Given our "oh yeah, we also still have to do that whole AtAT thing" broadcast schedule, you've no doubt already heard by now, but as faithful viewer foolsdragon first notified us mere minutes after the goal was reached, Apple sold its 100 millionth song in the wee hours of Monday morning. Please note that right after the giveaway was launched, on Friday, July 2nd at 2:24 AM EDT we guessed the 100 million mark was "probably no more than maybe ten days away." Note also that, according to Apple's winners list, the hundred millionth song was downloaded on Sunday, July 11th at 10:21 PM PDT-- which is Monday, July 12th at 1:21 AM EDT, meaning that we were only 57 minutes off.

Ooooooo. This is the part where you deduce that we have real powers, bow before our Astonishing Predictive Abilities™, and offer to pay us huge wads of cash for our lottery number picks (with no guarantee of accuracy explicit or implied).

Anyway, the giveaway is over, and instead of that big, friendly countdown/countup/whatever that we've gotten so used to seeing for the past week or so, Apple's home page now proudly proclaims that "100 million songs have been legally downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. A major milestone for online music." And for some reason, there's a suffusion of hot pink. (Celebratory hot pink, we assume.) While Apple had originally hoped to be here two and a half months ago, that was before Pepsi botched its yellow cap promotion, and the Euro iTMS took much longer to get off the ground than anyone had expected. Given those constraints, we figure Apple has plenty reason to be proud.

Speaking of Europe, though, does anyone else find it a bit suspicious that every single winner listed on Apple's site is from the U.S.? Not that we'd expect a 2:1 ratio of Germans, or anything, but given the reported download numbers we'd have thought there'd be at least one or two non-Yanks mixed in among the home team, but no. Then again, Apple only lists 23 winners right now out of 50, so maybe there's some weird legal reason why it can't post the names of non-U.S. winners or something. See? That's us; always willing to believe the best about somebody.

Meanwhile, none of the winners' names looks familiar, and no AtAT viewers have come forward to boast of their victory, so we have to assume you all failed as miserably as we did. Well, maybe not that miserably; faithful viewer Jonathan Claydon came the closest we've seen-- witness the timestamps on the downloads of his Guster album (in Central time). He missed the jackpot by mere seconds. And it's a shame on a number of levels, because not only would we like to have seen an AtAT viewer walk away with the Big Piñata, but we'd also much prefer for the 100 millionth song to have been Guster's "Homecoming King" instead of, as the Apple press release states, "Somersault (Dangermouse remix)" by Zero 7-- but that's just us rooting for the hometown heroes, so don't mind us.

Needless to say, the AtAT staff didn't win squat, but we aren't bitter or anything. This may sound like sour grapes, here, but we have to say, we're actually partly relieved that we didn't win the grand prize. While we'd never spit at a free PowerBook or turn up our noses at a new iPod (our original first-gen models look a lot bigger than they did two and a half years ago, for some reason, and being constrained to a thousandish songs in this day and age is starting to feel like three days in The Box without food or water), that gift certificate is problematic.

See, Mr. Britten is going to have to pay the taxes on the total cash value of this prize pack, which means he's probably going to have to shell out, what, maybe three grand on the $9,900 worth of free music he won? Sure, he's getting a great price, but more or less, he's basically being forced to spend $3,000 of his own money on music, and we doubt that's the sort of thing most people budget for. Besides, is anyone's musical taste both mainstream and eclectic enough to want 10,000 songs from the iTMS catalog?

Oh, all right, fine, we're jealous. Bite us.

Now, here's something we never thought we'd see: the newest national Apple Authorized Reseller is none other than... Office Depot. No, seriously, follow the link! We swear it's real! As the announcement says, "you can take advantage of one stop shopping for all your office supply needs and now all of your Apple technology needs in one convenient online location. It's that easy to shop and save at Office Depot!"

People, c'mon, stop giggling. We're serious.

Okay, fine, so it's a little strange thinking of Macs being sold at an office supply superstore, but really, isn't it a good thing? Note that the announcement says "online location," so it's not like they're going to be turning the floor-model G5s on their sides and stacking this week's half-price staplers on top of them or anything-- yet. Think Secret notes that an informant who leaked the Office Depot announcement before it went public also notes that Mac products "would indeed be available at the stores in the coming days," so apparently we will get to see shiny PowerBooks being sold alongside boxes of rubber bands and rolls of bubble wrap.

