That's one thing about Apple: regardless of any other complaints you may have, you can't say the company isn't concerned for the welfare of its customers. Well, you can say it, we suppose, but you'd be wrong. And kinda mean. Oh, sure, you can take issue with the company's pricing policies, its support policies, its "nobody gets into a retail store without wearing a sombrero and clucking like a chicken" policy, and so on and so forth. But when the higher-ups at Apple heard that its continuing delay in announcing new, faster Power Macs was causing some Mac fans' heads to explode, the company took decisive anti-head-blowing-up action. In other words: check it out, we have new eMacs!

Okay, granted, an arguably minor tweak to Apple's low-end consumer line-up isn't going to get many rumor addicts' motors revving, but at least it's enough of a development during a news lull to cut incidents of cranial eruption by a projected 45%-- and if that's not taking care of the user base, then we don't know what is. For your pressure-relieving dose of announcementy goodness, faithful viewer Michael Wyszomierski instructs you to look no further than Apple's press release, which confirms that the eMac, while decidedly not aluminum or G5-powered, is nevertheless now "faster" and "more affordable" than ever. Go on, give it a shot; it's just enough of a fix to put out the fuse on those ol' sinuses.

So what's different in the eMac line-up? Well, there are still two models, and the entry-level Combo Drive config remains at $799 (sorry, $599-and-under crowd; you're still going to have to hock an internal organ or something), but the deluxe SuperDrive unit just dropped from $1,099 to $999, so now you can get your iDVD mojo workin' for under a grand. In both units the G4 has gotten a boost from 1 GHz to 1.25 GHz, the system bus has accordingly been bumped from 133 MHz to 167 MHz, and the RAM has been doubled from a barely-useable 128 MB to a slightly-less-stifling 256 MB-- of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM, no less. The ATI graphics subsystem is now a Radeon 9200 (up from a 7500-- so it's 1700 better!) and the 4x SuperDrive in the high-end model has been replaced with an 8x one.

Of course, this is all simply incidental to the one really big change that customers will notice immediately: new product numbers! Whereas yesterday's eMacs were M9252LL/A and M8951LL/B, the new ones are M9425LL/A and M9461LL/A. Why this isn't front-page news at CNN is beyond us. And what's with Dubya not mentioning it in his speech? Priorities, people!

And there you have it: just enough of a product upgrade to keep your head from going pop. While it clearly won't carry any of us all the way through to the increasingly-likely-late-June Power Mac revision, we're sure Apple will see fit to squeeze in a couple more product updates between now and then to minimize the thinning of the herd. After all, it'd be a little too Twilight Zone if, by the time Apple gets faster Power Macs out the door, there weren't any Mac fans with sufficiently intact skulls left to buy them.

Sweet merciful space goat with a Thermos full of Postum-- does Apple have another serious quality control crisis on its hands? You all know that the miniPod is selling like gangbusters, right? Or, rather, it is anywhere that shoppers are lucky enough to find them. Ever since Apple finally admitted that demand had outstripped supply so completely that the company was delaying the miniPod's international launch by three months, scattered reports have flickered in claiming that shipments of miniPods to Apple's resellers have all but dried up completely. So where 'da 'Pods at?

Well, here's where the "quality control" question comes in: faithful viewer Paula Cuccurullo notes that BBC NEWS is reporting a miniPod complication of potentially dire proportions. Apparently some people are complaining about hearing "screeching sounds and static," even when they're not listening to Noise To Cringe By: The Best of Screeching Sounds and Static Vol. 1. (Inexplicably, it's not available at the iTunes Music Store yet; sorry, kiddies.) It seems that some owners, after spending just a few weeks with their miniPods, are finding themselves with extreme sound problems which the Beeb attributes to "jack issues." The article links to a posting at UNL in which a biologist describes his findings after dissecting one such afflicted unit, and what he found may technically qualify as an "uh-oh" under current manufacturing guidelines. Or at the very least a "whoopsie."

