"Hey, AtAT," you ask, "just where the Galvin are those new PowerBooks that everyone's been waiting for since June's price cut?" Well, it's funny that you should take the Chris's name in vain, there, Binky. True, Mac fans have been waiting for new 12- and 15-inch PowerBooks ever since that inventory-clearing price reduction showed up almost two months ago-- and technically, we've all been waiting for the 15-incher for far longer, i.e. ever since the first aluminum PowerBooks surfaced in January and suddenly made titanium passé. Frankly, we were pretty puzzled, too, since we would have figured on at least the 15-incher having shown up by now.

So what's the hold-up? Believe it or not, according to AppleInsider, Apple has been swatted in the hinder by yet another Motorola production shortage. Yes, folks, it's all well and good to hang your hopes on IBM as the company that's going to develop kick-ass PowerPCs and actually deliver them 1) in quantity and 2) on time, but sadly, the transition can't happen overnight. In the meantime, Apple is still frighteningly dependent on Motorola to supply G4s to stick into PowerBooks, eMacs, and iMacs-- and word has it that Steve and company are still waiting for a big order of chips with an original promised delivery date of "mid-May"-- an order which now officially qualifies as "Later Than Kilborn." What, no "30 minutes or it's free" guarantee? Yeesh. Let's hope that when they finally show up, those chips at least come with an extra order of Crazy Bread.

Meanwhile, Apple allegedly has revised 12- and 15-inch PowerBooks ready and waiting, packed to the gills with everything but an actual processor inside. (We bet they'd make you a sweet deal on one if you're interested.) These puppies were supposedly targeted for a WWDC intro, then pushed back to a Macworld CreativePro release, and are now listed internally at Apple as shipping "sometime before intelligent apes enslave mankind and the Statue of Liberty is mostly buried and all slanty." Reportedly Apple has been planning to pop faster G4s in the iMacs, too, which are also overdue for a little pick-me-up, but until Motorola comes through with the goods, that's a no-go as well.

Steve is said to be "irate" about the hold-up to the degree that he "often uses profanity when expressing his displeasure with the semiconductor sector of Motorola." Gee, is that all? We hear that Mr. Mercurial often uses profanity when expressing his displeasure with the fact that unwrapping a Jolly Rancher occasionally leaves little bits of plastic on the candy, so if the G4 shortage hasn't prompted at least three murderous rampages in highly-populated areas, maybe he's mellowing with age. Or maybe if those G4s don't turn up in another week or so, Motorola's headquarters will be mysteriously reduced to a smoking hole in the ground...

Why, what's this? Still more evidence that BuyMusic.com sucks? You betcha, folks-- it just keeps coming, wave after wave of it, unceasing and endless just like those bug-looking swoopy alien things in Galaga. Rather than try to weave this into some semblance of a narrative (c'mon, you already know the plot: jackass shamelessly rips off iTunes Music Store while simultaneously badmouthing same, jackass drags wife-beating ex-con porn-making hair-metal rock personality along on a $40 million lie-filled marketing blitz which mysteriously neglects to mention that the service chews spew, etc.), we're opting for a simple list form, which seems a little more efficient given the circumstances. So without further ado, we give you... BuyMusic Bleeaauuurghh!

• Faithful viewer Michael McKinney was the first to point out USA Today's interesting little slam, which notes a couple of relevant facts: one is that BuyMusic refuses to divulge its first-week sales numbers, although Buy.dork Scott Blum tersely admits that "it's not millions." The other is that apparently BuyMusic kindasorta forgot to enable the transfer of any of its songs to portable music devices. "We're working on this," said Blum. Hey Scott, a little tip for you: the best time to work on stuff like this is before you sell broken music to your customers. Just a helpful tip. (BuyMusic claims to have fixed the problem and is magnanimously allowing customers to re-download their music in non-screwed-up form. Oh, joy.)

