Well, we don't have any actual sales figures to go by, yet, but if anecdotal evidence holds any weight, Apple probably made a wise decision keeping its three Massachusetts retail stores open during all twenty-four hours of the state's first ever sales tax holiday. The Boston Globe quotes the CambridgeSide manager as saying that they "had a huge crowd at midnight, and people were buying throughout the night," and had the stores not absorbed some of the buying frenzy in the wee hours of the morning, they would likely have been throttled to death by crazed shoppers once regular store hours had rolled around. How do we know? Because we were there. And there, and there.

Yes, we did something a little bizarre. See, originally we just thought it would be cool to go Mac shopping at 3 AM, which is a convenience we probably won't get to experience very often. But as the day approached, we got to thinking about the staff who'd have to contend with throngs of sleep-deprived shoppers while fighting sleep deprivation themselves. And while we're up working at 3 AM just about every night, we're guessing that most of the Apple Store staff is usually tucked away safely in bed at that hour. Staying up all night is not an easy thing to do, especially if you're not used to it, and we figured their efforts would probably also go somewhat underappreciated by most of the shoppers. How, we wondered, could we ease the plight of these unseasoned graveyard shift compatriots?

The answer came to us in a flash: cookies. Fresh-baked, homemade cookies. For all three stores.

Okay, sure, in hindsight it was exactly the kind of harebrained scheme that typically arises because of sleep deprivation, but it seemed to make sense at the time. So, Friday afternoon we squeezed in a frantic ingredients run, Friday evening consisted of a frenzy of baking that resulted in four batches of our patented chocolate chip pancake cookies (oh, right, like we weren't going to bake a batch for us while we were at it), and once the clocks ticked over to 11:30 PM, we were ready to roll-- or, rather, Jack was ready to roll while Katie and Anya filled in on sleep detail. With three batches of cookies in the trunk of the AtATmobile, Jack's real evening started at the Apple Store CambridgeSide, at which he arrived right at midnight as the doors were opening for twenty-four hours of tax-free fun.

Surprise number one: for some reason, we figured that there'd be maybe three or four people working overnight, with perhaps five or six crazy late-night customers waiting to get in, tops. Nuh-uh. As the Globe hinted, there were enough people clustered around outside to qualify as a bona fide throng, and Apple was evidently smart enough to anticipate that, because there were at least a dozen blue-shirted staff members inside waiting to embrace the insanity. (We learned later that Apple had even flown in some temporary help from Pennsylvania.) Sadly, it seemed unlikely that our dozen cookies were going to go very far.

We'll spare you most of the details of what followed, but suffice it to say that, given the size of the crowd, those dozen-plus staff members were all working at 90 mph from the get-go and things didn't slow down until maybe 2 AM or so. Jack met up with AtAT buddy Nick, who had served AtAT from his own personal DSL line for a couple of weeks way back during our own D-S-HELL saga; he was in the market for a new eMac to replace an aging iMac Special Edition (which, with its G3 processor, wouldn't play GarageBand software instruments). We can paint a decent enough picture of the craziness just by mentioning that we spent about 45 minutes in line to pay for it. IDOKnowJack from the AtAT Forums got off slightly easier, since iPods were rung up at a second point of purchase in the back of the store where the line was moving a little more quickly.

At about twoish or so, having successfully delivered a woefully insufficient number of cookies into the hands of the CambridgeSide store staff, Jack headed back to the AtATmobile, onto Storrow drive, and through the Fenway out to Route 9 and the Chestnut Hill Mall. Once again, he was faced with far more activity than expected; even at 2:30 AM, the lines at the registers were stretched halfway through the store, and the activity didn't die down much until about 4 AM-- and people were still coming in. They were primarily students, it seemed, most of whom were probably coming from nearby Boston College; a few were drunk, and at least one was barefoot, but they all wanted Macs, or as one particular customer put it, "I need one of those laptops, the Power thing with the Super?" Anyone who can put up with that type of customer at 4 AM without grabbing a baseball bat is a saint. Jack dropped off Cookie Batch #2 (this time, rather more appropriate for the smaller store and staff count) and then headed out for the final stop of the night.