Here's the deal: reportedly the miniPod's guts include a main circuit board that's screwed to the case and a secondary, smaller board (which houses the all-important headphone jack) which is not. These two boards are connected solely via a single rigid ten-pin connector that is locked down with some "shoddy soldering." The problem arises because the connection "has essentially zero flexibility," but the miniPod's case is made out of aluminum, which has a little "give" to it. All it takes to start wrecking that connection and bringing forth the aforementioned screeching and static is "repeated pressure on the case"-- like, say, plugging and unplugging the earbuds, carrying it around in a pocket, or otherwise actually using the thing. We sense a Neistat Brothers sequel involving the phrase "iPOD MINI'S UNREPLACEABLE SOLDERING LASTS ONLY 45 DAYS."

It's worth pointing out, of course, that while Apple admits there's a problem, it claims the sound issues are currently limited to "a few isolated reports"; there's every chance that most miniPods are fine, and the sick ones were all soldered together by a guy named Francis who had hurt his solderin' hand in a spirited drunken hammer fight down at the local bar the night before. Still, we have to admit that the whole "rigid connector in a squishy case" design sounds like it might not have been Apple's brightest idea ever.

So are the miniPod shipping delays purely the result of demand gone haywire, or has Apple quietly ceased production of the lil' fellas until it fixes this alleged soldering ickiness? You don't have to be paranoid to think it's plausible, especially since faithful viewer frozen tundra notes that, according to MacRumors, Apple has contacted customers with pending miniPod orders and offered to "replace [their] iPod mini with a 15 GB iPod at no additional charge." Remember, that's a $299 'Pod (with space for about 2,700 more songs) for $249; surely Apple wouldn't be acting so "generously" if something weren't up. Here's hoping that this whole problem is really as "isolated" as Apple claims.

Wouldn't you know it? More bad news in Appleville. We'll keep this short, because we're starting to depress ourselves, and we're all out of Pez so we won't be able to self-medicate back to a healthy emotional state. Besides, does anybody like dwelling on the subject of pink slips?

That's right, pink slips. Layoffs. Jobs Go Bye-Bye. While Apple has managed to avoid the massive-scale stem-the-bleeding-style layoffs that were so popular in high-tech during the "corrections" of the past few years (Motorola was probably the king, here, with over 48,000 job cuts over a 16-month period), apparently the company nixed a couple hundred workers on Tuesday morning without warning. Faithful viewer Tony Wren sent us a KCRA article which reports that Apple has confirmed the pink slips and states that the reason behind them is that the company is shutting down its Sacramento manufacturing plant. No plant, no jobs; it's an easy equation to grasp, if not necessarily an easy one to accept-- especially for those poor folks who suddenly found themselves unemployed.

As for why Apple is closing the plant, the company says that the move is "part of an ongoing effort to make its operations more efficient." Uh-oh, do you smell what we smell? Do we detect a faint but distinctive whiff of Eau de Globalization in the air? Everybody knows someone who lost a job when a company outsourced chunks of its business to India or whatever, and now it seems that Apple, too, has fallen prey to the lure of cheap offshore labor; the company's statement says that it's taking most of the "manufacturing activities" formerly handled by the Sacramento facility and moving them to a supplier in some country called "Southern California." We hope Apple doesn't run into any language problems.

Anyway, the bright side to this whole sordid affair-- well, bright to anyone who still has a job, at least-- is that Apple still isn't cutting jobs just for the sake of stemming any bleeding; the company is quick to point out that "while this action will result in a reduction of operations staff, Apple's overall headcount worldwide continues to grow." So there's no particular reason to expect a nasty red-ink surprise at Apple's quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday afternoon (by the way, you did remember to enter our Beat The Analysts contest, right?), because the jobs aren't so much disappearing, as they are migrating. To "Southern California," wherever the heck that happens to be.

We can only pray that Apple doesn't outsource its tech support there, too, because otherwise we'll all have to struggle with phone techs who speak with a thick Southern Californian accent...