Welcome to Rehash Day here on AtAT! Yes, there seems to be a bit of a lull casting its icy pall across the Mac landscape, and most of the stuff that's happening now is actually stuff that's happened before. But hey, there's nothing wrong with leftovers now and again, right? Heck, lasagna's better on the second day right out of the fridge, so why shouldn't your Apple-flavored drama age just as deliciously?

Try this on for size: PaidContent.org has selected comments from Peter Lowe, Apple's Director of Marketing for Applications and Services, taken from his keynote yesterday at the Jupiter Plug.IN conference. "What's this," you ask? "A keynote we hadn't even heard was happening in the first place?" Well, yes, probably; we certainly didn't know about it until after the fact, but then, we're pretty out of the loop these days. Still, don't panic; you didn't miss a new PowerBook intro or any onstage hijinks involving Phil Schiller, a Photoshop bake-off, and a greased pig. Plug.IN apparently focuses entirely on digital music, and as such, Mr. Lowe (who is intimately involved with iTunes and its Music Store) was dispatched to handle the Peternote-- which featured, if anything, even fewer surprises than the CreativePro's Gregnote.

Peter reportedly voiced Apple's position that "the way to go after illegal file sharing services is to compete with them" by offering consumers an inexpensive alternative to the pitfalls said illicit services invariably include-- namely, unreliable encoding, poor connections, a lack of previews, misnamed files, and the "bad karma" that comes along with stealing. Interestingly enough, many people seem to be reporting this as "news," whereas we're pretty sure that Peter was just parroting the exact same points that Steve made back at the iTMS launch. Hence the whole "rehash" thing.

Of course, there was some newer stuff, or at least older stuff reiterated in a pointed manner: "If digital distribution is about one thing, it is about being simple... and it needs to be consistent... Web is not the best interface to enjoy music." Hmmm, suppose that was directed at anyone we know? Meanwhile, Peter confirms yet again that iTunes for Windows is still "on track to launch by the end of this year," and that it's Apple's "intention" for the Windows version to keep the same broad usage rights that customers with the Mac version enjoy. Which means that BuyMusic.com will probably die bleeding from its metaphorical eye sockets mere days later-- assuming that it hasn't drowned itself in its own incompetence by then.

And speaking of leftovers, who wants yet another helping of BuyMusic slapstick? Faithful viewer Kimball Larsen pointed out a customer experience detailed in, well, detail over at Scriptygoddess, and it would be truly funny if it weren't so utterly and irretrievably sad. In addition to describing some of BuyMusic's unforgivable user interface absurdities (if you buy an album, you still have to download-- and register via password-- each song individually), the author relates her nightmare in trying to do something we iTMS users take for granted: burning her purchased music onto a CD to play in the car. Turns out that under Windows 2000, the only CD-R plugin for Windows Media Player supported by BuyMusic is Roxio's, which crashes every single time the author attempts to use it.

That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if she could just burn the disc from her husband's XP system, but of course BuyMusic only lets you burn CDs from the computer you use to buy the song, even if you're allowed by the DRM to download it to another computer or two. Since she is effectively unable to burn her music to a CD, she threatened to involve her credit card company, which finally prompted BuyMusic to refund her money. Well, most of it. Until she complained again and they refunded all of it. Yeah, this is a business that'll flourish.

So what's the moral of this story? Well, it might be this: don't use Windows 2000 and BuyMusic.com when you admit you have a Power Mac G4 "collecting dust" because you "have no software for it." Surely that counts as a crime on some sort of cosmic scale, right? We hate to say it, but it sounds like there might be a little bad karma at play here, too...

Continuing in the "rehash" vein, how's this for a tired and sagging blast from the past? One of the latest controversies to make headlines this week is-- are you ready for this?-- the "Apple lied about the G5 benchmarks" dust-up. Yeah, we know-- we thought it was long-dead, too, but apparently not all of the analysts (even "chip analysts") bother reading anything other than tech headlines and "Love Is..." comic strips. Specifically, faithful viewer David Poves pointed out an article in The Inquirer about how senior analyst Peter Glaskowsky over at the Microprocessor Report labels many of Apple's G5 claims as "simply not true."

Now, to be perfectly fair, he's got a point on at least some of the issues; for example, yes, there were 64-bit Windows NT workstations seven or eight years ago, so Apple's claim to have the "world's first 64-bit personal computer" is slightly iffy and depends entirely on the vague distinction between a "workstation" and a "personal computer." (We figure it comes down to price; betcha those 64-bit Alpha systems didn't start at $1999...) But Pete's claim that Apple is lying about the benchmarks because the Pentium 4 and Xeon numbers as available elsewhere are "considerably higher than those that Apple reported," well, looks like Mr. Big Shot Chip Analyst somehow slept through all the followup which explained every single facet of the alleged discrepancy and put, we assumed, this issue to rest once and for all. Guess we were wrong.

