A belated Happy New Year to all our viewers out there, or at least to the ones still sticking around after our extended absence. (Yes, both of you!) We're finally back from our holiday jaunt through the cultural hotbed known as the American Midwest; in fact, we've been back since last Saturday, but unfortunately this particular trip was so rife with calamity (the previously-mentioned stomach flu, a four-hour flight delay, a fire-related hotel evacuation into the Chicago winter at 4:30 AM-- why, the fun never stops at the Play-Doh Fun Factory!) that we needed a few days to re-ensconce ourselves into the cozy confines of the AtAT compound, reel our heads back in from Holiday Limbo, and unpack all the loot that found its way into the possession of AtAT's youngest staff member. (Given that she's the only girl in the family younger than college age, said loot was copious, to say the least. We now own more pink fabric than most professional Barbie impersonators.)

But at last we seem to have achieved something vaguely resembling normalcy, or at least whatever passed for such before our foolhardy trek west. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of catching up to do plot-wise, because Apple-related stuff actually happened over the holidays, albeit largely in a rumor-only capacity. The important stuff, in case you missed it, involves-- what else?-- alleged insider info about the super-secret magic goodies that Uncle Steve plans to conjure forth Wonka-style during next week's heavily anticipated keynote address, amid the inevitable oooohs and aaaahs from the faithful pilgrims assembled before him. Surely you've all heard about all of this by now, but we feel we should mention it anyway, at the very least for continuity's sake, because otherwise we'll never get back on track.

So the big news, of course, was Think Secret's revelation last week that Apple is finally going to bite the bullet and ship a low-low-low-cost entry-entry-entry-level Mac sans integrated display. If the report is accurate (and as we've said before, Think Secret has a pretty solid track record on stuff like this), then Steve is gearing up to unveil a "sub-$500 Mac bomb" next week-- a system that, with a single 1.25 GHz G4, may not win any performance awards, but whose low cost may suck in scads of curious Wintellians so smitten with their iPods that they won't be able to resist dropping $499 on a "headless iMac" to see what happens when iPodian elegance and ease-of-use is applied to a desktop personal computer. True, these people will most likely plug their spiffy new Macs into whatever butt-ugly five-year-old phosphor-burned VGA monitors they happen to have sitting around in their basements (the horror... the horror...), but with luck they'll still absorb enough of the Mac experience to get them to spring for a Power Mac with a Cinema Display next time around.

Heck, some people might even skip the monitor altogether, since AppleInsider claims that the cheapMac will "easily plug into any display or television"-- ah, memories of the good ol' days, when only rich folks plugged their Apple ][s into an actual monitor; the rest of us jacked 'em right into the TV set alongside the Atari 2600. AI also corroborates several of Think Secret's listed cheapMac specs: a low-end G4, 256 MB of RAM, a basic graphics subsystem, and the same ports you'd expect to find on an iBook. And gee, between iLife and the various handy apps that ship with Mac OS X, that's really a whole lot of computer for $499. Especially if it ships with a productivity suite-- you know, like AppleWorks, only preferably one that won't make customers keel over in sheer horror of using software that was last meaningfully updated when big lizards roamed the earth.

Which brings us to the other major Bit o' Honey to dribble out during the holiday sleepiness last week: Think Secret's claim that in a week's time, AppleWorks will be officially replaced with iWork, a suite consisting of Keynote 2 for presentations, an app called "Pages" (which will be at least a word processor and possibly also a spreadsheet), and whatever else Apple sees fit to wedge in there-- hopefully stuff to replace the drawing/painting/database functions in AppleWorks, because as much as we'd love to see that suite replaced with something written since the Battle of Hastings, we'd hope any replacement would have more functionality, not less. But actually, you know what? Never mind. iWork could consist of nothing more than an Apple-rebranded version of SimStapler, and as long as it's newer than AppleWorks, it'll be welcome.

So anyway, that's what we missed while we were gallivanting around flatland yenching uncontrollably and negotiating the twitchy minefield known as Family-- and given that, according to CNET, Apple has just sued Think Secret (more on that tomorrow), we can probably rest assured that at least some of those specs are accurate. Now that we're kindasorta caught up on the major plot elements of the day, we can turn our attention to more current events without feeling like we skipped anything huge. So, uh, just pretend that we covered everything worth mentioning, okay? Because that would really help a lot.

Speaking of "more current events," we're pleased to note that Apple isn't trying to stuff all of its New Year product releases into one teensy lil' Stevenote, which would be a blatant violation of local fire codes. Instead, ever safety-conscious, the company has opted to trot out some of its less consumer-oriented new gear a week ahead of time, thus conserving valuable keynote space for the gazillion mass-market announcements it obviously has stacked up and ready to wow all of humanity come Tuesday. (Smokey no doubt approves.) And thus does the world come face-to-broad-flat-surface with (insert trumpet fanfare here) the new dual 2.3 GHz Xserve G5.

That's right, folks, it's not just for breakfast at college in Virginia anymore: according to faithful viewer Small Paul (and confirmed by Apple's press release), those custom-built dual 2.3 GHz Xserves currently powering Virginia Tech's "System X" supercomputer are now available for purchase by any shmoe with four grand in reasonably negotiable currency or credit. Yes, for the same $3,999 that only would have gotten you an Xserve with dual 2.0 GHz G5s just days ago, now you can get an extra 600 MHz of raw Xservin' power and a Combo drive instead of the previously-standard CD-ROM unit. The entry-level Xserve, incidentally, is still a single 2.0 GHz G5 config for $2,999-- except that now it comes with the Combo drive as standard equipment and twice the RAM (1 GB instead of 512 MB).

