Ah, the Product Shipping Delay: plot device #11, and an old standby used almost as often in Apple-flavored melodramas as sitcoms rely on Feckless Landlord Overhears Part of a Tenant's Conversation Which Leads To a Great Misunderstanding About Carnal Activity, or They Almost Make It Off the Island But Dimwit In Stupid Hat Ruins Everything At the Last Minute. If you're not a total newbie to the Apple world, you're all too aware that product demand often far outstrips supply, leading to statistically high incidences of frustration, emotional trauma, and ritual suicide among Apple's existing and potential customers. But how often is it actually Apple's fault?

No, seriously, think about it for a minute: Apple's biggest product delays of the past twelve months have all been attributed to shortages of third-party components. And there have been a lot of delays; consider how long it took for Apple to get the original Power Mac G5 out the door in any real volume following its announcement last summer. When that happened, we figured it was no big whoop; after all, it was a brand new chip and a whole new Mac architecture, and some delays were bound to creep in. Little did we know it would get to be a habit. The Xserve didn't go G5 for months and months, and once it did, it suffered a formal monthlong shipping delay. Meanwhile, the speed-bumped incarnation of the Power Mac was expected months before it finally surfaced, and dual-2.5 GHz units didn't ship for months more, as long-suffering preorderers received emailed ship-date "reassignments" again and again. And guess what? It was all IBM's fault. Yup, Big Blue couldn't squeeze out the silicon, so Apple and its customers got smacked down on G5-based products again and again.

Meanwhile, what about the Apple delay that the public really noticed? iPod minis have traditionally been about as easy to grab hold of as a leprechaun on meth and dipped in Crisco; sure, demand for the lil' suckers has been thirty shades of crazy, but it's clear that Apple hadn't been cranking out nearly as many as it needed to in order to keep the riots and looting to a reasonable level. You may recall that Apple even had to postpone the product's international introduction by three whole months, which led to a couple of border skirmishes and at least one formal declaration of war. True, nothing ever came of it because the countries involved finally went with the full-size iPod instead, but still. And was any of this Apple's fault? Nope; Hitachi couldn't crank out teensy hard drives fast enough, so Apple got stuck with a zillion driveless minis just sitting around twiddling their Click Wheels.

Well, chalk up one more delay: remember the gargantuan 30-inch Apple Cinema Display that Apple unveiled recently? Maybe not, because "recently" is relative; it's now been over two months since the product was introduced, and despite Apple's initial claim that it'd be "available in August," we're now a week into September and it's still a no-show. And guess whose fault it is this time? That's right, "not Apple's." According to The Inquirer, Apple has the displays piled up on the loading dock and is "raring to go," but NVIDIA just hasn't been able to produce enough-- or, in fact, any-- of those surfboard-sized GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics cards needed to drive them. So much for Apple's promise that "this card will be available for Mac only in August 2004."

So if all of Apple's product delays are due to third-party component shortages, the solution seems obvious: Apple should build all of its components itself. C'mon, how hard can it be? Keep cranking on the software development and hardware design, but occasionally whip up a few hard drives, slap together a graphics card or two, and cook up a batch of 90-nanometer G5s whenever no one's using the microwave in the employee lounge. Piece o' cake.

Then again, IBM is reportedly this close to getting G5 yields up to scratch, Hitachi is upping its drive production something fierce (minis are already a lot more findable, and DigiTimes reports that Apple has just signed up a second mini manufacturer in anticipation of the increased supply of drives), and Mac OS Rumors hints that now that NVIDIA's dropped the ball, ATI may be picking it up and running with it, with its own 30-incher-compatible DDL card coming to the Apple Store "as soon as October." So we suppose it'll all work out in the end.

If it doesn't, we blame Motorola.

Not enough angst for you out there? Looking for something more to worry about? We know how you feel; sure, things aren't perfect with Apple right now, but the company really does seem to be in a good place, what with the iPod still stomping the competition into a watery paste and the iMac G5 poised to take back some long-awaited market share. Heck, the company's stock price is even hovering near a four-year high. Meanwhile, you've fretted all you can fret about G5 availability, the effects of Microsoft's music store, Uncle Steve's cancer scare, and whether cranking your iPod all the way up might collapse one of your lungs; you need something new to dwell upon. Well, how about the imminent failure of Apple's retail initiative?

