The mostly-positive iMac G5 reviews keep rolling in, but have you noticed that every review-- even the most gushing, drooling, fanboy-slobbering thumbs-up one imaginable-- always contains an obligatory criticism, presumably because the author doesn't want to lose credibility as an impartial evaluator? All too often these days, the "flaw" singled out is Stuff the Reviewer Thinks Apple Should Have Included But Didn't. For example, faithful viewer JoeS notes that an Associate Press review comes across as a largely favorable one, except that the reviewer can't stop complaining about how Apple makes you pay extra for Bluetooth, wireless input devices, an AirPort Extreme card, and more than 256 MB of RAM.

Meanwhile, good ol' Walt Mossberg, who frequently raves about new Apple's products like the company's just ended world hunger and discovered a cheap 'n' easy cure for idiocy, isn't immune to "They Shoulda Included x" syndrome either. His borderline messianic ode to the wonders of the iMac G5 in the Wall Street Journal can only criticize the fact that the units ship with-- all together, now-- 256 MB of RAM and don't include "a built-in reader for memory cards used in digital cameras, PDAs, and smart phones." Why do we get the feeling that either these gentlemen are flailing wildly just to complain about something, or they somehow misunderstand that the iMac is targeted at a mass-market audience on a semi-limited budget with a wide range of needs and computer expertise?

The RAM criticism we can at least understand, since we agree that 256 MB of RAM isn't enough for us or, most likely, for any of you, either. But Apple may well have determined that it's "adequate" for the baseline user; the AP reviewer fully admits that the iMac with its stock 256 MB of RAM "handled simple tasks like surfing the Web and reading email" without so much as a hiccup. Well, guess what? For a substantial portion of potential iMac buyers, he's just described 100% of what they'll use the system for in the first place. Why drive them to Dell by bumping up the base price by including RAM they don't need? (And don't go arguing that 256 MB more RAM is cheap enough could have added it for free; sure, they could have. And analysts just love it when gross margins fall so they can downgrade the stock and freeze AAPL in carbonite.)

As for the notion of including Bluetooth, Airport, and even card readers standard in the base models, multiply the same argument by a kajillion. Why does Granny, who just wants to send and receive email, need a Memory Stick reader? And why should she pay for it if she doesn't need it? And AirPort; well, what if the buyer has no access point within range, doesn't need one, and most certainly doesn't want to buy one? He either winds up paying more money for a feature he doesn't need, or he goes and gives his money to Dell instead. Bluetooth? Heck, we here at AtAT are generally considered to be wired to the gills, and we don't have Bluetooth phones; granted, it's one of the few drawbacks of the Treo 600, but still, we don't have it and so we don't cotton to the idea of paying more for an iMac that has it included standard.

So by shipping a system with only as many fixin's as most people will need, Apple keeps the price down and lets everyone else pay extra to add in all the stuff they want. Come to think of it, though, these reviewers are right in a larger sense: the iMac G5 is missing certain crucial accessories that 99% of buyers are just going to go out and add right away anyway, so why didn't Apple save them the hassle and just include them in the base configuration? We speak, of course, of peripherals such as the USB Mini Desktop Aquarium. When was the last time you actually got anything done on your Mac without a USB-powered fake aquarium to help you along? Exactly. So it should come with the iMac. Heck, it should be built right in.

Ditto a USB microscope. It's simply ridiculous to think that Granny's going to buy an iMac for emailing the grandkids and not also want to use it to inspect magnified images of all her twenty dollar bills to weed out the counterfeits. And who buys a Mac and then doesn't use it to compare 50x blowups of their own moles from week to week, in order to detect any suspicious changes that may signal the presence of melanoma? It's like Apple hasn't done any market research at all.

What's worse, the iMac G5 doesn't even ship with a USB Beverage Warmer. You can't tell us that at least as many people who need more than 256 MB of RAM don't need some way to keep their beverages steamy while they sift through their 700 spam messages or frag heavily-armed buxom women in platemail bikinis or whatever. You think computing with 256 MB of RAM is tough? Try doing it with a tepid mug of Postum.

Last but not least, this thing can't even turn lead into gold. What's up with that?

Still, it's one firecracker of a machine, ain't it? We can totally see ourselves buying one. Well, at least if it came with a USB noodle strainer, maybe. Because since it doesn't, what on earth could anyone possibly use it for?

Attention, all viewers who are still bouncing gleefully on the edges of their seats in fierce anticipation of an imminent record-breaking settlement between Apple and the Beatles: get up off the pins and needles and sit on something a little more comfortable, because there's a smidge more evidence hinting that our original suspicions were correct. In other words, the Beatles' record label Apple Corps may not have a slam-dunk case against our buddies in Cupertino, and the prospect of Apple Computer writing an oversize novelty check for an unprecedented sum to make this little legal indiscretion disappear may not be nearly as inevitable as Variety's "unnamed lawyer source" once claimed.

