Several viewers have noticed that our typical broadcast time these days hovers right around 5 AM EDT, and have written to us wondering why we've chosen to produce AtAT during such ungodly hours. Well, friends, the reason is simple: when slapping the show together that late at night, we're prone to make all sorts of entertainingly goofy mistakes which we can then correct on slow news days in fun-filled retraction scenes like this one. (Hey, it beats trying to squeeze any drama out of Fred Anderson joining the board of directors of an "information management software company." Thanks for the tip-off, faithful viewer Pastor Mac, but frankly, we're just not up to the challenge these days. Maybe when we're averaging more than forty minutes of sleep a night.)

For example, let's take yesterday's scene about IDC's apparent undercounting of Macs sold during the third calendar quarter. Faithful viewer Tony Leggett was the first of about eleventy-seventy individuals more well-rested than us to point out that the seeming discrepancy between Apple's reported number of units shipped (734,000) and IDC's claimed number of Macs sold (462,000) is easily explained by the simple fact that IDC was counting Mac sales only in the U.S., whereas Apple tallied up Macs shipped all over this nifty lil' planet. Oops!

As it turns out, we were thrown because we forgot that this U.S.-or-worldwide factor wouldn't come into play with Gateway, who ran screaming from the overseas markets in August of 2001, so Gateway's total sales and U.S. sales are one and the same. Anyway, it appears that IDC's Psychic Chicken™ was likely right on the money, which means that, yes, Apple probably does have a measly 3.8 percent share of the U.S. market-- and even less worldwide. But on the plus side, at least Apple sold more computers than Gateway overall and still isn't doing anywhere near poorly enough to have to pull up stakes overseas. So neener neener neener.

Speaking of pulling out of foreign markets, remember that bit about Quark sacking almost all of its staff in England and bolting from the UK as if it were fleeing a Viking attack? Way-ell, this isn't so much our retraction as it is Macworld UK's, but faithful viewer David Poves noticed that whereas yesterday that august publication reported that "all but two" UK Quarkers had been sent packing, today that very same mag-- indeed, that very same URL-- suddenly states that the actual number of pink-slipped workers was, um, well... two. (Unless Quark only had four UK staffers, there's a slight difference, there.) A Quark rep has also gone on record to deny that his company is ditching the UK, the Mac platform, the desktop market, or fuzzy baby ducks.

While we're at it, we should probably also mention that we were incorrect last week when we implied that Canadian high school teachers didn't qualify for the free Mac OS X promotion. Several Great White Northerners (commencing with faithful viewer Dan McKay) noted that a page on Apple's own web site clearly states that "this offer is valid in Canada." However, we don't feel we can accept all the blame, here, since at broadcast time today, another page on Apple's site still states that the offer "is valid only in the United States (50 states and District of Columbia)." So either Apple made a boo-boo, or we totally missed it when Canada became one of the fifty states. (Which one did we get rid of to make room? We're guessing it was Delaware.)

Lastly, we may have mentioned in passing recently that "submerging your Power Mac in molten lava is an excellent way to defragment all internal hard disks, burn away troublesome dust, and restore the unit's original showroom luster." Please be advised that this was a typographical error; it should have read "domesticated howler monkeys make excellent house pets when proper training commences no later than two months of age." We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused anybody. Our bad.

Okay, it's official: we're really sick of this whole "struggling economy" thing. And it wasn't any one thing that finally pushed us over the edge and suddenly, bam, we were sick of it, but rather a slow realization that, even to drama hounds like us, the magic is simply gone. There's just nothing particularly interesting about it anymore, you know? Maybe the first six times we heard about massive layoffs at Motorola there was something of the car crash "can't look away" factor at work, but really, these days anything about how the economy is still in turmoil is about as engrossing as a roundtable discussion on the difference between beige and ecru. It practically sends us straight to sleep-- and we can't sleep, dagnabbit, because we've got a show to do, here.

Still, when signs of potential economic hardship hit Apple, we suppose we've got to mention something about it. A moment of silence, please, then, for any (former) Apple employees who may have been pink-slipped this month; a CNET article indicates (sans detail) that, a few weeks ago, "a very small number of jobs" was trimmed from Cupertino's Great Tree of Gainful Employment. Think Secret claims that the cuts totaled about sixty and included members of the "Development Executive team" and the educational division. We wish the best of luck to those who suddenly found themselves unemployed in what we understand to be a really heinous job market. Interview tip: try not to mention that you have recurring nightmares involving the late Shari Lewis, her puppet Lambchop, and a leaf blower. Seriously, just trust us on this one.

Meanwhile, for the rest of you out there, it's not worth getting too worked up over these job cuts, since Apple's been doing this for a while, now-- trimming a few jobs here and there for the purposes of "restructuring." We heard way back in February that about fifty more layoffs were coming, and the axe fell in April; granted, we spent a good chunk of the year since then completely out of the loop, but we don't recall any other layoff reports after that, other than the ones at the retail stores six months ago.

Apple, for its part, still claims that despite the handful of layoffs, the company is hiring quickly enough that overall headcount is growing. We don't have a very recent sample to go by, but it's true that, according to Yahoo! Finance, Apple's total number of employees had increased to 9,603 at some point this year, up from 8,568 as reported last December. So once again, this doesn't look like a frenzied hack job done in desperation. Presumably we won't know for sure until Apple's next 10-Q filing, but as far as we can tell, there's no need to panic-- yet. That is, unless you really want to.

File this scene in the "Preemptive Quickie Denial" category. Faithful viewer Peter Chastain forwarded us a Wired article about a poor woman whose car was broken into by some malfeasant who took nothing but a shoulder bag (which was later found discarded and unmolested in a trash can nearby) and-- drum roll, please-- an old-school rainbow logo Apple sticker.

Actually, the woman describes it as a sticker, but we strongly suspect that it was actually a vinyl logo cling; if it had been a sticker, it would probably have been on the outside of the vehicle and there for the taking, making the smashing of a window somewhat gratuitous. The clings, on the other hand, are applied to the inside surface of the glass. They're also a bit harder to come by than the stickers, several of which came with every Mac sold.

But anyway, here's the thing: the victim of this heinous crime lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, which, coincidentally, also happens to be the birthplace of AtAT, the location of the original AtAT headquarters, and just one town over from the current AtAT compound. So we know what you're thinking, and no, we didn't do it.

For the record, we already have more Apple stickers than we known what to do with-- indeed, we could probably cover every square inch of the metallic blue floral wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom with them, if we ever got a mind to. And logo clings? Well, we're not exactly rolling in those, but we certainly have enough that we don't need to go breaking into nearby vehicles to get more. Especially when, if we really wanted another one, we could always just grab one off of eBay. Add to that the fact that we have a rock-solid alibi for the entire month of May when the crime took place (new parents have no time to run around breaking into cars) and we think you'll agree that your knee-jerk suspicions were incorrect, not to mention insulting. Shame on you.

Now that that's settled, on a related note, the cling that graced the left rear door window of the AtATmobile for the past eight years had petrified, turned brown, and evidently bonded chemically with the glass to which it stuck; the application of razor blades and harsh chemical solvents was necessary to remove it from the window to make way for a Babies "R" Us windowshade. True story. But fear not; we've still got the AtAT sticker on the bumper.