About a mile or two from Chestnut Hill, Route 9 connects right up with 128, which dumps you right at the Northshore Mall if you follow it north for about half an hour or so. With the Ghettobillies' Bootlegs album feeding a steady stream of wakefulness from a trusty first-generation iPod, Jack eventually reached the mall, found the single super-secret unlocked door sneakily hidden sideways next to Joe's American Bar & Grill, and waltzed into the Apple Store Northshore at 5 AM on the dot.

Now this was more what we had expected at all three stores as early as 1 AM: only three or four people on duty, zero customers, and even the mall security guard hanging out inside, watching Star Wars Episode II on the theater screen. According to the staff, things had been busy, but this far out in the 'burbs, apparently there were far fewer people willing to shop much past 3 AM or so. And so the final cookie delivery of the night was a mellow affair, spent quietly checking out iPod accessories and watching QuickTime movie trailers with the staff. At about 5:30 AM the first customer on the daylight side of the morning came in, an elderly gentleman who bought two 20 GB iPods and then went on his merry way. At 6 AM, Jack did the same. (The merry way part, not the iPods part. Unfortunately.)

We're guessing that Northshore's business probably picked up again with the breakfast crowd, and the other two stores probably experienced the same. We can't say for sure, though, because Jack was long gone by then. We also don't know if the cookies helped a bit, or were even eaten at all. All we do know is that all three stores moved a lot of Macs and iPods that night-- and that if it wasn't Jack's first time going to three malls in a single day, it was definitely his first time going to three malls in a single day before 5 AM.

We close on a semi-interesting side note: we'd never been in a single retail store-- Apple or otherwise-- that had ever had iPod minis in stock. And yet on this whirlwind tour of Apple's Massachusetts retail properties, all three stores had them on the shelves; Northshore had a handful, CambridgeSide had literally dozens (although pink ones had sold out), and Chestnut Hill only had three left (all green), but they were there and ready to buy. So apparently the era has finally come when, if you want to buy an iPod mini, you very well might be able to do so without spending three months on a waiting list or having to stake out the store's loading dock all week to commit something akin to armed robbery. Plan accordingly.

Oh, and Steve Jobs: if you want a batch of cookies, just ask. Yes, they're vegan, and yes, we'll FedEx 'em cross-country if you think they'll speed your recovery. And really, what problem can't be fixed by chocolate?

So, uh, speaking of Steve Jobs's recovery, how many registered Apple Expo attendees do you suppose are considering trying to get their Euros back? Because The Question None Had Dared to Ask has nonetheless been answered: no, Steve will not be delivering his scheduled keynote address in Paris come the 31st, at least according to a report at MacMinute first pointed out to us by faithful viewer Daniel Blanken. Instead, Steve Lite™ (also known as "T-Bone," "Clamps," "Bootsy," and "Phil Schiller") will be handling the gig while Steve soaks up the very last bit of his month off-duty. And nothing against ol' Phil, of course, because he's a real mensch and he's proven his chops at the whole keynote thing with his years of handling the duties at QuickTime Live, but some people just crave the Reality Distortion Field that only a bona fide Stevenote can provide.

But, of course, the concern surrounding Steve's no-show status at Apple Expo runs a lot deeper than people simply jonesing for another Steve fix. Indeed, this quiet announcement of Steve giving up a keynote address (and probably an important one, since the iMac G5 may well be on the agenda) has several viewers writing in expressing concern that if Steve can't even deliver a simple keynote one day before the month in which he's supposed to get back to work, maybe his recovery isn't going quite as well as we've all been led to believe. Or maybe he's taken a good, long look at his life, weighed his priorities, and decided that he needs to spend a lot more of his time with his family. Or, worst of all (and believe us when we say we hate even mentioning the remote possibility), maybe his illness has recurred to some degree and he needs further treatment. This is all some pretty scary stuff, on several levels, so we understand the angst crackling around out there.

Until we hear more, though, all we can do is remind you that Steve always said he'd be off until September, which, unless you do some fancy twiddling with the contours of the space-time continuum, August 31st is not. Indeed, Steve never even specified when in September he planned to return, so to expect him to jet ten or eleven hours to Paris less than a month after abdominal surgery and then get up on stage and be charming for an hour or two seems overly optimistic, if not a little bit cruel. (Post-surgery tissue can really hurt with the pressure changes in-flight; we speak from experience on this.) So unless we hear otherwise, we're just chalking this up to unfortunate timing and a guy who wants to take a well-deserved break to recover before he returns to take Apple to dizzying new heights of greatness.

