Holy flying lutefisk, one of the higher-ups at BusinessWeek apparently got beaned by a wayward iPod or something, thinks he's Steve Jobs, and declared this to be All-Apple Week down there at the BW headquarters! Man, talk about a slew of raw material from which to choose; it's like the lunch buffet down at Akbar India, only without Chana Masala and with only half the selection of chutneys. Let's see, here... we could talk about Stephen Wildstrom complaining that he has to keep writing about Apple because those durn fools in Cupertino won't knock it off with the innovating, already. Or we could tackle the interesting little article about how Mac OS X and the Xserve are finally letting Apple get its foot in the door in business IT environments, lack of beige notwithstanding. Or maybe we should go the lighter route, and discuss Haddad's recent followup piece on bands that object to the iTunes Music Store on "artistic" (or is that "arti$tic"?) grounds. On the other hand, we could go all Big Picturey and dissect the centerpiece on Apple's "strategic shift" to a less computer-centric, more Sony-like focus. Why, we haven't seen this much breadth of choice since a thunderstorm briefly granted us access to every cable channel on the dial! (Well, except for "those" channels. Darn prude thunderstorms.)

But we've made up our minds, and decided to ignore just about the whole pack o' Apple-y goodness and focus in like a freakin' laser on a single interesting quote in the enterprise article, as called out by MacRumors: "Next, Apple's newest version of OS X, called Panther-- which is scheduled to debut later this year-- will let corporations run Windows applications on their Macs." Hmmmm. Did Apple decide that Panther's reported ability to run Windows apps was just way too minor to mention at WWDC, unlike such earthshattering features as fast PDF rendering and built-in fax support? Did it simply slip Steve's mind? Or was it just a deep dark secret buried among Panther's "over 100 new features" that Apple wanted kept under wraps as a grand surprise until the OS was winging its way to store shelves?

Oh, the rumorological implications are staggering. Apple buying FWB (note the "Under New Management" sign) and building the long-awaited, long-delayed RealPC OS X (temporarily "removed from the web site," wink wink) into Panther! An enhanced Aqua port of WINE running atop Apple's own super-secret, super-speedy x86 emulation engine! The rebirth of Red Box for PowerPC! Any or all of these so ridiculously tweaked for the G5 that a new Power Mac can run Windows apps faster than the fastest Wintel money can buy, and still have enough cycles left over to balance your checkbook and find a cure for cancer! We're yelling and we don't know why! It's far too late to stop now! CHICKENS MAKE LOUSY HOUSE PETS!

Oop-- wait, hold the phone. It turns out that the BusinessWeek article was corrected even as we were foaming at the mouth over the possibilities of built-in Winulation; now the relevant passage has been changed to read: "Next, Apple's newest version of OS X, called Panther-- which is scheduled to debut later this year-- coupled with new emulation software from Microsoft will let corporations run Windows applications on their Macs more smoothly." So apparently this was just a simple mistake transformed into a half-assed reference to Microsoft's stated plans to make its recently-acquired VirtualPC available as a bundled component in certain future versions of Office for Macintosh. Big whoop.

Now, it's not like BusinessWeek never makes mistakes; heck, Haddad's piece even links to the wrong stock symbol, which we figure must be some sort of mortal sin among business publications. But if you're desperate to cling to speculation about some sort of integrated x86 emulator in Panther, we suppose you could always interpret BusinessWeek's "correction" as a quickie Jobs-mandated coverup following the unintentional leak of ultra-confidential info. Bonus points to conspiracy nuts who dig up evidence of the sudden violent deaths of several BusinessWeek staffers this morning, with only an empty Evian bottle and some turtleneck lint found at the scene of the mayhem...

Ah, conflict-- that magic Mrs. Dash without which all of life would taste like cold flour soup. By extension, conflict is also the very essence of entertainment, because as any ancient Roman can tell you, it just wasn't nearly as much fun when the Christians and lions sat down and played a friendly game of Pinochle. Deep down, the human animal craves the sight of two opposing forces, preferably ripping each other to bloody shreds. It's not a pleasant thought, to be sure, but there just isn't any other way to explain cockfights, boxing, Quake, or that hideously savage and uncivilized bloodsport known as curling.

Sometimes, though, the matchups are so lopsided as to provide no thrill whatsoever. Consider, for example, Mike Tyson's 1994 bout with the late Katharine Hepburn; everyone knew that Kate would kick his kiester in the first round, so it was no surprise whatsoever when her vicious left ended the "fight" in a mere twelve seconds and put the so-called "champ" in the intensive care unit. TechTV should have held that lesson firmly in mind when it was casting about for a couple of things to pit against each other in a steel cage match from which only one would emerge with more than half its teeth and the use of both arms. Unfortunately, it didn't, and so we wound up with an article pitting the iTunes Music Store against BuyMusic.com. Talk about your foregone conclusions, right?

