So, uh, what have you got planned for January 24th? You do have something planned, don't you? After all, it's going to be the Mac's twentieth birthday, and any celebration with appropriate levels of hoopla and debauchery is going to take at least six months to orchestrate. The shindig here at the AtAT compound is shaping up nicely, but we still have to figure out where to store 8,000 cubic feet of extremely dodgy foreign-made fireworks and whom we'll need to bribe in order to get the live zebras out of quarantine in time.

But even if we do manage to get all our pyrotechnics and livestock in order, chances are that Apple's own celebration will be so massive it'll make ours look like two convalescents sharing a can of Pringles-- and in addition to the Animal House antics sure to sweep through the halls of One Infinite Loop like a herd of wildebeests in heat, you just know that Apple's also got some sort of kickin' new Mac in the works that'll serve as a fitting way to mark the occasion. What'll it be like, you ask? Only Steve knows for sure. But as faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini points out, MacWhispers isn't afraid to hazard a guess.

The usual caveats about trusting Mac rumors sites-- especially new ones-- about as far as you can comfortably spit a bowling ball apply, of course, but MacWhispers claims to have an unverified source at the plastics molding plant that made the acrylic shells for the ill-fated Power Mac G4 Cube-- and said source allegedly claims that Apple wants more. Coupled with rumors that Apple is working on a "special edition" Mac for 1/24/2004, MacWhispers figures that "the machine may be slated to appears in a clear cast acrylic enclosure nearly identical to the original G4 Cube."

It's not out of the question, we suppose; after all, the Cube was Steve's baby, and we bet he's just itching to give it a second chance at success. Plus, Apple pretty much brought this sort of rumor on itself with the manner in which it retired the original Cube: "there is a small chance [Apple] will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future, but that there are no plans to do so at this time." Talk about leaving the door open for goofy speculation.

At the same time, though, there are a few reasons why we think a revamped Cube is about as likely to serve as the 20th-Birthday Mac as Steve Jobs is to resign from his posts at Apple and Pixar to head up the board over at Ruth's Chris Steak House. For one thing, we'd really expect Apple to celebrate twenty years of Macintosh simplicity with an all-in-one design, not a modular one like the Cube's. For another, it seems unlikely that the company would celebrate the theme of innovation by rolling out a variation on a system it designed three years ago. And lastly, take a look at Apple's stock chart and see what happened at the end of September 2000 when Apple announced an earnings warning due in part to the Cube's "slower than expected start." Do you think Apple really wants to mark twenty years of the Mac by reminding people of one of the platform's most embarrassing commercial failures?

For our part, our own sources report that the 20th-Birthday Mac will instead be a near-perfect replica of 1984's original Macintosh design; all the legacy ports will be replaced with USB, FireWire, Ethernet, etc., and at its heart will beat a mighty PowerPC 970 running Mac OS X 10.3 in all its glory. Well, some of its glory. Word has it that Aqua is a teensy bit cramped and, well, a little bit completely illegible on a 9-inch 512x384 black and white screen. But hey, that's just a minor annoyance, right?

By the way, for the Mac's twenty-first birthday in 2005, Apple will re-release the same model, but with a faster processor, more RAM, a larger hard disk, and a bottle of Tequila. Upon opening the box, purchasers of the 21st Anniversary Mac will discover that the bottle is empty, the Mac makes a sloshing noise when moved, and turning it on reveals the Sad Mac icon lying on its side in a pool of vomit.

You bought an iBook or PowerBook this year, right? You haven't? Well, why the fuzzy heck not? Completely aside from the fact that Apple's latest portables are a great value and the coolest kicks in the cave, you're surely aware that Steve Jobs proclaimed 2003 to be the Year of the Notebook-- and we're pretty certain that means you're required by law to buy one, so don't come crying to us if you get tossed in the slammer. (Don't blame Steve or Apple; we're pretty sure this whole "Year of the Notebook" thing is a Chinese zodiac deal.)

The good news is that it's apparently the Year of the Notebook over in the UK, too. According to an article in Macworld UK, Apple's notebook sales in the first quarter of the year were up a chubby 18.8% over there. Good news, right? But wait, there's more: UK notebook sales industry-wide grew only 14.7% in the same time period, which means that Apple's growth is outstripping that of the rest of the industry-- at least in the UK, when it comes to laptops. We're unsure of the protocol in a situation like this, but we suspect we're supposed to say "blimey" or something.

Let's blithely skip over the bit about how desktop sales fell 31.3% (cough) and consider the implications of UK's Year of the Notebook on Apple's relationship with the UK in general. It's long been suspected that Steve Jobs has been perpetuating some sort of ill-conceived vendetta against the English over the years. But will the UK's market acceptance of his company's portables pave the way for a reconciliation? And what about the Scotland on Sunday article pointed out by faithful viewer Porsupah which doesn't say anything about Apple, but does claim that Microsoft is "in danger of falling off the pace" and likely to "have difficulty sustaining its current share price"?

Here's hoping that all this direct and indirect support from the UK leads Steve to a newfound love of the United Kingdom. Okay, mostly we just want to see Steve in a deerstalker cap. Or maybe a kilt.

Oh, for cryin' out... Okay, could Microsoft's look-and-feel thievery get any more blatant? Is the company finally going to take that final step and just start reselling Mac OS X boxes with "Mac OS X" crossed out and "Windows" scribbled on the box with a Sharpie?

Here's what's got us all riled up. We already mentioned how Phil "The Man" Schiller dissed Microsoft's recent demo of its upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows (due in 2005) by saying that its graphics architecture is "almost a direct copy of Quartz." Well, we never knew exactly what prompted that comment-- we figured it was based on a technical rundown of Longhorn's core technologies in a WinHEC panel discussion or something. But faithful viewer Jan Adriaenssens just tipped us off to a short QuickTime movie over at Extreme Tech that illustrates just what was sticking in Phil's craw.

Look beyond the fact that the windows shown have a familiar Aqua feel to them; it's the flappy way the windows move that must have prompted the comparisons to Quartz. Drag a window by the title bar to a new location and the rest of the window just sort of dangles along in its wake like a limp piece of spaghetti. Looks kinda neat, right? And it's so reminiscent of the Genie Effect that come 2005, Windows users should check their interfaces to see if the original serial numbers have been filed off.

One important distinction: once again, Microsoft reveals a certain cluelessness about form following function. The Genie Effect doesn't just look nifty; it gives the user valuable visual feedback about where a window goes when it's minimized. In stark contrast, as far as we can make out from this short video clip, Microsoft's flapping windows don't do anything except drive the sale of hardware upgrades. We admit we're looking at a very short clip out of context, so we could be wrong. But honestly, folks... when are we ever? (Don't answer that.)