What a difference half a decade can make. Longtime viewers may recall an incident way back in 1997 in which a U.S. Navy "Smart Ship" wound up completely dead in the water following a total systems failure; it turns out that the onboard computers controlling the not-so-smart-after-all USS Yorktown were running Windows NT, an operating system so robust that when it encountered a divide-by-zero error it panicked and dove out the nearest porthole. The warship, then devoid of any control or power whatsoever, actually needed to be towed back to base. Embarrassing, no? But at least the Blue Screen of Death sort of matches the ocean. Ahhhh... soothing!

Fast forward to 2003, and the Navy's making some smarter choices these days. According to faithful viewer Daniel Blanken, Terra Soft Solutions just announced that it's inked a deal to provide a massive flock of Xserves to the Navy by way of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. How massive a flock? Try 260-- and 260 Xserves officially qualifies as "massive" in our book. (Have you seen the size of the boxes those things come in?) Terra Soft claims that this is the largest single sale of Xserves ever made by a value-added reseller; apparently the Navy plans to string 'em together into a "unique sonar imaging system" that will ostensibly be capable of discerning whether large undersea masses are whales, legendary sea serpents, or sunken Navy Smart Ships with screens blinking "Abort, Retry, Fail?"

This represents a huge win for Apple hardware-- although the software guys in Cupertino must be a little bummed. See, Terra Soft is the maker of Yellow Dog Linux, which runs on Apple hardware, and its VAR agreement enables it to resell Macs with Yellow Dog preloaded instead of Mac OS X. So those 260 whale-spotting Xserves will all be running Linux instead of everyone's favorite lickable operating system, which is a crying shame, really; Mac OS X could definitely have used the boost of street cred a Navy endorsement would have provided. But apparently Mac OS X was never in the running in the first place: Terra Soft's LinuXserve was chosen because it "meets the Navy's requirements for form-factor, density, performance, and use of Linux."

Still, like we said, Apple's hardware people should be throwing a little party, because what this means is that, since the Navy just wanted to run Linux, it had its pick of pretty much every server out there, including all the x86 stuff, and the Xserve was chosen as the best of the bunch: "twice as dense, less power consumptive, and higher performance" than the similarly-priced systems it'll replace. Plus, a sale is a sale-- and given recent reports that "Xserve sales are dead" and have been ever since Steve-O took the wraps off the G5 processor at WWDC, we bet Apple is actually thrilled to have cleared 260 G4-based Xserves out of its overflowing warehouses. Unless, of course, the "close of October" delivery date is somehow tied to those recent rumors of G5 Xserves surfacing sometime in September...

Okay, well, apparently we missed something during one of our many unscheduled hiatuseseses over the past year or so, or maybe we just misunderstood the whole situation from the beginning; didn't Apple's retail stores originally downplay their role in a hardware service situation? We could have sworn that early on, the Genius Bars were actively referring customers with Macs in need of repair to local Apple Authorized Service Providers, because promising not to horn in on the service side of the business was one of the ways in which Steve aimed to avoid being taken out by a sniper hired by Apple's own third party resellers. Like we said, we could well be wrong, but if we're right, then it seems that Steve has decided that the benefits of Apple retail stores sucking on a bigger slice of the service pie more than make up for the expense of Kevlar turtlenecks.

See, Think Secret apparently got hold of a recent internal Apple retail presentation which reveals that "Apple stores account for 20-25% of all Mac repairs in the U.S.," and the company doesn't plan to stop there: "by expanding the service business and offerings, the stores can grow revenue, build customer loyalty, and distinguish themselves from competitors." Reportedly Apple has plans to move PowerBook and iBook repairs in-house (right now the stores just ship 'em out for depot repair) and even put together a loaner program so customers needn't go Macless any longer than absolutely necessary. Which all sounds great for Apple and its customers, and like serious trouble for resellers who have already lost sales to nearby Apple stores and soon stand to take a big hit on service, too. Hey, Steve-- duck!

But the presentation doesn't just discuss an expansion of service; it's actually Apple's master plan for future retail success, of which service is but one prong. Most of it seems to be pretty tame stuff that's saturated with motivational buzzwords; for instance, did you know that the Apple retail mission statement is to "enrich people's lives with innovative, easy-to-use technology"? (Can we get that on a Successories poster?) As long as phrases like "total solution," "metrics goals," and "raise the bar even higher" don't make you yench uncontrollably, check out Think Secret's coverage to see where Apple retail is going next-- like a targeting of small business (Apple wants a full 20% of its retail store revenue coming from small business sales) and a "controlled, methodical expansion" of stores through 2004.

Interestingly enough, our own sources managed to obtain another Apple retail roadmap which looks a little further down the pike; whereas Apple is indeed planning to continue its "controlled, methodical expansion" through the end of next year, the first half of 2005 will see a switch to a "haphazard, higgledy-piggledy expansion," followed by two weeks of a "mellow, nougat-filled expansion," then three to five minutes of a "frenzied, cactus-colored contraction," and finally a thousand-year era of "perfect Zen retail balance" and "free Enlightenment to the first billion customers." Hey, it's always good to plan for the future.

We forgot to say it a week ago, but... Happy August! And indeed, it should be a happy August, since this is the month in which the long-awaited Power Mac G5 is finally supposed to ship. Yes, friends, any day now the G5 will be more than just that cheese-grater-looking thing on TV that excels in user propulsion and massive property damage. It'll be more than the catalyst of a zillion arguments about benchmark methodology, largely by people whose only qualification to be discussing such things is that they once made a mark on a bench. It'll be more than that thing that's displaced naked supermodels in your dreams and thereby caused your therapist to express grave concern over your mental well-being. Yes, pretty soon you'll actually be able to own one. (Assuming you've got the funds, of course.)

But wait, is August the G5's ship month? Some sources say it's not. Don't panic, though, we're not saying it's really going to be September or October; we just mean that, technically, the G5's ship month was July. As in last July. See, AppleInsider insists that the G5 is shipping, even though it's not "shipping"; reportedly Apple has put "several Power Mac G5 units in the hands of its prized customers for several weeks now." So who rates such special treatment? "Larger corporate and government customers," apparently, who are all merrily tooling along on their G5s running a prerelease build of Mac OS X 10.2.7, while the rest of us regular people are stuck limping along with the ungainly waddle of dual-1.33 GHz G4s or what have you. But mama never told you life was going to be fair.

The fact that G5s were available for the "right" customers last month isn't terribly surprising, nor does it mean a whole heckuva lot-- unless you ran out and bought a lovely peridot birthstone brooch for the G5 to commemorate its ship date, and now you feel compelled to exchange it for a ruby one. Of course, if you want to make it personal, the G5's ship month is actually a moving target; if you're just getting around to ordering one now, you're going to be waiting for a while. At last check, the Apple Store lead time on new Power Mac orders is 4-6 weeks-- and that's for the single-processor models. If you want the dual-2.0 GHz system that's so goldurned popular with the jet-set crowd, you'll be waiting 7-10 weeks instead. So the ship month for you would be September, or even October. Ouch. Opal earrings, anyone?