That said, if you're of an even more optimistic bent, we should mention that it's not exactly carved in stone that Steve won't show up in Phil's place anyway. And we're not just saying that in a "hey, it could happen" sort of way; it has happened. AtAT fans who've been tuning in for a few years (say, six or seven) might recall that Steve initially bailed out of doing the 1998 Macworld Expo keynote in New York, and then showed up anyway. Granted, that last time Steve was still planning to appear alongside Phil live via satellite, and he was going to be away for the birth of his child and not because he'd had a tumor hacked out of his pancreas, so the circumstances aren't quite the same, but we're just saying that a precedent exists. And if the G5 iMac is going to debut onstage in Paris, as most people assume, what if Phil's "one more thing" were Steve live via iChat AV on an iMac G5's screen? Or even an iMac-bearing Steve himself?

We prefer to focus on the positive possibilities of this scenario, and Steve is a consummate showman; what better way to announce his full recovery to the world (and the stock market) than to show up for a keynote address on another continent looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed-- and at a conference at which his appearance had been canceled? Imagine the headlines... not to mention the stock price. Just don't count on it, okay?

So whaddaya think: is it proof of AtAT's spooky prescience when it comes to all things Apple, or just evidence that if you spout off a couple thousand words a day on the same general subject regardless of whether or not you have anything of substance to say, eventually you'll spew out something that sticks? We speak, of course, of our original mention of the concept of "Mood iMacs" from back in December of 1998, and Apple's much-discussed patent application (as detailed last week by The Mac Observer) describing an "active enclosure for computing device." Or maybe it wasn't even prescience, but a simple case of Apple taking our idea and running with it; after all, Apple's patent application only claims "priority to earlier applications dating back to May 14th, 1999," which is almost six months after we first floated the "Mood iMac" idea. Will we get royalty checks if this technology ever shows up in a shipping Apple product?

Oh, sorry-- we forgot to mention just what it is we're yammering about. See, Apple has filed to patent the concept of sticking arrays of red, green, and blue light-emitting diodes into a computing device housing and then lighting them in different combinations and intensities to produce just about any glowing color your little heart could desire. If you're experiencing a smidge of déjà vu, don't freak out; Apple has filed for a similar patent before, but this new one goes into a bit more detail, and even shows a diagram of what looks like a tabbed System Preferences panel that provides separate settings for "housing illumination," "keyboard illumination," "indicator illumination," etc. The diagram implies a setting whereby your iMac would be green when on and in use, and would pulse blue when it sleeps. It's not a far cry from being able to make it, say, flash red when you have new email or whatever.

There's a decent chance you've seen this sort of thing before-- say, in the USB Christmas Tree, which uses a triple R/G/B LED system to cycle through a whole bunch of colors when the transparent plastic tree is plugged into a USB port. We always regretted that said tree didn't allow the programming of its colors on its host computer, but Apple's Mood iMac would evidently change all that. And who says they'd just use the technology in iMacs? Because the thought of an iPod that could pulse different colors in time with the music it's playing (now that's a Visualizer!) has us reflexively reaching for our wallets as drool practically spurts from various ducts in our mouths.

Of course, the usual caveats about patented technology not necessarily ever making it into shipping products applies, but the iPod mini suggests that Apple is getting tired of the white 'n' grey thing and might be willing to let consumers get funky with a little color again. And while a color-changing Mac is a gimmick, it can be a useful gimmick-- in addition to the "flashing red means new mail" idea mentioned above, what about some shareware that changes your iMac's casing from a healthy green to yellow to orange to an urgent red as your health points get shot away in Unreal Tournament 2004? It's a whole lot more noticeable than a little bar readout on the screen while you're ducking rockets lobbed at your head.

And can you imagine the extra foot traffic that a color-shifting iMac in a window display would bring to the Apple retail stores? Sure, the anti-Apple pundits would write it off as a fad, but who cares? For the sheer excitement and media buzz that it'd bring to the Mac platform, we really hope that Apple does something with this technology, other than letting it sit in a patent application. Especially since we could really use those royalty checks.