We're through the looking glass, here, people! It's been mere days since Apple introduced (among other things) the Mac mini at Uncle Steve's keynote address, and we're more than a little spooked by the types of people who are praising it to the skies. Faithful viewer Jeff Labuz notes that, over at CBS MarketWatch, perennially clueless Apple-basher John Dvorak actually has good things to say about the Mac mini, voicing only a vague concern about heating issues in such a tiny enclosure. Overall, though, his estimation is as follows: "Once this unit gets into the field and passes the tests of the real world, I'll have no trouble recommending it as a machine of choice, especially to new users. And I haven't done that with an Apple product for years." Eeeeeeek!

But wait, it gets worse: faithful viewer Vaughn notes that even Paul Thurrott likes the Mac mini. Yes, folks, this is the very same Paul Thurrott of Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows, the guy who continuously claims to be a Mac user in a painfully transparent grab for the appearance of impartiality, but who poops on everything Apple ever does while also having his head so far up Bill Gates's digestive tract that he can inspect the man's molars for cavities. And over at one of his other sites, Paul Thurrott's Internet Nexus (yeesh, suppose he has a bumper sticker on his car that says "Paul Thurrott's Honda Civic" and wears t-shirts bearing the slogan "Paul Thurrott's Hanes Beefy-T"?), he actually refers to the Mac mini as "beautiful," "drool-worthy," and "a revolutionary product" before saying "I love Apple for making Mac mini... It's about time. The Mac is back, baby."

So, uh, whaddaya think? Brain trauma? Or alien pod?

We know we should be happy that longtime Mac-bashers are gushing all over the place because of the Mac mini, but we can't shake this cold, creeping dread that if these Microsoft apologists all like it, there must be something dreadfully wrong with it. Sure, the Mac mini is intended to appeal to seasoned Wintellians like Thurrott and Dvorak (that's its whole raison d'être, after all), but there's still something really creepy and unsettling about witnessing the phenomenon in action-- especially when, as faithful viewer Doug Cole points out, Bill Palmer is practically apoplectic about how bad an idea the Mac mini is. Bill's an Apple pundit whose opinions we actually value, and he really does raise lots of valid concerns about how not bundling a mouse and keyboard (and selling only displays whose prices start at twice the cost of a Mac mini itself) might leave lots of potential switchers feeling bait-and-switched, instead. So Dvorak and Thurrott like it, and Palmer hates it. What are we supposed to make of that?

Oh, but wait-- as faithful viewer Bill Brown points out, "analyst" Rob Enderle has officially gone on record likening the Mac mini to the IBM PC jr. and predicting that it'll fail just as miserably. Now, remember when he said Apple would switch to Intel processors by the end of 2003? Or that iTunes for Windows would fail because BuyMusic.com released its Windows-compatible music download store first? Or that the HP iPod would "outsell Apple's version relatively quickly" (when it currently accounts for only 7 percent of all iPods sold) and that the iMac G5 would flop because "consumers want the freedom to change desktop monitors" (when it was Apple's best-selling Mac last quarter)? In fact, we can't recall a single instance in which one of good ol' Rob's doom-and-gloom Apple-related predictions has ever come to pass, so his dire outlook for the Mac mini has calmed our concerns enormously. Thanks, Rob!

Meanwhile, what about Apple's other big hardware announcement this week? Well, to hear the competition tell it, the iPod shuffle is so insignificant a threat to their business, it's barely worth mentioning at all. Faithful viewer Don Laur dished us a MacCentral article in which every manufacturer of flash-based MP3 players quoted "claimed to be either excited or relieved" when Steve took the wraps off of Apple's first solid-state music player. So what, exactly, is so unthreatening? Its cutesy name? Its potentially dorky white lanyard? The fact that it looks suspiciously like a Bic lighter that someone dipped in Liquid Paper? What?

Well, a spokesperson for Rio claims to be "disappointed" that Apple shipped a "somewhat neutered product" and cites the lack of a screen as a major flaw, because "a blind user interface... isn't popular with consumers." Somebody at Creative Labs claims to be "very surprised that [Apple] would release a player with a limited feature set" instead of something "competitive or innovative." And someone at iRiver says the iPod shuffle is no threat because of its lack of advanced features like "an FM tuner and recorder that you can even schedule recordings to wake up, record something, and go back to sleep"-- which is just what everybody wants to do on their flash-based portable music player, we're sure.

Of course, they probably mentioned all this before they heard the news that faithful viewer Cheesehead Dave informed us was originally reported by iPodLounge: that the Apple Store San Francisco had sold out its entire stock of 20,000 iPod shuffles in a mere four hours. What this tells us is that 1) the iPod shuffle is actually pretty darn popular right out of the starting gate, and 2) those supersoldiers that Apple is breeding in preparation for the company's bloody bid for world domination in 2008 are apparently also handy retail workers, seeing as they'd have to have rung up 83 iPod shuffles per minute for that figure to be accurate.

