Holy paper gain, Batman-- what the heck was going on with Apple's stock price today? Faithful viewer Dana Sutton pointed out that it clawed its way nearly a buck and a quarter higher-- over five percent-- to close at $25.16, which MacMinute notes is the stock's highest closing price since May of 2002. And it even inched a teensy bit higher than that in after-hours trading, to $25.23; for the first time in ages, our stock portfolio isn't sitting slumped in a dark corner eating wet cigarettes like a dog, and it's nice that AAPL investors can finally smile a bit again. (Well, except for the ones who bought in pre-split at $140 a share; those guys aren't going to be smiling again until the advent of the time machine.)

Now, not that we're complaining-- it's nice to see our portfolio off the Zoloft for a change ("even the Intel Inside logo gets depressed sometimes")-- but seriously, what's with the sudden spike today? Did we miss a product announcement or something? Did Power Macs just hit dual 4.5 GHz and nobody told us? Did the Pope finally endorse the iPod as the official portable music player of the Vatican? What?

A CNN/Money article does little to solve the mystery, merely noting that "technology stocks finished mostly higher" today because "investors anticipated good news from Intel." But most tech stocks didn't fare nearly so well as AAPL did, and even Intel's stock price only climbed 61 cents-- and then dropped 54 cents right back down again after hours once the "good news" turned out to be "instead of making $7.9 billion to $8.5 billion this quarter, we're actually going to make $8.0 billion to $8.2 billion." (Okay, sure, that's a sizeable chunk more than Apple collects in a whole year, but still: Woooooo.) So if Intel only gained 2% on anticipation of this "great news," why did Apple go up so much more?

Well, after putting a ton of thought into it, we think we may have stumbled upon the answer. You know, of course, that the iPod is what got Apple back into the headlines and got investors to take notice again; however, the single perceived black mark against the iPod's reputation is its battery life, both long-term and short-term. Long-term, some older iPods had stopped holding a charge after a year and a half of use, and a couple of people figured that was grounds for a libelous vandalism campaign that actually managed to spread unfounded iPod battery panic as far as the British House of Commons. Short-term, current iPods only boast about eight hours of use per charge, while Dell's bulkier knockoff claims to serve up about twice that. So what if someone had found a way to make the battery issue moot?

Voilà: presenting the Deck o' Cards iPod Battery Pack. Faithful viewer markintosh tossed this link our way, which details how one ingenious individual stuffed two nine-volts and a couple of AAs into a Bicycle playing cards box, soldered in a FireWire port, and bickety-bam, Genius-Boy can plug it into his iPod via a FireWire cable to get up to "an extra 10 hours iPodding time." And, okay, sure, Belkin's had a battery pack commercially available for months, now, but it only works with 3G iPods, and worse yet, it doesn't look like a deck of cards. That's key to market success.

Now, granted, the Deck o' Cards solution's actually been up there for at least a week, but seeing as we've been sent the link half a dozen times in the past two days, clearly it's just now making the rounds. And apparently Wall Street just got the news, because, hey-- how else can you explain AAPL's sudden $1.24 gain?

You can't, can you? Ha! We win.

Do you think you must be blind, incompetent, or occupying a strange nether universe where reality bends like the willow just because you haven't been able to find a single potentially-free-song-bearing yellow Pepsi cap? Well, fear not, people; there's actually at least a 30% chance you're none of those things. While we haven't exactly performed an exhaustive search, we'd like to point out that the big 100 million song giveaway officially commenced over a month ago, game caps had shown up in some places a week before that, and yet we still haven't spotted a single yellow-capped Sierra Mist as we've poked our heads into various convenience stores here in the greater Boston area. In fact, we've only even seen a few iTunes Pepsi bottles-- but a thoroughly ridiculous number of Diet Pepsi ones. So you see, when it comes to cap distribution, something just ain't right.

