You have to applaud the Austin American-Statesman; while the rest of the Apple-focused media is wasting its time chasing down ultimately meaningless minutiae about rampant benchmark controversy, prattling on about the coming downloadable music wars, or even rambling incessantly about the Power Mac G5's style-to-speed ratio, the Statesman is investigating something of real importance and depth: Steve Jobs's wardrobe, and in particular, the significance of the signature black mock turtleneck and the omnipresent blue jeans. Thank heaven for the fourth estate.

The Statesman lists the couturial associations of Jobs's standard outfit: "nonconformist beatniks," "mods," "hipster intellectuals," and "rebels" who are "cool, calm, and collected." Fashion Institute of Technology sociology professor Ruth Rubinstein calls it a "clerical outfit" for a man who "is all about democracy and sharing" [ed. note: What the?!...] and "believes the computer can really revolutionize the world." Oooookay. Meanwhile, WIRED senior editor Jeffrey O'Brien thinks that Jobs's fashion statement is probably "my creativity is elsewhere," but contends that at least his outfit is "more streamlined," more approachable," and "much more interesting" than Mike Dell's "traditional boardroom attire." Well, doy.

Unfortunately, this was all a bit of a waste of time on the Statesman's part, since they could simply have asked any true Mac fan why Steve wears The Uniform: it's the outfit that maximizes the range and potency of his Reality Distortion Field output. (Well, okay, technically a white jumpsuit with that big silver V-shaped thing across the chest works even better, but it tends to arouse suspicion.) Appearing in front of an audience clad in a lesser RDF conduit would be nothing short of foolish-- not to mention irresponsible, since Steve has stockholders to consider, as well as his own unstoppable plans for world domination.

The Statesman points out several occasions on which His Steveness has been spotted in public in non-turtleneck-and-jeans outfits, but all three are easily explained. Sure, he wore a tuxedo to the Oscars, but attending the Academy Awards without wearing either a tux or a $10,000 evening gown with a plunging neckline will get a contract put out on your head, and Steve didn't think he had the cleavage to pull off the latter. And yes, he wore a suit for the Macworld Expo Tokyo 2001, but he also unveiled Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian iMacs, so he was clearly stoned out of his gourd. As for the occasional white tee/black vest combo, that's the traditional mating garb on his home planet, so he's, uh, just lookin' to get busy. After all, mercurial extraterrestrials bent on subverting the entire human race need love too...

Well, the developer release of Panther has been in the hands of eager code monkeys for a week, now, so there's no end of info on Apple's next major Mac OS X release floating around the 'net-- not to mention screenshots, screenshots, screenshots! If you dig a little, you won't have much trouble finding all sorts of nifty little tidbits that didn't quite make the cut at last week's WWDC Stevenote. (We're enjoying this FunMac thread in particular, as originally noted over at MacRumors. Nothing's niftier than seeing entire interface windows labeled "To be implemented...") But we're in a lousy mood today, so rather than focus on all the great new stuff Panther already has to offer (such as the option to overwrite trashed files with random junk 35 times, so no one will ever be able to prove that you actually downloaded a Spice Girls video), we're going to point out that beige is officially over-- and black isn't that far behind.

Now, of course you already knew that beige is so last-three-decades-of-the-20th-century, but regardless, some stubborn Fashion Don'ts out there are still using beige Power Mac G3s to get some actual work done-- and in a current operating system, no less; Jaguar's System Requirements page explicitly lists the "Beige Power Mac G3" as a supported system. But as far as Panther's concerned, beige is downright Nowheresville, and not just from a style perspective. We were poking around through Think Secret's coverage of the Panther developer release and noticed that, sure enough, the system requirements appear to have changed: the only Power Mac G3 still supported is the Blue & White.

And beige isn't the only passé hue that dropped off the A-list; looks like even basic black is out-- to a degree. Whereas Jaguar is supported on the entire PowerBook G3 Series (there's a picture of the original Wall Street model on the requirements page), Panther now requires at minimum a "PowerBook G3 with built-in USB"-- meaning, Lombard and onwards. (In other words, black is okay as long as you accessorize properly.) Now, granted, we're talking about five-and-a-half-, even six-year-old Macs, here, so it's not entirely outrageous that Apple won't support them in its new Mac OS X revision... but what if the reason why Apple excluded support for these models wasn't technical at all, but entirely based on style? How long before Bondi Blue gets it in the neck? Or Tangerine? Is any hue safe from Apple's grand vision of "metal for the pros, white for everyone else"?

Of course, this is just a developer release, so there's still a chance that the final version will accommodate beige G3s and Wall Street PowerBooks, but personally we consider that about as likely as Jonathan Ive sporting a mullet and chugging a Mountain Dew. But here's the real question: will our beige G3 boot into Panther if we spray-paint it silver first?

Ah, the good ol' days of the mid-'90s Mac... Don't get us wrong, here-- we love Mac OS X and the Power Mac G5 and all the other great new stuff flying around these days, but sometimes we just get a little nostalgic for the way things used to be. Smiley Macs. Icon Gardens. A Finder that could move a couple thousand files to the Trash in less than a week and a half. The bumbling, Shemp-like charm of Gil Amelio. And system extensions.

C'mon, you remember extensions, right? They were those great little files you dropped into the System Folder that patched the operating system itself, leading to great new productivity-enhancing features like Oscar the Grouch singing in your Trash can and about a zillion more opportunities for system crashes. Wheeeeeee! Seriously, it was great-- flying by the seat of our pants, blithely loading extensions left and right without checking for updated versions or known conflicts or anything. Just dropping in thirty new third-party extensions at once, rebooting, and hoping against hope that everything would be just fine.

Of course, nothing was ever fine, which brings us somewhere within the general vicinity of The Point: do you remember Conflict Catcher? Version 2 (or, actually, II) was one of the first commercial Mac software titles we, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, ran out and purchased after getting our first Mac, in large part due to our propensity for trying to load a beta copy of Kaleidoscope, a five-year-old version of After Dark, and an entire CD-ROM's worth of "fun Mac extensions by a bunch of people you've never heard of and will never, ever find" simultaneously.

We mention this because Casady & Greene, the company who brought us Conflict Catcher (and Glider Pro and Spellcatcher and Grammarian and a whole slew of other neat software) is calling it quits as of this Thursday, and it just sort of got us to thinking about the eight or nine hundred thousand conflict tests we performed with their software, discovering that this extension was incompatible with that application, that extension crashed if loaded before that other extension but only when this control panel was installed, and After Dark conflicted with... well, with software, as best as we could tell. C&G's software saved us untold hours of tracking down conflicting INITs, thus freeing up our precious time to do all that Oscar-singing Trash-tossing in our busy schedules.

So long, C&G; sorry to see you go. Considering that Mac OS X largely made Conflict Catcher obsolete, we can't say we're all that surprised, but it's still a little sad just the same. Maybe we'll try to fire up the ol' LC 575 and run a conflict test just for old time's sake. And then we can load the "Games" extension set for a round of Marathon...