we find about as interesting as sorting lentils by size. Instead, we're going to check into this Norman invasion thing... plenty of potential for some ensuing wackiness there.