See, faithful viewer mrmgraphics flicked us a CNET article which cites "music industry sources" as claiming that "recent rumors of an incipient settlement" are "unfounded" and "baseless." Why trust CNET's unnamed music industry sources over Variety's unnamed legal source, you ask? Well, mostly because they agree with us, so we figure they must be right. (Duh.) But there's also the fact that CNET reports that "legal experts separately question whether the settlement would really be among the largest non-class-action settlements" in history. What's more, CNET backs it up somewhat by quoting its own "legal source"-- as in, an actual lawyer with an actual name and some form of accountability for his public statements-- as saying, "I would take that proposition with a big grain of salt. I can't imagine it is going to be the biggest settlement we've ever heard of."

Okay, so it's not exactly a proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, but it bolsters our skepticism of this random legal joker spouting off anonymously to Variety. It also lends a little credence to our own interpretation of the terms of the original agreement between Apple and Apple, which is that, far from not having a leg to stand on, Steve et al have at least three legs and one of those walker doohickeys, along with a serious argument that the contract in no way prohibits them from using their trademark on the iPod or the iTunes Music Store. So Apple may well choose to let a judge decide, instead of pulling out the checkbook and cutting a deal.

Then again, cutting a deal may be just what Steve wants; the guy's reportedly a monster Beatles fan, and with Paul, Ringo, and the widows Lennon and Harrison finally starting to talk to people about putting the band's music up for digital distribution for the very first time, since they're already at the table with Apple about this trademark thing, why not form an exclusive Apple-Apple music alliance as a term of some huge payout? Steve's got Apple's $5 billion in cash just burning a hole in his pocket, after all, and signing the Beatles catalog as an iTMS exclusive would be a major coup.

Reportedly the Beatles want a virtual "store within a store" in whatever service they sign with, "where song downloads might share digital shelf space with DVDs, videos and interviews." The iTMS already does artist pages, special content sections (like the Disney catalog), music videos, and spoken word content; DVDs might be a minor challenge, but remember: the iTMS uses One-Click, so does the Apple Store, and they both identify users with the same Apple ID-- and in case you've forgotten, the Apple Store did sell overpriced movie DVDs for a brief period once upon a time. In other words, Apple can give the Beatles what they want, on the most popular music download service available. And since other services have balked at the Beatles' sticker price (up to $25 million, according to some), well, why shouldn't Apple blow a little cash on some really cool content?

Whoa, psychic much? Because maybe we are. Not in any traditional sense, apparently, since we've never scored any better than random guesswork in those "which card am I holding up?" tests ("Figure eight?"), and not only do we never know what people are going to say before they say it, half the time we don't even know what people said after they said it, a symptom we chalk up to extreme social ineptitude coupled with a fundamental loathing of all people and an attention span measurable in microns. But there's a chance-- just a chance-- that we have the uncanny ability to see glimpses of what web sites will post hours before the posting actually goes live. There's never a Theremin around when you need one.

See, in our last episode we made a throwaway comment about how "Apple and Hewlett-Packard will have moved a combined total of over three million iPods in the fourth calendar quarter," and then about seven hours later, AppleInsider posted a quick piece with the eerily synchronicitous title "Apple, HP plan to ship 1 million iPods a month." The months to which they referred were the ones beginning this October to kick off the upcoming holiday shopping season, which just happens to correspond to the fourth calendar quarter. And a million iPods a month for three months comes to... well, lookee here, Calculator says it's three million iPods! Don't that just beat all?

According to AI, these figures originate in a report which was released earlier this week by some outfit called the Susquehanna Financial Group, which is clearly bullish on iPod shipments, since Apple "only" sold 860,000 last quarter. Of course, last quarter didn't have a Christmas in it (at least, not that we noticed), and seasonal demand is clearly playing into Susquehanna's estimate. Plus, analysts apparently expect that when the dust settles after the end of the current quarter, which ends any day now, Apple will be able to report that it sold "anywhere from 900,000 to 1.4 million iPods," so if the company hits near the top of that range, Susquehanna's projection isn't much more than a twofold increase. Surely that's feasible given how rabid consumers get in the weeks leading up to Santa's sleigh ride.

But who cares about feasibility, anyway? The real news here is that we psychically channeled a web page over seven hours before it went live. Now, we know exactly what you're thinking (ooooo!): since this Susquehanna report presumably went public long before AppleInsider reported on its figures, there's a very good chance we stumbled past the estimate somewhere else on the 'net and the number wedged in our subconscious like a fish bone coated in pine tar, popping back out later on in a completely different context.

But that's patently ridiculous. How could we see something like that and not remember? We can tell you right here and now that not having gone to bed for the past three nights has had no effect whatsoever on our... um... whatchamacallit storage brain-part thingy. MEMORY. That's it.

Besides, we knew you were going to say that. Or we would have, if you'd planned to post it to a web page. So there.