Aw, boooooo! We were just getting into the swing of full-on irrational pipe-dream Stevenote speculation, and then someone had to go and step on our buzz by injecting logic and reason into the whole process. There's a reason why it's a felony to tell kids under age 7 that there's no Santa Claus, you know? Plain and simple, people need fairy tales every once in a while, and Mac fans more than most. As a matter of fact, in the extreme case, we know of at least two people who'd probably perish from an overdose of sheer reality if they ever gave up their white-knuckled conviction and accepted that [ATTENTION JESSE AND MARK: please skip to the next paragraph immediately] Apple probably isn't planning on releasing a PDA anytime soon.

But reality, harsh mistress though she may be, does bake some decent cookies now and then, so we suppose that we can forgo a little denial and face the awful truth about the iMac G5: namely, that the chances of it surfacing in any way, shape, or form this Monday are slimmer than a stick insect on Atkins. Faithful viewer David Triska notes that Think Secret has gotten positively snippy on the subject, calling any such speculation "ridiculous," "loony," and "way off," citing the lack of a webcast as the prime evidence that no such major product revision can possibly take place. (Although we do have to wonder about the further claim that "June is too early to roll out a consumer product that needs just the right amount of momentum entering the holiday buying season"; wasn't the iMac G4 introduced in January?)

Not that this is anything we didn't already know deep down inside, of course; indeed, we mentioned the webcast worriment when exploring the various doodads that folks have been predicting for a Monday debut. And Think Secret doesn't even mention the fact that an Apple official went on record just a couple of weeks ago to state that cramming a G5 into an iMac "would be a heck of a challenge," implying that we shouldn't exactly be holding our breath. But don't get too down in the mouth, sports fans; assuming that the folks at Think Secret are right about all this stuff (and in our experience, they usually are), while hoping for iMac G5s at WWDC is an act of the purest folly, at least we should finally get those new aluminum-clad displays, which aren't exactly the sort of product that Apple needs to introduce at some massive media event. Yeah, they're cool, but they're displays, you know? They're not going to get evening news coverage unless they also smell like fresh-baked pizza and cure all forms of cancer, and our own sources tell us that Apple is still at least eighteen months from delivering that technology.

Still, it would have been nice to keep the iMac G5 dream alive, no matter how unlikely such an announcement might be. Guess we'll just have to sub in one of the other fantasy product mainstays to get our fix of boundless optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence. Hey Jesse, Mark! What's this we hear about a new Apple handheld coming this Monday?

So as far as we've heard, the iTunes Music Store still rules the downloadable music roost here in the States, and its new European counterparts have already grabbed Germany, France, and the UK by the ankles, flipped them upside-down, and shaken over 800,000 songs' worth of pence 'n' pennies from their collective pockets, rocketing way out in front of the market over there, too. Nice. So ignoring for a moment the pan-European store that's supposed to go live in October (apparently there are Europeans who aren't French, German, or British; go figure), what's next for the iTMS juggernaut? After all, it's a big world, and sizable non-U.S., non-European chunks of it are populated with folks who can scrape together enough cash for an iPod and a dozen songs or two.

Folks like our frosty neighbors to the north, the Canadians. Of course, the saga of the iTMS creeping its way up there is a familiar and frustrating one, since it's been eight solid months since the prez of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency announced that "the process of negotiating a licensing deal with Apple is now underway," which most of us figured was a good indication that iTMS Canada would go live by spring. (Then again, most of us also figured that Euro iTMS would go live by last New Year's, which just goes to show that most of us have far more optimism than sense.) The latest on this appeared a few days ago in the Financial Post, which reported that-- oh, this is rich-- Apple is "seriously considering entering the Canadian market." So in eight months we've gone from actively negotiating distribution licenses to "seriously considering" doing a Canadian store in the first place. Why, it's almost enough to make a Canuck want to drink American beer. (Calm down, we said almost.)