As it turns out, of course, someone left out the sanity check and added an extra order of magnitude somewhere along the line; the corrected article now says that the SF store sold 2,000 iPod shuffles in four hours, or a far more reasonable one-every-sevenish-seconds-- which is, of course, still mighty impressive. Now, granted, those 2,000 shufflePods were sold in San Francisco during Macworld Expo, and its tough to think of a time and place that would produce greater demand. Still, though, that just doesn't sound like a sales rate that the competition can shrug off so easily-- especially since, as Steve pointed out during his keynote, the iPod mini has already cut the flash-based competition's collective share of the market in half, and if the iPod shuffle catches on, those guys are going to be hurting something fierce.

But the denial is in full force with these guys; Rio, for example, seems happy that its sales "grew 54 percent in 2004 over 2003"-- which sounds pretty good, until you remember that Apple's iPod sales grew by over ten times that factor during the same time period, so Rio's 54 percent growth is practically a death knell. But hey, there are worse ways to go than deluded, ignorant, and happy, right? And while they're busy ignoring the signs of their impending doom, we can all sit back and wait to see just how popular the iPod shuffle turns out to be in the weeks after its intro...

Another Expo has come and gone, and as we're sure you've noticed by now, new Mac portables were nowhere to be seen. Not that we're nuts enough to have been expecting a PowerBook G5 or anything crazy like that, of course, but the iBook and PowerBook lines are due for upgrades sooner rather than later, so we won't be the least bit surprised if one or both are speed-bumped some quiet Tuesday within the next few weeks. And the world will yawn and smile politely, because the new 'Books will still pack G4s in some form or other, which officially became old news about six nanoseconds after the Power Mac G5 was announced a year and a half ago and a zillion Mac users all asked with one voice, "yeah-- but when can we get one to go?"

Personally, we've resigned ourselves to the fact that we're unlikely ever to see a PowerBook G5 until pigs learn to fly, and the iBook G5 won't show up until said pigs are pulling precision synchronized barrel-rolls and loop-de-loops to the delight of cheering state fair attendees watching from far below. Honestly, when you hear that something's "a long way off" enough times, eventually your brain simply accepts that it's always going to be a long way off-- and yes, as far as portable G5s are concerned, our own grey matter reached that point sometime back in October. From our perspective, when Apple Veep o' Worldwide Sales 'n' Ops Tim Cook just recently described the act of wedging a G5 into a laptop as "the mother of all thermal challenges," that was just business as usual-- and when, asked whether that meant there might never be a PowerBook G5, he simply declined to comment any further, well, that wasn't much of a shock to us, either.

So what was a shock to us was when faithful viewer iain forwarded us a DigiTimes article which is primarily about the Taiwanese manufacturers tasked with cranking out Mac minis and iPod shuffles, but which mentions in passing that "Asustek will also start shipping iBook G5 notebooks to Apple in the second quarter of this year."

Say what, now?

Just a typo, you say? Well, we figured as much, too-- but the very following line about "shipments of the current iBook notebooks" in the last calendar quarter certainly seems to be drawing a distiction between the existing iBook G4 and this where-the-heck-did-THAT-come-from iBook G5. And it gets weirder; if the "G5" thing was a typo, it's a darn persistent one, because a graph accompanying the article lists Asustek as the manufacturer of the "iBook/iBook G5" and reiterates that the iBook G5 is set "to start shipping in 2Q 2005"-- and also lists Quanta Computer as the maker of the "PowerBook G5," also with a delivery date of 2Q 2005. Clearly this is no simple typo.

Dare we believe that there's some insider info at work, here? Is it really and truly possible that Apple is preparing to move its entire portable lineup to some form of G5 as early as April? After all, that sounds really soon to us, but it's nearly two full years after the G5 first appeared, so it's not that crazy an idea, right? Heck, faithful viewer James Muir even sent us a TechNewsWorld article which reports that an independent analysis of the G5 processor by the technical services company Chipworks Inc. concludes that the G5 "allows 'significant cost and power reductions'" and its PowerTune power scaling technology "allows operation as low as 15 W." Surely that's plenty low enough to cram into a laptop, right?

But we're not going to get our hopes up. Historically, the accuracy of reports from these Taiwanese manufacturer sources has been spotty at best, and seeing as the chart in that article appears to claim that Apple shipped over ten million iPods in 2004 (it didn't; there have been 10 million iPods shipped since it debuted in 2001, about 8.2 million of which shipped last year), we can't exactly see DigiTimes as a Shining Beacon of Truth™. But if you're a road warrior with a need for speed, DigiTimes has handed you a nice little thread of hope to cling to, especially after Tim Cook did his best to plunge you into a pit of despair. Whether or not you want to grab hold of it is up to you; personally, we'll wait for Piggy Aerobatics.