But wait, since the outcome of a bout of this nature is determined solely by the judges' ruling and judges are notoriously fallible (fal li ble: adj. 1. Making judgements attributable only to the deleterious effects of a lifetime of substance abuse), maybe there's a horserace here after all. In the first round, "Finding What You Want," TechTV declares the iTMS the winner for offering "better lists, suggestions, and song-quality descriptions" and a "more robust" search engine. Round 2 ("Comparing Prices and Selection"), however, goes to BuyMusic, at least for price-- supposedly because "some" of its songs are as low as 79 cents, despite the acknowledged fact that some are "as high as $1.14" or "even more." Apparently TechTV wasn't bothered by the fact that only one song of BuyMusic's Top 100 cost 79 cents. Call the foul, ref!

We have to admit that TechTV was perfectly fair in giving the iTMS the win on selection, though; we fully expected to hear that BuyMusic has more music, since it claims 300,000 tracks and the iTMS launched with 200,000. But instead of going with the press release numbers, TechTV actually searched for a list of 21 specific songs on both services and found that the iTMS won 16 to 13. Small wonder, since BuyMusic's alleged 300,000 songs is apparently a big myth; you've probably noticed that a whole lot of them aren't actually available for purchase. In fact, BoycottBuyMusic.com reports that the service only has a hair over 200,000 songs that are ready for download, which, given the amount of music that Apple's been adding each week, is almost certainly fewer than what the iTMS has to offer.

Unsurprisingly, the iTMS wins big time in rounds 3 and 4 ("Which is easier to use?" and "Limits on Burns and Transfers"), leaving price the only category in contention-- and now we're starting to think that TechTV glossed over the specifics of BuyMusic's sketchy pricing "advantage" just to throw Scott Blum a bone because otherwise he would have been smacked three-quarters into next April by the iTMS, sans most of his internal organs. (After all, we may be bloodthirsty, but we're talking "meatgrinder" here.) Was it a pity point? We don't know. But we do know that TechTV's next matchup will be a lot more exciting if the opponents are more evenly matched. Like, say, a fluffy bunny with a Wiffle Ball bat vs. Predator.

Woo-hoo, SMACK TALK!! And here we thought this whole week would be a full-on snoozer, when MacMinute comes to the rescue with a link to an interview in the Edmonton Journal. An interview with whom, you ask (being the sticklers for grammar that you are)? An interview with Pat "Call Me 'Borg'" Gelsinger, Intel's senior veep and chief technology officer, we answer. And normally we'd find an interview with some Intel dweeb about as interesting as an extensive treatise on the subtle art of fish stick arrangement, but this time we were lucky enough for him to have badmouthed Steve Jobs. Thank heavens. Seriously, you don't know how close we were to trying to write something about the Irish iPod shortage. Dodged a bullet there.

So here's the scoop: following all sorts of stunningly interesting insights about how "there is no longer any innovation ahead of us" (well, maybe not from your company, bubelah), how "we have to make technology more transparent and visible" (does anyone else see a problem with that?), and how "if technology can do it we will embrace it, even if it means eating our own children" (ladies and gentlemen, we have an admission of familial cannibalism here!), Pat goes for the smackdown: "I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions." Mmmm, do we taste fear, everybody? When asked what Intel chips have to offer for Apple, Pat ever-so-eloquently replies, "Our chips would help Apple could find ways to open up more applications for themselves." (Apparently the editor was using a Wintel or something.)

Now, despite the sheer stupidity of publicly stating that the Almighty Steve has been making wrong decisions for 20 years (a move that will surely culminate in Pat's "accidental" demise when an unidentified Gulfstream Jet rains a payload of flaming 286s on top of him as he snoozes in his backyard hammock one day), we have to admit that Pat may have a valid point. Looking back, even if the PowerPC had consistently trumped Intel's offerings, Apple may possibly have benefited more by using the same processors as the rest of the industry; at the very least Macs would always have maintained raw performance parity with the Wintels against which it competed, and then it could have won on basis of the overall user experience. The switch from the 680x0 to the PowerPC would have been a reasonable time to switch to x86 instead, since all legacy code had to run in emulation anyway. Today we wouldn't have spent the last five years moaning about Intel's performance lead (real or imagined), and persuading Wintel users to switch would be much easier, since running Windows applications on an x86 Mac with little to no speed hit would be cake. (Whether or not such a thing might have torpedoed the Mac software industry is a whole 'nother kettle of creamed corn.)

We're not saying that the man's right (we value our living, breathing, flaming-286less existence), but it does make for an interesting "What if?" scenario. Of course, hindsight's 20-20, and if Apple were stuck with Intel today we'd be looking at a freakin' Itanium for 64-bit performance, which is a frightening enough thought to keep us screaming well into next year, so personally we're plenty happy with the PowerPC architecture, thank you very much. Oh, and Pat-- when you die, can we have your stereo?