The situation's actually not nearly as bad as the Financial Post first makes it sound, though; apparently an EMI bigwig expects an iTMS Canada launch "in the near future," stating that he "saw Steve Jobs [last week] and he is acutely aware the Canadian consumer is knocking on his door." Note to the Canadian politely camped out on Steve's porch and occasionally knocking on his door: here in the U.S. we call that "stalking," but hey, whatever works for you-- and it does seem to be working to some extent, since the aforementioned EMI bigwig says that a Canadian version of the iTMS is "very much on [Steve's] radar now." So now all we need are another Canadian staking out Steve's health club and a third hiding in the trunk of his car, and we oughta be in business.

Meanwhile, the Australians have a little less to celebrate: the Sydney Morning Herald reports that Apple Australia "says, with every sign of regret, that it has no news of iTMS for Oz." No hard facts are given as to why an Australian release apparently isn't even in the planning stages yet; while the Herald supposes that it has something to do with "digital rights management deals and differences in contracts between musicians and labels" (in other words, the same legal hurdles that put Euro iTMS on ice for so long), we suspect it's more a matter of priorities. Australia's a big country, but its music market isn't; the country reportedly spends "about $600 million annually on CDs," while the four existing iTMS-enabled countries spend roughly 32 times that much. But Apple is clearly going for world domination, here, so as sales slowly tip from CDs to downloads and the music industry finally sees that it should simplify licensing issues for stores like the iTMS, we can't believe that Apple would stay out of Australia simply out of spite. (You Aussies didn't spit on Steve or anything, did you?)

Of course, we've still got nothing to answer the real question on everyone's mind: where the heck is iTMS Spratly Islands?

We don't usually like to close with a downer, but hey, sometimes it just seems appropriate, you know? If there's a death, for example, propriety dictates that you stick that after the yuks 'n' giggles out of respect for the deceased-- despite the fact that the mourners could probably use a laugh or two to take the edge off, while the deceased is presumably too busy being dead to care all that much about propriety in the first place. Whatever. We don't make the rules. Heck, we don't even follow 'em all that often.

This time, though, we just feel that the situation is serious enough to warrant a sober and respectful mention after the day's ha-has. Faithful viewer bo pointed out a Nashville Business Journal article which reveals some sales statistics that are downright startling-- or should be, anyway, especially if you're an AtAT veteran from way back when. Sticking to the convention of shoving all the ugly stuff in at the end, here's the good news first: Apple has a larger share of the education market than Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, and IBM. The bad news is that while Apple has the second-largest slice of that particular pie, Dell is scarfing down the biggest. And the worst news of all is that Dell's slice is over three times the size of Apple's.

No kidding! Reportedly Dell has a whopping 44% of the education market, while Apple holds a mere 14%. Longtime AtAT fans may recall the controversy and duelling press releases back in '99 (and, believe it or not, again in 2000) when Dell claimed it had toppled Apple from the number one spot while Apple, citing sales numbers from a different source, claimed that Dell had done no such thing. What a difference four or five years can make, hmmmm? Because these latest figures are so drastically different that no amount of fudging or "interpretation" is going to put Apple back in the lead.

And the reason that this counts as a sort of death is because Apple used to be the uncontested king of education sales; no one else came close. About ten years ago you could add up the sales from all the Wintel manufacturers, and they still wouldn't equal Apple's share. Now, though, with Macs trailing Dells 3 to 1 (and trailing Wintels 7 to 1), we have to assume that Apple's goals have changed. Not that the company would ever give up and exit the education market completely, of course; second place is nothing to sneeze at. But we doubt that Apple's education bigwigs are sitting around figuring out ways to reclaim the top spot, just like Apple as a whole isn't strategizing on how it can take the market share lead from Windows. And if retaking first place in education is no longer a concrete goal for Apple, then yes, that's a death of sorts, and worth mourning.

So a moment of silence, if you will, for Apple's reign as the Education King; it may have ended four or five years ago, but it's only now that the situation really feels permanent. If we're wrong, and ten years from now Apple's back to the 61% share it enjoyed in 1993, well, we'll feel kinda dumb for having worn these black armbands, but we're always up for a good rebirth story.