It's nice, then, that The Inquirer is fair-minded enough to give a rebuttal equal time. It's also nice that said rebuttal takes the form of a link to an Applelust article by Joe C. Carson that's so infreakingcredibly thorough that it doesn't just run the arguments into the ground, it punches them straight through the earth's core with enough force that they pop out of the ground upside-down in China with little subterranean mole people clinging to them and screaming at the unaccustomed exposure to sunlight. Assuming you're not totally sick of the whole sordid spiel, give that article a look-see, because it even goes so far as to provide hints as to the identity of the guy who wrote the original "Apple's lying" tirade. And links to said fellow's other rants on topics as diverse as religion and the evils of purebred pets might prove enlightening, although not necessarily in the way the author intended. (Whether or not you agree with his views, it's his method of making an argument that we find revealing.)

Of course, it wouldn't be necessary to keeping beating this dead horse if uninformed so-called chip analysts didn't keep propping up the carcass à la Weekend at Bernie's. Sadly, though, this is not the best of all possible worlds, and therefore deceased equines are rarely left to rest in peace. Poor fellas.

Okay, so this topic isn't so much a rehash as it is a followup, but it's still about mining the past, so cut us a little slack on the whole "theme show" concept, willya? It's both unrealistic and inhumane to expect a perfectly consistent unifying theme woven throughout three separate scenes by a production staff with a combined attention span whose length is usually recorded in nanoseconds. In fact, our lack of focus is such a problem that we frequently change trains of thought in mid-sentence, leading people to think that we're making non sequiturs, when in reality we're just having burritos for lunch, which only take a few minutes to nuke in the microwave because we always thought that "built-in sharpener" in the Crayola 64-pack seemed a little useless.

Now that that's cleared up, let's get back to the topic at hand: the Tablet PC. You remember these things, right? They were first shown in 2000 and finally shipped last year from several Wintel manufacturers; they're sort of like laptops (indeed, they can be laptops), but you draw on the screen with a stylus. It's kinda like Microsoft took a Newton and shot it full of steroids and gamma radiation. Does any of this ring any bells? No? Well, don't feel bad: you're not alone. At least, not nearly as alone as the six people who actually bought one of these things. According to MacUser, fewer than 100,000 Tablet PCs have shipped since the product's launch last November, which certainly sounds to us like buyers are staying away in droves.

Let's put that number into a little perspective. November was eight months ago, but let's be generous and call it "two quarters." Now, Apple had a measly 2.3% market share last quarter, which analysts are fond of describing as a relatively insignificant sliver of the global computer market. And in that quarter, as we all know, Power Mac sales were in the proverbial toilet, because QuarkXPress still hadn't shipped and even the top-end G4 processor was looking oh-so-tired for high-end desktop use; people sat on their wallets awaiting the G5. And yet, even in a quarter in which Power Mac sales fell 20% and those Power Macs represented just 17% of Apple's piddling little 2.3% slice of the pie, Apple shipped 133,000 of them in a three-month period. Compare that to the 100,000 Tablet PCs shipped in over twice the amount of time, factor in how that 100,000 lumps together multiple Tablet PC products made by several different manufacturers (all of whom are probably cursing up a storm right now), and you'll probably arrive at the conclusion that the Tablet PC is, thus far, a flop. ("But how?! It includes the most significant innovation in Wintel history: the one-finger salute!")

What this means, of course, is that any hand-wringing about how Apple didn't have a tablet to counter Microsoft's version turned out to be unfounded at best. Our math's not terrific, but we figure that even if all 100,000 of those Tablet PCs sold were sold in the past three months, combined they'd still only account for 0.3% of the global computer market. Let's say that Apple had shipped its own tablet, and its sales comprised roughly the same percentage of Apple's quarterly unit sales as the Microsoft version comprises all non-Apple computer sales; at the last earnings conference call, Fred Anderson would have had to admit that Apple had sold only one or two thousand tablets all quarter. Eeek!

Okay, that reasoning's a little specious, because if Apple had done a tablet, it'd probably have been good. But you get the point: the Tablet PC hasn't lived up to its hype-- and it certainly isn't revitalizing the global PC market, as one or two of the most enthusiastic Microsoft lap dog analysts originally predicted. Between this development and the cratering of the PDA market in the past few years, it looks to us like Apple's instincts about what product segments not to pursue are spot on, whereas mosquito bites are occasionally fatal because Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day.