Yeah, we know it's a bit out of style; it was much more fashionable to worry about Apple's retail prospects before it opened all these stores, turned a profit, and proved the naysayers wrong. But if you want to revisit an anxiety from the past, feel free to seize upon the thinnest of rumors currently being kicked around by ifo Apple Store: "Word is circulating in suburban Chicago that all three area stores-- Oakbrook, Woodfield, and Old Orchard-- will be closed, leaving only North Michigan Avenue as the official Apple outlet." While ifoAS can't confirm the rumor and "hopes the news is wrong," it does note that "two independent sources have reported this situation," so there might conceivably be something to it.

Needless to say, if the reports are true, then we can all kiss that four-year-high stock price so long, because we're willing to bet that any admission on Apple's part that its retail operation isn't 100% effective will lead to stock downgrades, panicked selling, and a sudden chorus of "I Told You So" from the anti-Mac pundits who sleep with one eye open in hopes of spotting a story like this. Trust us: even the closing of a single store would be like blood in the water with the sharks just waiting to pounce. (Of course sharks pounce. We've seen it. They're just like big cats, only underwater and with less fur.)

The thing is, though, if you really want to take this rumor seriously, you're going to have to expend some serious effort. Apple generally doesn't break out the performance of individual stores to the press, so first you'll have to convince yourself that the three "doomed" stores in question are doing so poorly out there in the affluent Chicago suburbs that Apple would consider the PR black eye of closing them preferable to absorbing their losses into the Big Picture. Then you'll have to ignore reports from staff at the Woodfield store itself that they're doing great and that any reports of an imminent closure are false. Last but not least, you'll need to reconcile the idea of Apple closing three of four stores in a major Mac-friendly market (there's a reason Woodfield was one of the first stores to open) with the fact that it's currently opening new stores like gangbusters, including one in Pittsburgh last weekend and at least ten more in a single day later this month.

But if you really want to worry about it, we're sure you'll find a way. Good luck!

Man, what is it about seafaring military organizations that gives them a blind spot as far as the dangers of Windows are concerned? (Okay, fine, roughly nine-tenths of the tech-using entities on the planet have a blind spot of that sort, but most of them aren't in charge of handling weapons of mass destruction.) You may recall way back in the mists of time when we expressed a tricky combination of glee and horror-- we call it "glorror"-- at the original Smart Ship incident, in which the systems running a U.S. Navy warship failed utterly, and the craft lolled dead in the water for three hours before it eventually had to be towed back to base.

The system that failed? Windows, of course, which choked like a kitten swallowing a bowling ball when it encountered something as mundane as a divide-by-zero error. And yet despite the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center stating that if the ship had been running UNIX (you know, like that stuff in Mac OS X) the shutdown would never have occurred, the Navy still committed to use a "futuristic version" of Windows in "next-generation aircraft carriers" two years later. We can only surmise that either bribery or some sort of Memento-style inability to convert experience into memory is at play, here. Maybe both.

Well, guess what? Apparently it's not just our navy making boneheaded decisions like this. Faithful viewer Daniel Blanken tipped us off to an article in The Register which reports that despite having been warned in a "50 page dossier detailing the unsuitability of Windows as a foundation for a naval command system" and reminded that Windows is "proprietary technology owned by a foreign corporation," has "many and continuing security flaws," and "is not even warranted by Microsoft itself for safety-related use," the Royal Navy (you know, in the UK) has decided to use Windows instead of the open source Linux as "a foundation for future combat systems" and use it to run, among other things, their attack submarines. That includes Vanguard-class boats which just happen to tote "Trident thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles."

And get it straight, here: this is not merely a case of Windows being used near nuclear missiles, which is already a whole class of apocalyptic nightmare we could well do without. Windows won't just be steering the boats, here, kiddies; reportedly this decision "really is committing the Royal Navy to Windows-based command, control and combat management systems," meaning that Windows has its twitchy finger on the button. So whereas twenty years ago we worried about a nuclear strike by the Russians, now we worry about a nuclear strike by a General Protection Fault or a Blue Screen of Death (the latter of which takes on all sorts of fun new meanings). We've come a long way, baby.

By the way, the only reason we're assuming that this isn't all a massive plot by Bill Gates to gain control of the world's nukes via secret Windows backdoors (see "proprietary technology owned by a foreign corporation" above) is because the man's rich enough to buy his own. Trust us, if the man wanted to bomb you you'd already be vapor. Unless, of course, he used Windows to steer his missiles, in which case some guy roughly 300 miles to the west of you would be vapor. But you get the picture.