Greetings, and welcome back to another exciting episode of As the Emeryville Turns! Yeah, yeah, we know... there's been an awfully high ratio of stuff about the (allegedly) imminent grand opening of the Apple Store Bay Street floating around here lately, but what the heck-- at least it's a continuing plot thread. Things are kinda slow lately, and we're thankful for what we can get. (We figure we'll hold off on renaming the show, though, until we broadcast another three consecutive episodes with Emeryville scenes in them.)

To recap: last week we noted that Apple had officially bumped the Emeryville store into the Neato-Keen Coming Soon box on its retail page, complete with a November 16th grand opening date. But then yesterday we had to report that the November 16th tag had been mysteriously replaced with one of the most reviled phrases in the high-tech universe: "Coming Soon." Always ones to oblige, we offered up all sorts of extremely plausible suggestions for reasons for the delay, but it seems that all you folks out there in TV Land inexplicably favor educated theories based on established facts to random swirling speculation based on nothing in particular. Weirdos.

But never let it be said that we don't give the audience what it wants. We heard from Bay Area faithful viewers Don Carlile, Bruce, JoshOgle, and scads of others that the Apple Store Bay Street is located in the Bay Street Mall, which isn't actually open to the public yet-- and if we had to offer an educated theory based on established facts as to why, well, the fact that said mall is currently still apparently very much under construction might have a teensy little something to do with it.

Selected excerpts from eyewitness accounts: "Very wet construction site"; "huge blob of steel and wood and whatever"; "lots of mud"; "surrounded by fences"; "doesn't even have interior walls yet"; "road leading to the Apple store is blocked with a big fence"; "smoking hole in the ground filled with quicksand and pit vipers with little life vests." Okay, we may have added that last one ourselves, but you get the picture. Indeed, by all accounts, Apple was totally on track and ready to Unleash the Dogs of Retail this Saturday, and wasn't terribly pleased at the prospect of having to wait for the mall itself to play catch-up.

But it seems that Apple has chosen the path of Blinding Optimism; faithful viewer Dan Young notes that the Bay Street "Coming Soon" has once again changed back into a date: November 23rd, to be exact, which (if it's not just a pipe dream) is still in time to get the store running full-force before Thanksgiving and the insane holiday shopping crunch that immediately follows. So that's the latest, Bay Area partygoers; update your copies of iCal appropriately, and enjoy the grand opening-- provided you're not going to be out of town for Turkey Day already like poor ol' Dan. Somebody snag him an extra t-shirt.

Jonesing for an update? We're not surprised; after all, it's been almost nine weeks since Mac OS X 10.2.1 made the scene, and that's a long time to go without so much as a point-release update to take the edge off. Well, Jaguar-using Software Update junkies rejoice: Mac OS X 10.2.2 was released last night, which means you're just a click away from infusing your Mac with all sorts of shiny new bug-fixy goodness.

We'd give you our own impressions of 10.2.2, but truth be told, we haven't actually installed it yet, for a couple of reasons. The first is that "uptime" on our main production system currently returns "up 35 days, 16:42" and counting, and we're loath to break the streak just for the sake of installing a minor update without which our Mac seems to be coping pretty nicely. We don't have a particular goal, here, but rebooting voluntarily after nearly 36 days of uptime would feel like kicking over a sand castle we spent a month making. Sure, it's irrational, but so's eating donuts upside-down while doing a handstand on a board 54 stories above the New York City streets, and you don't hear anyone calling "Shipwreck" Kelly irrational, do you? Ha. We've run circles 'round you logically.

The other reason is that we're actually in a strangely cautious frame of mind right now, so instead of blithely diving in and installing an update just for the sake of it, we're holding back and letting everyone else blithely dive in and install an update just for the sake of it. Maybe after a couple of days, when we've waded through all the bug reports, we'll make an informed decision to allow that code onto our Mac's boot drive. For now, though, we're content to sit back and listen to some of the feckless early adopters complain of post-update road bumps like disappearing iPods, incompatible Norton Utilities, freezes on reboot, deleted admin passwords, and nonfunctional optical drives.

But don't get us wrong: we will install this update soon, mostly because it's implemented one change for which the entire Mac community has been clamoring for months on end. Take a peek at Apple's list of changes in 10.2.2 and you'll notice that it "addresses a potential kernel panic situation when using three video cards and more than 512 MB of RAM." Well, geez-- finally! Seriously, as if anyone uses fewer than three displays anymore...

Remember all the time we've spent sitting around waiting for Apple to get off its duff and ship a new PDA to replace the long-lamented Newton? Well, Apple never actually got around to producing one-- but that's not going to stop Mike Dell from releasing his own copycat PDA anyway. (Yes, the guy is that sick.) If you keep your ear to the ground about more general tech stuff instead of limiting your worldview entirely to All Things Apple, you've probably already heard that Dell plans to unveil its first handheld device next week, at a price point that may make other PDA manufacturers require a change of shorts. Expect a price war in that market, because the new Dell handhelds are reportedly going to undercut comparable competing PDAs by hundreds of dollars.

So if Apple doesn't have a PDA, how exactly is Dell's an Apple ripoff, you ask? Well, we won't really know until the device comes to market, but faithful viewer Andrew Borovsky happened upon this image of the upcoming Dell Axim X5-- and you can't tell us that the swoopy blue pattern on the screen doesn't look a whole lot like the default Desktop image in currently shipping Macs. Moreover, what's with the extremely Aquaesque Dell logo in the middle of the screen? Shiny round button, light cast from straight up... apparently Dell's decided to run the Axim with Mac OS X Lite. You know, just like Apple was rumored to be working on all that time.

We know what you're thinking: can we really trust that this image is legit? Okay, sure, you've got no particular reason to believe that InfoSync didn't publish a doctored image. But if you still doubt the Apple-Dell PDA connection, how do you explain this Associated Press article? At broadcast time it makes this extremely interesting statement: "A company spokesman said Dell decided against Macintosh's Palm OS5 technology because Microsoft's Pocket PC is a better fit for Dell's move toward standardization."

Wait, Macintosh's Palm OS5? Company name/product name confusion aside, we knew that Apple and Palm were working together a lot lately, and we know that Palm OS 5 incorporates BeOS technologies that at one point Apple was considering using as the basis of what is now known as Mac OS X-- but who knew that Palm's latest operating system is apparently a covert Apple project? Clearly something strange is going on here.

Of course, strange as it may be, that last bit sort of contradicts the whole "Dell is copying Apple" thingy, so we probably shouldn't have mentioned it if we actually wanted to convince you of anything... so, um, never mind. Say take a look at that picture again, willya? Boy howdy, that suuuure is some crazy Apple ripoff, ain't it?