Okay, folks, the Apple Store San Francisco opens in mere days, now, and Apple even issued a press release just to make sure you remembered. As you are no doubt aware, the SF store is one o' them there "flagship stores," meaning it's grotesquely huge and has a glass staircase or something, which means the press will be watching. This is an important opening, and Apple needs all the celebrants on hand it can muster, so we don't want to hear any excuses like "oh, I live a thousand miles away" or "oh, I'm in the hospital with a crushed pelvis and an exposed liver" or "oh, gambling is against my religion and just being the same store with those gift bags will condemn me to an afterlife of everlasting torment." C'mon, people, deal with it! We live on the opposite freakin' coast, here; don't you think we'll be there for the grand opening?

Well, okay, no, we won't. But only because we have an appointment at Supercuts, and you really don't want to cancel on those guys. They get twitchy on you. Otherwise, you know, we'd totally be there.

Now, we know you've heard about seventy-something retail grand openings over the past few years, and you're probably taking them for granted, but we've got news for you, Beavis-- the grand openings won't be around forever. You already know that Apple has slowed way down with the whole retail expansion thing; the days of three openings a week are long gone. What you may not have processed is the fact that, eventually, Apple will have reached saturation here in the U.S., and then the party's over.

According to ifo Apple Store, Fred Anderson recently confirmed that Apple only plans to open another four stores (that's including this Saturday's San Francisco shop) by early September, and won't plan any stores that it doesn't think can make a profit in a year's time. Since the profitability factor is based solely on the prediction of a Metropolitan Statistical Area projection (that's fancy talk for "we only build 'em where Mac users live"), sooner or later-- and probably sooner-- Apple is simply going to have a store serving every viable market, and the grand openings will cease forever. According to Fred, "Apple does not intend to have 300 stores-- only profitable stores."

Now, while we agree that it's wildly irresponsible for Apple not to keep opening new stores just so we Mac fans can continue to get free t-shirts at the grand openings, at this point you can surely see why you have to make it to the SF gala on Saturday; your chances are running out. So unless you can honestly say you're all partied out and you've gotten all the free shirts you'll ever want, you've only got a few chances left in which to get the whole grand opening experience out of your system. That is, unless you're okay with leaving the country just to attend openings overseas. Heck, we'd fly to London for a grand opening. Except, you know... Supercuts.

You really have to hand it to Apple; the company knows how to ride out an economic downturn. Back when the bubble popped a few years back and high tech companies left and right were either going under, getting bought, bleeding cash, or-- at the very least-- laying off tens of thousands of employees (that means you, Motorola... Hello? Anyone still there?), Apple somehow managed to stay mostly profitable, grow its cash stockpile, design and develop scads of amazing new products, and avoid issuing a tidal wave of pink slips. Seriously, think about it for a while. You'll be mighty impressed-- and all that much sadder that CFO Fred Anderson, who is clearly some sort of magical money elf who can conjure cash from the very air, is retiring soon.

But back to the layoffs thing... while it's true that Apple never announced sweeping personnel cuts in order to staunch any arterial gushing, the company has certainly trimmed a little off the back and sides every so often to keep everything tidy. Of course, the guy receiving the pink slip doesn't much care if he's one of five or one of five hundred, but it sure makes a difference to Wall Street. For example, Dow Jones Business News is reporting that Apple has confirmed making "minor" job cuts in the past few weeks, but since it won't say how many people were sent packing, the company's stock price didn't suffer. Heck, it even went up a quarter today. (By the way, "Jones" is a perfectly respectable last name, but what kind of sadistic parents name their child "Dow"? That's just wrong.)

However, this latest round of "minor" cuts still has us a little concerned, since the article cites a former employee who claims that the layoffs occurred mostly in the education unit. It's probably just us, but it seems like for the past couple of years every time we've heard reports, confirmed or otherwise, about "minor work-force reductions" at Apple, the pink slips always seem to land somewhere in the middle of the folks tasked with putting more Macs in the schools. Well, actually, yes, it is just us; we've only found a couple such instances in the Reruns, but that just shows you how edgy we are about the whole education situation. Remember, we've got a 22-month-old on staff, here, and we can't help but worry about what kind of shape the nation's schools will be in by the time she traipses off to class. Will she have to contend with guns? No worries; we'll just make her watch The Matrix a few hundred times until she figures out how to dodge bullets. Drugs? C'mon, she lives with us; she has no need to make her life any weirder. Windows? Well, now, that could be a problem.

So no matter how many stories we see about schools dramatically improving test scores after giving AirPorted iBooks to every student, whenever we hear about more and more school districts tossing their Macs for cheap Dells and then we hear that Apple is once more laying off staff in its education division, we find ourselves wondering if Apple has essentially given up on the K-12 market as a whole. After all, it's certainly true that school budgets keep shrinking, so maybe Apple has concluded that it simply can't compete on price (which is the bottom line with budgets stretched so thin) and still remain profitable.

In other words, scaling back its focus on school sales might be exactly the sort of savvy financial move that kept the company so solvent through the downturn; unfortunately, that means an increasing number of children may well have to spend hours a day exposed to Windows whether they (or their parents) like it or not. Isn't that a violation of the Geneva Convention or something? Please, won't somebody think of the children?

Oh, for the glory days of the Microsoft antitrust litigation! You remember, right? Back before the Department of Justice suddenly turned into an insecure puppy dog in desperate need of acceptance and rolled over to settle what was largely an airtight case against the company? Back when over half the states in the union joined in the fight against Big Software, whereas now Massachusetts is the only state possessing the sheer bloody-mindedness to remain standing firm? Sure you do... Good times. It's a shame they've drawn to a close.

Or have they? True, "Redmond Justice" is all but off the air in this country, but you know how these things work; there's always an export lag on TV entertainment, so other nations are only just now getting the first couple of seasons' worth of episodes. At least, it sure seems that way, since the BBC News reported less than a month ago that the European Commission had only recently finished drafting its ruling in its own antitrust case against Microsoft-- and the EC is apparently considering changing the ending: "The Commission is likely to decide that the firm illegally tied audio and video software, as well as server systems, to its Windows operating system," which is much the same as what happened her in the States, but after seeing that the restrictions in the Justice Department settlement are "too lax" (Gee, ya think? Even Judge Collar-Kotelly admitted just last week that the settlement terms had "failed"), "the EU is likely to want to go further."

As for how much further, well, there's talk of "multi-million euro fines" (which will do absolutely nothing to a company with a $53 billion war chest, of course) and sanctions that could prevent the company from selling Windows bundled with Windows Media Player, at least in Europe. And there's more talk about forcing Microsoft to license its Windows source code to competitors, although if people keep leaking it anyway, the point would be moot. Granted, none of this is as exciting as the prospect of a corporate break-up from back in the day, but it has the potential to turn out at least slightly better than the eventual DoJ settlement.

And hey, if the European version of "Redmond Justice" doesn't pan out, maybe the Japanese translation will take some happy liberties with the plot! Remember when Apple Japan was raided by the Japanese Fair Trade Commission as part of a price-fixing investigation back in '99? Well, faithful viewer Julian Clark notes that, according to the BBC News, that same organization has raided Microsoft's Tokyo offices "on suspicion that the US giant violated Japanese anti-monopoly laws." (Apparently in Japan they're all about the raids. And why not? It must be great for ratings.) Are we naïve to think that maybe, just maybe, someday one of these countries will finally mete out something actually resembling justice? Well, yeah. But hope is a marvelous thing, isn't it?