We're not knocking the Office Depot thing, mind you; we love the idea of Apple getting some more retail exposure, though we can't help but think that Apple has tried the third-party retail thing so many times before (Best Buy, Sears, Circuit City-- all multiple times, we believe, and none of them currently) that there's a reason why it eventually opened its own stores: no one else on the planet seems to know how to sell a Mac. Well, other than CompUSA, but even they need stores-within-stores and typically get help from Apple-badged sales reps.

iPods are another matter; toss 'em anywhere, they sell themselves. But Macs can't just be thrown in a corner and set fire to if anyone wants them to sell, and we're having a tough time imagining that Office Depot sales staff are going to prove much more competent than the reps at Best Buy et al. We're just concerned that we'll walk into an Office Depot in three months and flash back to the days when Sears used to use demo Performas as step-stools for the height-challenged personnel.

We'll just have to wait and see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, though, we have to admit that it is pretty cool seeing the sheer breadth of stuff that Office Depot is selling online. They aren't just pushing iMacs, folks-- they've got every Mac in the lineup, all the way up to the 3.5 TB Xserve RAID-- just $10,994.00 and in stock now! We'll take three... plus a hand soap dispenser, some artgum erasers, and an electric 3-hole punch.

Normally we'd sit on something like this all week and trot it out for Friday's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, but since not much of urgency is happening in the Mac world (and the fact that we can say that on the eve of Macworld Expo is so sad we think we just might cry) and this piggybacks right off of last week's installment, we just can't wait. Besides, it's either proof that our Astonishing Predictive Abilities™ are still in full force (even when we don't realize we're using them), or that PC pundit John Dvorak secretly tunes in and cribs column ideas from us. Either way, it's pretty cool.

As you could probably guess, we rarely much care what Dvorak is spouting at any given time, since he's one of the few rabid anti-Apple Mac-bashing pundits that-- despite occasional lapses-- didn't eventually fall sway to Uncle Steve's Reality Distortion Field, like Hiawatha Bray and David Coursey did. When Dvorak bothers to mention Apple at all, it's just to complain that the iBook is too girly or that computers would sell better if they still relied on command line interfaces and Apple hadn't introduced the world to the GUI with the Macintosh-- "the first 'un-fun' computer." (Don't worry, folks, just back away slowly and avoid eye contact until they up his dosage.)

But here's the thing, see... faithful viewer Dave Barnes tipped us off to a new Dvorak article at PC Magazine in which-- and try to keep an open mind about this one-- the man actually talks about something cool: "the concept of Microsoft possibly shutting down." Oh, sure, it's still crazy talk, but at least it's crazy talk with a glorious pipe dream behind it; Dvorak's take is that Microsoft has clearly accomplished just about everything Bill Gates could ever have set out to do, it can't possibly be much fun to run anymore, and it's not like Gates and Ballmer can even spend what money they've got now-- so if it's not fun anymore, "how about simply shuttering the company?"

He uses this scenario as a possible explanation for why, as we recently discussed, Microsoft-- with over $56 billion in cash, mind you-- is cutting employee benefits to save $80 million this year. By Dvorak's logic, the real reason behind Microsoft's stated goal of wide-ranging cost-cutting to save a billion dollars "has to be one of three things: Someone sees a rocky road ahead, they are even greedier than ever, or they are planning a shutdown." He proposes that Microsoft may be planning to hoard all the cash it can, drop its own stock price "with one or two dubious reports," use the cash to buy back all of its devalued shares, and close the company. "I think this is exactly what Microsoft should do," he says. And we agree, although probably not for exactly the same reasons.

No, we don't honestly believe for a second that Microsoft is seriously planning a controlled collapse, and for the most part, neither does Dvorak: "I realize that this whole notion is crazy on the surface." (Nice job, John; the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.) But it really is an interesting theory, and more to the point, it comes just two days after we said "now all we need is for someone to suggest that Microsoft 'shut itself down and give the money back to the shareholders.'" Whaddaya think? Spooky coincidence, precognitive ability, or is Dvorak a closet fan?