Duck and cover, kids-- here comes the Big One! At least one pundit sees signs that AAPL will come crashing through the earth's crust any minute now. Oh, quit acting all surprised and stuff; you had to realize that Apple's recent luck with its stock price couldn't last forever, right? It's that whole "entropy" thing kicking in or something. Or maybe we're thinking of gravity.

Osmosis? Is it osmosis?

Anyway, whatever it is, we're pretty sure that Avocado's Number figures heavily. Regardless, before you go making a mad stabbing lunge for your favorite online trading house to dump all your AAPL like it was so much flaming radioactive panda poop with the Enron logo on it, you might consider the actual facts which have led BusinessWeek to cast aspersions at the stock's future performance. Apparently what's causing all the uproar is the fact that several higher-ups at Apple itself have been selling off a fairly hefty chunk of shares lately; publicly available government filings reveal that, just this month alone, "several top execs sold nearly 3 million shares worth at least $47.8 million." This has prompted analysts such as Kevin Conway of Thomson Financial to wonder "whether they know something we don't," and whether this is some sort of rats-deserting-sinking-ship scenario.

Personally, we think the whole semi-accusation smells of sensationalism for the sake of drama (and believe us when we tell you that we know a thing or two about that). For one thing, outgoing CFO Fred Anderson's stock sales accounted for 23% of that allegedly worrisome $47.8 million. And sure, normally when the guy who handles the money starts dumping large volumes of his own company's stock, that can be a pretty bad sign, but let's not forget that the guy's retiring, for crying out Pete's sake; is it so strange that he might want to cash in a few of his chips for yacht money, or an extensive new wardrobe of Bermuda shorts, or maybe several million Twinkies to deep fry? Seriously, let the guy retire in style, right?

For another thing, the SEC can get pretty nasty with insider traders, and since all these stock transactions are a matter of public record, those Apple execs would have to be about thirty more kinds of stupid than we thought possible to try to profit off any knowledge they might have about upcoming bad news. We have a tough time believing that bigwigs running any company capable of producing insanely great stuff like Exposé and the miniPod Click Wheel could somehow figure that no one would notice if they sold a bunch of shares a month or two prior to some upcoming revelation that'll line Wall Street with the corpses of panicked jumpers.

Then again, if you're the paranoid type, there is maybe a little bit of a precedent, here; BusinessWeek mentions that the last time Apple insiders sold off so much stock, AAPL's price cratered shortly thereafter. However, what BusinessWeek fails to mention is that Apple got sued by stockholders for insider trading when a similar sort of thing happened back in 2000, and indeed, the Associated Press noticed a potentially disturbing correlation between executive Apple stock sales and subsequent corporate earnings warnings that nuked AAPL's price soon after.

Make of it what you will; personally, we doubt there's anything more going on here than sheer coincidence, and if we won't milk a potentially juicy tale of stock intrigue for all the drama it's worth, well, that says something.

Oh, mitosis! We were thinking of mitosis, right? No? Dang.

Say, we were just scoping out a calendar trying to find out when "Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbors' Porch Day" happens to fall this year, when we suddenly realized something: aren't we about due for another big iPod revision? After all, by our count it's now been over a year since the third-generation models sashayed down the runway, showing off their new svelte forms, their backlit touch-buttons, and their sudden lack of anything resembling a standard FireWire port. Sure, there have been minor revisions since then which boosted disk space and added support for On-The-Go playlists, etc., but unless you count the miniPod (which we don't, because it's marketed as a separate product), the iPod hasn't experienced a major facelift since April 28th of last year. One just has to be coming soon, right?

Well, AppleInsider sure thinks so. The site claims that the new player is now close enough to a public debut that the marketing folks have gone ahead and stuck it in front of a camera: "Apple has just recently wrapped up the filming of a new iPod commercial starring the yet unannounced 4th-generation iPod." Provided you believe that the report of filming is true, that's a pretty good indicator that the 4G iPod is done-- at least, done enough to appear onscreen without looking all prototypey and gross. (Technically, we suppose all it really means is that the enclosure is ready for prime time; for filming purposes, the guts may well be nonexistent. But we doubt it.)

We have to wonder just how long Apple plans to make us wait before these newfangled 'Pods make the scene, though; seems to us that an introduction alongside iTunes 4.5 would have been a natural pairing, but that didn't happen. Unless maybe we just missed it. (We didn't, did we? Because we know we've been distracted lately, but man that'd be embarrassing.) Let's see, here... if filming just wrapped, figure on up to a month for the editing... what do you think, should we bank on an iPod "special event" right smack in between the iTunes Music Store anniversary conference call and WWDC?

Of course, before you get your hopes up too high, you might want to remember to consider your sources when it comes to info like this. On the 4G iPod front, keep in mind that AppleInsider has previously stated that the new units would include a "2-inch color screen" and a "video output jack," and while we're certainly not saying that's definitely untrue, it's perhaps worth considering that Steve Jobs himself has publicly and repeatedly downplayed the likelihood of the iPod gaining major non-music, non-toast-related features such as any sort of video capabilities. Personally, we're hoping he's just smokescreening, because we actually like the idea of toting a few episodes of The A-Team around with us wherever we go. Like the one with Boy George. No one should ever leave the house without that one.

Hey, speaking of iPods, if you've been trying to puzzle through some weirdness with iPod Update 2004-04-28, you're not alone. Personally, we haven't gotten around to installing it yet, even though it claims that our ancient 5 GB models will enjoy "improved playback performance" (like, what-- our songs will play faster?) and "compatibility with iTunes 4.5 and the iTunes Music Store." Frankly, we aren't entirely sure just what sort of compatibility Apple's talking about, since iTMS songs we've bought via iTunes 4.5 are already playing just fine on our 'Pods sans update, so in light of the recent, um, "unpleasantness" surrounding a certain wireless networking update that issued forth from a certain Cupertino computer manufacturer, we figured we'd postpone the whole iPod updating process until it becomes apparent that we actually need it.

Well, it appears we might have been (marginally) right to wait, because faithful viewer fabian forwarded us a CNET article which reports that Apple is "investigating reports that some iPod owners have had trouble updating their devices to take advantage of the company's latest version of its iTunes jukebox software." Now, before you get your hopes up for a drama-drenched debacle such as the iPod update wiping hard disks clean and causing iPods to burst into flame, we should point out that the only malfeasance which affected users are attributing to the updater is that "the software cannot detect their iPod."

It's pretty tame, we know. Sorry, but they can't all leave big, smoking craters in the ground. Sort of a double-edged sword, really, now that we think about it.

At last check, Apple was "aware of a few isolated reports and is looking into it." Frankly, given the utterly nondestructive nature of the alleged bug and the apparent rarity of its occurrence, we're wondering just how slow a news day it was for CNET to write a story about the problem in the first place-- which has also started us wondering just how slow a news day it was for us to be incorporating what appears to be a total non-event CNET article into our plotline. Maybe if there were at least a couple of unconfirmed reports of the updater causing a kernel panic or swiping a twenty from a user's wallet, we could squeeze a little more out of it. But an updater that just doesn't recognize a few iPods?

Then again, software malfunctions of any shape or size hint that Apple's Quality Control team will still be a source of drama in the future. Sure, it's no "AirPort Update 3.4 kicked my dog and drank all my root beer," but at least it beats a software update that functions perfectly. Because, geez-- who the heck wants to see that?