Not convinced? Then take faithful viewer Frozen Tundra's advice and check out USA TODAY, which confirms that Pepsi has done one seriously lousy job of getting its product out on the market. It's been over a month since the company blew untold gazillions on its "hey, everybody look at some kids who steal" Superbowl commercial, and yet New York, arguably the iPod capital of the world, reportedly only just got its first shipment of yellow-capped beverages last week. Worse yet, those bottles still haven't shown up in Los Angeles, and Pepsi admits that they won't make it out there "until mid-March." Considering the limitations listed in the promotion's official rules, that puts certain geographically-challenged iTunes fans at a serious disadvantage; the promotion officially ends one second before midnight on March 30th, which means Los Angelinos are only going to have about two weeks in which to score as much Pepsi as possible. Hitting the 200-song limit is going to be a real challenge out there, unless they immediately start supplementing with Slurpees and Big Gulps.

Suddenly our Sierra Mistless existence seems like far less of an injustice. The only up side to this whole nightmare is that Apple is 100% blame-free, since the promotion is entirely a Pepsi thing-- Apple just provides the tunes. Still, we can't help but feel a certain sense of Déjà vu. Remember when Apple made a big media thing about the brand new Power Mac G4s coming in 400, 450, and 500 MHz flavors, and then was forced to drop those specs back to 350, 400, and 450 MHz versions? Remember why? It had a little something to do with chip availability issues and a certain semiconductor manufacturer.

So there you have it, folks: the yellow Pepsi caps are evidently being made (or not made, as the case may be) by Motorola. Say, do you suppose they classified the whole "tilt" debacle as an "erratum"?

"Michael Dell is out as CEO!" shouted Katie (AtAT's Resident Fact-Checker and Goddess of Minutiae) from the next room, at which point we knew immediately that Dell's resignation would be the single most-suggested plot point in AtAT's history. After all, this is Mike Dell we're talking about, here: the plot thread of his increasingly unhinged obsession with copying Steve Jobs's every move has fueled approximately 38% of all AtAT scenes ever produced. Clearly we were headed for Inbox Meltdown on this one.

As it turned out, however, Dell going bye-bye was not the most-suggested plot point ever, nor was it even the most-suggested plot point of the day. (The latter honor goes to the battery life-- and we use the term "life" very loosely, here-- of the mammoth 16ish-pound Acer Aspire 1710 Wintel notebook we discussed yesterday: "up to 1.0 hour life depending on configuration and usage," as pointed out by faithful viewer flyingcactus and enough others to qualify as a national sports league.)

Apparently people don't think Dell leaving his CEO post is actually all that big a deal, and in a general sense, they're right; as noted by CNN/Money in an article first pointed out by faithful viewer drow, ol' Mikey remains the chairman of the board to think about "big picture" stuff and merely yields his CEOship to Dell's president Kevin Rollins, who will take over the nuts and bolts of running the company. Since that's reportedly what both guys really do already, there's no real change other than a shuffle of titles.

But what people seem to be neglecting is, how does this change affect us, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff? (Because as you all know, we're all that matters.) With Mike out of the spotlight we'll have far fewer opportunities to play up the progression of his compulsive Steve-emulation. And indeed, is it possible that Mike's been cured? After all, Steve is a notorious micromanager, and here we have Mike giving up the day-to-day running of his company to think profound thoughts about "direction" and "purpose." Hey, waitaminnit-- do you suppose now he's copying Bill Gates?

Naaaahhh.

We can only wait and see what the future holds; for all we know, Mike ditched his CEO position expressly to gain more time to stalk Steve Jobs, because he's clearly been slacking on that whole thing lately. And regardless, on the plus side, this move thrusts Kevin Rollins into a far more public position, and who knows? We struck drama gold when Bill Gates handed his CEOship over to Steve "Leadership Through Grave Embarrassment" Ballmer. For all we know, Rollins is an even bigger basket case than Mike Dell was. Fingers crossed, people!