And is that all the tasty pre-Expo fun for the enterprise set? Nuh-uh, Maynard; another press release reveals that Xsan (Apple's 64-bit Fibre Channel-based Storage Area Network cluster file system for "scalable, high-speed access to centralized shared data for storage consolidation and workflow"-- well, duh) has finally shipped, and only a couple of weeks late. Oh, and what's this? There's something for the creative pros, too, because according to MacMinute, there have also been significant across-the-board price drops on Apple's entire line of LCD displays, which can save you at least a coupla hundred clams if you're hankering for a deskful of aluminumy LCD goodness. My, my, my... we're all pretty sure that the Stevenote wasn't yesterday, right?

Of course it wasn't, but that's still a lot of pro-oriented announcement action that Apple spewed forth a week before the big gig. Let's tally it all up: by our count, now Apple has reduced its Stevenote clutter by one speed-bumped rack-mount server, one buzzword-laden enterprise network file system thingy, and one set of Cinema Display price drops, all of which ought to make the local fire marshall breathe a bit easier.

All supremely dorky fire safety analogies aside, though, Apple choosing to trot out new Xserves a week before the Expo really does hint strongly at a slew of more consumer-focused announcements next week-- and in particular, consumer-focused Mac announcements. You might recall that last year's Stevenote yielded only a single new Mac: the Xserve G5, which was mentioned only briefly, since it's obviously more at home in a data center than in the living room and was only included as a token Mac hardware presence in an otherwise exclusively software-'n'-iPods presentation. Apparently this year, Apple has some other Mac stuff lined up at the starting gate. So, uh, you may want to grab a second drool-bucket. Just in case.

On the off chance that anyone from TiVo is tuning in, we have a question. It's now been two whole days since you released the first incarnation of your highly-anticipated TiVoToGo feature, which allows the transfer of recorded TV shows and movies from a TiVo box across a wired or wireless network to an authorized personal computer (allowing subscribers to catch up on the last four episodes of Veronica Mars while on the road with a laptop, for instance); so, uh, is the Mac version ready yet?

We swear that we're not making this up: we honestly and truly did remark to one another during last week's trek through the Midwest that it was too bad that TiVoToGo wasn't out yet, because if we could have loaded up one of our PowerBooks with several episodes of LazyTown, Max and Ruby, and Teletubbies, the trip may have been a lot less stressful for our toddler-in-tow. Now, though, we're actually glad that the feature was released two days after we got back, because we wouldn't have been able to use it anyway, since the current version isn't Mac-compatible, so we would've been even more annoyed. Boo, hiss, catcall, etc.

Don't get us wrong, folks; we're still huge TiVo fans, and quite frankly, if you forced us at gunpoint to give up either our Macs or our TiVos, we'd just tell you to go ahead and shoot, because now that we've tasted the glory of both technologies, life without either would be like spending the next half-century with red-hot needles under every fingernail. Or a mouth full of angry hornets. Or, dare we say it, Windows. We still unhesitatingly recommend TiVo to anyone who watches TV. We're just a little disappointed in how far the company has slipped in its Mac support, that's all.

See, way back when TiVo released its Home Media Option, which allows a TiVo unit to stream photos and music from any personal computer on the same local network, Mac support was built-in from Day 1. In fact, in many ways, HMO worked even better with Macs then it did with Wintels, since the Mac version was tightly integrated with iTunes and iPhoto (transparently supporting playlists and albums with zero effort for the user), whereas the Windows version just shared images and songs in designated folders. Oh, and it supported Rendezvous, too, so Macs running the HMO server ("TiVo Desktop," an elegant little System Preferences pane) just automagically showed up on TiVo's "Music and Photos" screen-- no messy IP addresses to enter with the remote control.

Over time, though, the Mac version of TiVo Desktop just stagnated. HMO never gained the ability to play AAC files, even after AAC became the default encoding format in iTunes; it was MP3 or nothing, and totally forget about playing iTunes Music Store purchases (at least, without burning them to CD-RW and re-encoding them as MP3, as we routinely do). And then faithful viewer David in San Diego broke the news to us that TiVo Desktop 2.0, required for TiVoToGo, is "Windows 2000, XP only," meaning that there's still no simple 'n' legit way to transfer TiVo-recorded content to a PowerBook for off-the-couch viewing.

According to the posted FAQ, "at this time TiVoToGo transfers are not available for Apple Macintosh computers. TiVo is working hard to enable TiVoToGo features available on TiVo Desktop for Mac. We are currently working on ways to enable playback on Apple Macintosh computers." We're trying not to get too excited, though, because "working on ways to enable playback" makes it sound like they're still at the kicking-around-ideas phase, so it could be ages before a Mac version is available. After all, they said they were "working with Apple on a solution to support the AAC file format" in HMO way back in May-- of 2003. And we've still got zilch on that front.

It's a pity, too, because TiVo really is the Mac of living-room-based personal video recording; compare it to most DVRs available through cable companies and you'll see a difference startlingly similar to that between Mac OS X and Windows... 1.0. The overlap between Mac fanatics and TiVo enthusiasts seems high, although that shouldn't be a surprise, since Mac users tend to appreciate an elegant interface, ease of use, trouble-free operation, and gobs of saved time. We've personally turned at least three dozen Mac fans into TiVoholics as well-- and we don't regret that in the slightest, because in our estimation, it's still the only sane way to watch TV. But given how much support TiVo gets from the Mac community, it rankles us a bit to see a great new feature debut only for Windows, especially since we're now paying the same monthly fee as Wintel users for less functionality. And sure, as Mac users, we're used to that kind of treatment-- just not from TiVo.

So here's hoping that the company remembers that its whole existence is predicated on rabid evangelism by its existing user base, and that we Mac users evangelize better than anyone else on the planet... provided that we're happy, of course. And what makes us happy? Price and feature parity in our goods and services. So c'mon, TiVo: don't forget the Mac geeks, okay?