• Meanwhile, faithful viewer Greg W. notes a thread over in Ars Technica's InfoPop forums that reveals a fun fact about BuyMusic songs: apparently they can't be backed up. Or, at least, the licenses can't be backed up, which basically means the same thing: if your hard disk dies, so does your music, and it's not restorable. Contrast this with the iTMS, which lets you back up your songs however you want, including by burning as many audio CDs as you like. (On a related note, several viewers pointed out that even reformatting one's hard drive doesn't deauthorize a given Mac from playing a specific customer's iTMS songs, throwing a little more weight behind yesterday's crackpot conspiracy theory that the formerly MusicDirect-/Microsoft-employed Shawn Yeager concocted his tale of newly-Canadian iTMS woe in an attempt to discredit Apple's service. If you're bent that way, go wild.)

• Lastly (for now), faithful viewer Jody Whitesides is a recording artist whose music is about to appear on the iTMS. (Yay, Jody!) The pertinent bit, though, is that he was surprised to discover that his songs are also listed over at BuyMusic.com-- as are the songs of several of his friends, none of whom had any inkling of how or why. The situation appears to be that BuyMusic got most of its 300,000-song catalog from The Orchard, a distribution company that has an "iffy" reputation when it comes to remembering to pay the artists for the music it sells. So at least some of BuyMusic's catalog "comes from musicians/bands that were not asked for permission, and who will likely not see a penny of any sale." Terriffic. Jody's currently checking into his options to force the removal of her songs from BuyMusic, legal-wise, and if you're a musician with a recording, we recommend that you disable Javascript in your browser and take a quick check over at BuyMusic.com just to be sure they aren't selling your music without your knowledge, too.

So that's today's batch. Fear not, we're sure there's plenty more bile where that came from. Given the level of outrage against Blum's venture from so many parties on so many levels, we figure we'll be seeing lots of stuff like this until BuyMusic becomes ByeMusic.

The masses have spoken, and generally speaking, while they would love some brushed metal on their desktops, they don't want it anywhere near their Finder. (Okay, technically we don't think the Power Mac G5 enclosure is brushed metal, but hey, cut us a little slack.) Well, we've got some good news and some bad news on that front. Which do you want first? What's that? There's no way for you to tell us which you want first and have it actually affect the outcome of this scene in any fashion, because it's presented in a strictly linear, static, and one-way structure and this entire conversational conceit is simply a stylistic device that affords no actual real-time interaction between author and audience? Okay, chief, bad news it is, then!

So here's the icky stuff: according to Think Secret, Apple distributor Ingram Micro is warning resellers that while the 1.6 and 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5s will indeed ship in August as Steve promised (in the third week, to be precise), the dual 2.0 GHz model-- by far the most popular, even judging solely by the Top Sellers list at the Apple Store-- won't find its way onto store shelves until "late September." That doesn't bode well for those of you who didn't bother to preorder, instead counting on sauntering lazily into CompUSA or whatever and slapping down some plastic whenever the mood strikes you. Well, actually, now that we think about it, it bodes just fine for you as long as the mood strikes you in, say, late September. Or a little later. But not earlier! That was the point we were trying to make, there.

Mmmm. Yeah.

There's an upside, however, which is that, as MacRumors points out, if you did preorder a dual G5 from Apple within mere seconds of the announcement because every passing minute of your life without one is like an infinity of hellfire and wet willies, if you check your delivery date, you'll most likely still see a ETA of late August. Of course, whether that's accurate and it's preordering goody-goodies like you that are sucking up all the duals and keeping them out of the hands of the rest of us, or you're getting shafted until late September just like the rest of us and Apple just hasn't bothered to update your ETA is a matter of some speculation.

Interestingly enough, that wasn't the "good news" to which we initially referred. (Truly, we are complex beings, with hidden depths.) The good news has to do with the other end of the brushed metal stick, i.e Panther's new Finder. If you're like most Mac users, you consider Panther's new metallicized Finder to be a personal affront and an assault on all that's good and decent in this world. (Personally, we're fine with it, but we're weird that way.) Well, here's the real good news: according to a report at MacBidouille, the latest test build of Panther adds a slew of nifty features-- increased speed and stability, data compression in the Finder, synchronization between Address Book and Microsoft Exchange, dancing hampsters [sic] in practically every window-- and "a simplified Aqua look" as an option for the Finder. Of course, if you go the Aqua route, you apparently don't get the new side column or a toolbar, but we expect that lots of you will find that to be a no-brainer tradeoff. So rejoice!

On a related note, the bad news is that the frogurt is also cursed-- but you get your choice of topping!