Hey, hold the phone a minute, here-- whatever happened to all that Disney-Pixar-Eisner-Jobs melodrama? Because that used to be the kickin'est plot thread going, and it all came to a head when Eisner received un unprecedented 43% vote of no confidence from investors at last month's shareholders meeting, and was subsequently yoinked from the big chair at the boardroom table. The thing is, though, Disney's board was too muleheaded to boot Eisner completely, so while he's no longer chairman of the board, the guy's still running things as CEO. In other words, all that craziness ended not with a bang, but with a sort of hissing, air-leaking-from-the-beach-ball-type fizzle. Think of it this way: Steve didn't wind up racking up his third concurrent CEOship. So just how exciting an ending could it have been?

But while the whole anti-Eisner movement has largely sunk beneath the media's radar, the same old dynamics keep right on chugging along-- in particular, the personality tussle between Eisner and Steve Jobs and Steve's apparent unrelenting campaign to get Eisner fired. Remember the theory that Steve only ended the Pixar-Disney contract talks in order to foment shareholder unrest in the weeks leading up to the big vote? After all, what better way to make the investors hate him than by making Eisner look responsible for the loss of literally billions of dollars in future earnings? Practically the only thing that could have had even more investors calling for Eisner's head on a stick would be getting them to believe that he'd greenlit an animated remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with Goofy as Leatherface. Or worse, Treasure Planet 2.

Conspiracy theorists always figured that Steve fully planned to bring Pixar back to Disney after the split got Eisner fired-- but since Eisner's still drawing a paycheck even after that catastrophic shareholder vote, whereas the alleged plan used to be at least a little bit subtle, now Steve has apparently thrown any trace of discretion out the window. The New York Post, in its typical blunt fashion, claims that "Steve Jobs wants to return to the Disney fold if Michael Eisner is ousted as CEO," information it says comes straight from "sources close to Jobs." So doesn't it sound an awful lot like Steve just grabbed a nearby lackey, dictated what he should say, and then put him on the phone with the Post? Because "subtle" sure didn't work with Disney's board, so maybe Steve just figured it was time to spell it all out for them in big, bold letters-- which the Post did nicely, of course: "'IT'S MIKE OR ME.'"

Poor Steve; he really must have been expecting Disney's board to clue in a lot sooner than this. How can he possibly be expected to take over the planet by 2008 if the rest of the world won't stick to the script? Tsk. Those guys are so unprofessional.

Wait, where are you going? Don't back away! Seriously, no speculation on upcoming Power Macs, we promise! But we have to mention that down here at the AtAT compound we all have a medical condition that requires a steady intake of tech-related gossip, so if we don't dish at least a little highly-suspect and uncorroborated dirt on some Mac product line, our skin may fall off again-- which is a royal pain, because it takes a team of medical specialists three or four hours to staple it all back on again. So for the sake of time and medical expenses, how about we just take a quick peek at an alleged eyewitness report on the long-awaited PowerBook G5? That ought to keep us in a continued state of dermal cohesion at least through the weekend.

So here's the latest we've come across on Apple's race to shoehorn a G5 into a portable that doesn't weigh twenty pounds and clock its battery life with a stopwatch: an anonymous tipster directed us to an article in Germany's MACup magazine, in which the author apparently claims to have seen an actual PowerBook G5 prototype-- or at least its motherboard. As usual, our German is sadly lacking (so he's outside sulking instead of in here translating for us), which means we rely once again on the ever-entertaining auto-translation wackiness courtesy of BabelFish. And from what we can make out, this guy claims to have been blessed with "a special favour"-- namely, a glimpse of "the completely new Main board Design of the G5-PowerBooks, which were to be introduced to hearing after at the beginning of April."

Reportedly this puppy will pack not one, but two 2.0 GHz G5 processors into a casing made of a "NASA developed carbon fiber-mix." There's a 1920x1280 17-inch display (capable of 30-bit color via a 256 MB graphics chip) and some kind of crazy water-cooling system to keep the whole thing from bursting into flame.

So. PowerBook G5s at the beginning of April? With dual processors? And an HD 17-inch screen in a carbon fiber enclosure? And a two-disk hardware RAID?! Okay, well, seeing as the beginning of April is kindasorta in the past, now, and these specs sound suspiciously like the drug-fueled raving fantasies of a Mac user who's about three and a half pecks short of a bushel upstairs, unfortunately we're going to have to chalk the whole thing up to an April Fool's gag (albeit a chronologically lax one-- the piece is dated "05.2004") that loses a little something in the translation; after all, the Germans have been in on the jokes from the very beginning. And if nothing else, the phrase "an efficiency of almost 200 per cent" ought to be the clincher, here... unless, of course, in its quest to provide adequate cooling for a G5-based portable, Apple has inadvertently invalidated the laws of thermodynamics.

On the other hand, if that's actually the case, we're just itching to preorder the first commercially available Entropy Inverter; why, we could cancel the maid service and the thing would pay for itself in no time flat...

So how are you enjoying Panther? It's a solid upgrade from Jaguar, isn't it? Which was, in turn, a pretty massive improvement from Puma, which itself built solidly on Cheetah. And wouldja believe that we've gotten all this Mac OS X-y goodness in just three short years? Meanwhile, if you bother to concern yourself with such irrelevant trivia, you already know that Microsoft's next major version of Windows after that XP thing is codenamed "Longhorn," and that after pushing a gloriously unrealistic ship date of 2005 for the longest time, the company finally admitted that it won't ship until 2006-- at the earliest. And by then we'll be up to Tiger at least-- probably even one cat beyond. Wheeeeee!

And in keeping with our traditional Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, it turns out that in order to ship Longhorn before mankind is reduced to a source of mute slave labor for talking apes with guns, Microsoft has taken to ripping a bunch of features out of the spec list. Faithful viewer Frank Davis notes a BusinessWeek article which reports that Microsoft is now targeting a Longhorn release in the first half of 2006, and in order to have half a prayer of meeting that schedule, the company has "cut some of the most far-reaching pieces of Longhorn"-- pieces like the brand new database-centric file system, which really did sound kind of cool; apparently the Longhorn version is no longer expected to "extend to files shared over a corporate network." And reportedly Microsoft bigwigs are even now huddled in smoke-filled rooms trying to decide what other highly-touted features to cut in order to get Longhorn out the door two years from now.

Now, in the interest of fairness, we're not going to pretend that Mac OS X didn't face the same sort of struggles. Remember, NeXTSTEP was bought in 1996, and we didn't get Mac OS X until 2001; Apple kept moving the release date along the way, and constantly changed what technologies were going to be included in which developer releases. The product mutated about a zillion times before it finally shipped. (Remember when it was going to be called "Rhapsody" and it was definitely going to be available for Intel's Itanium?) No matter how many times Apple redefined the finish line, by March of 2001 Mac OS X was super late by any sane person's standards, and by the time it finally hit store shelves, a whole bunch of intended features had been left out-- little things like, um, CD burning, DVD playback, and working volume keys. So yes, Mac OS X seemed pretty darn unfinished in its 10.0 release, and didn't really feel "done" to us until at least 10.1-- more likely 10.2.

And yet, none of that is going to stop us from pointing at Microsoft's Longhorn woes and giggling like maniacs on nitrous; just because we understand Microsoft's rescheduling and dropping features doesn't mean we can't get a big, goofy grin every time we think about it. If Apple's OS developers keep firing on all cylinders, whatever version of Mac OS X is shipping two years from now may be so far ahead of whatever Longhorn turns out to be, even random shmoes might find it obvious when they reach for the plastic. Fingers crossed.