What's that you say? You're restless and vaguely dissatisfied with life because nothing much interesting is happening in the world of Apple these days? Hey, don't look at us-- we don't create the plot twists, we just milk 'em for every last droplet of sweet, sweet melodrama and then toss the dried-out husks onto the Plot Desiccated Corpse Pile we've got out back. If the joint just isn't jumping to your satisfaction, direct all complaints to those lazy do-nothings out in Cupertino. What, like they're soooo busy trying to get Tiger ready for a no-later-than-June release that they just don't have any time to spare for corporate espionage, assassination conspiracies, entertaining bouts of trauma-induced amnesia, or long-lost twins reappearing only to frame their siblings for murder? Sheesh, even stodgy ol' Hewlett-Packard found the time to kick its CEO to the curb today-- and any reality in which HP is cranking out more corporate melodrama than Apple is probably not one in which we'd like to spend any great length of time.

So it's a darn good thing that Apple has seen fit to bestow upon us the roller-coaster thrills of yet another incremental Mac OS X update: as noted by faithful viewer Tivor X-09137, Mac OS X 10.3.8 is available immediately, both in a reasonably svelte 27.7 MB "Delta Update," and a "Combo Update" that's an understandably more zaftig 103 MB in size. And if you're the type who thinks that a point-release OS update can't possibly deliver spine-tingling excitement beyond all mortal ken, this may just be the one that changes your mind. For example, if you happen to have one of the "certain" PowerBook G4s that's been suffering "an issue in which a 'flicker' could be seen when navigating DVD menus in DVD Player," guess what? 10.3.8 allegedly fixes that. We know, you're weak in the knees with the mind-blowing profundity of it all.

But wait, it gets even better: Mac OS X also "improves the performance of Blizzard World of Warcraft's 'Full Screen Glow' video feature," prevents fans in a Power Mac G5 from spinning "erratically at unexpected times, such as when SETI@home software is running," and improves Mail and Address Book performance when they make LDAP queries via a "Cisco DistributedDirector DNS server." So if you have a G5 on which you play World of Warcraft while running SETI in the background and it's plugged into one of those Cisco thingules, too, well, clearly 10.3.8 will provide so many incremental improvements, you may simply keel over and die from sheer bliss. Meanwhile, those of us cursed with a "'flat' finger" can rejoice, now that 10.3.8 "addresses 'jumping cursor' issues" caused by our freakish and ill-formed phalanges on a PowerBook trackpad. Apple's commitment to the differently-abled is truly inspiring, isn't it?

Believe it or not, 10.3.8 boasts even more improvements than that, but we'll leave it to you folks to discover just what else is lurking in that mysterious 27.7 MB download. (Hint: if you regularly plug your PowerBook into a widescreen TV to watch DVDs, you're going to be pleasantly surprised!) Suppose Apple will find the time to squeeze in a 10.3.9 update before Tiger ships sometime within the next few months? If they do, here's hoping we'll have our heart pills with us when it's released, because otherwise the excitement's just going to kill us...

And thus does a promising minor subplot drop down dead on the spot with its spindly little legs twitching gently in the breeze. Remember all those rumors flying around a couple of months ago claiming that Apple was wedging a teensy satellite radio receiver into the next-generation iPod? At first people figured that rumors of imminent XM Radio portability had to have been connected with an Apple music media event slated for the same day, but the iPod just went photo while XM unveiled that portable MyFi doohickey that clashes so badly with Elton John's outfit. So then there were whispers that Apple had instead inked a covert deal with SIRIUS to bring that company's satellite offerings to the iPod in an effort to leapfrog those piddly lil' FM receivers found in "competing" MP3 players-- but, of course, Macworld Expo came and went and SIRIUS was nowhere to be seen. So what's the deal?

Well, apparently the deal is that there is no deal-- at least, not if you can believe the CEO of SIRIUS himself. According to CNN/Money, Mel Karmazin admits that he's "talked recently with Apple Computer about adding satellite radio to its popular iPod music player," but won't say much else... except that Steve Jobs's "current thinking" is that the folks at Apple "don't need to put a satellite radio in their box"-- which is obviously a reasonable assessment at this point. After all, iPod uptake has been terrifyingly exponential in the past year or so, despite the device's lack of a radio tuner, satellite or otherwise; at the end of 2004 there were 2.5 times as many iPod owners as satellite radio subscribers, XM and SIRIUS combined. As it is, Apple can barely build iPods fast enough to sell them, so adding a feature like a satellite tuner hardly seems urgent right now.

Which is a bummer for SIRIUS, no doubt, since the underdog company might have struck a death blow to XM had it been able to make the rumors come true. As for where these rumors came from in the first place, when Karmazin says he's talked to Steve "recently," we don't know exactly how recently, but it couldn't have been all that long ago; the guy only snagged the SIRIUS CEOship in mid-November. But if he's at all worthy of his job, he probably tried to wangle an iPod deal right away, since such an arrangement would likely have smacked XM's MyFi clear across the room to whimper pitifully in a dark corner, and we wouldn't be at all surprised if the SIRIUSpod rumors started when someone at either company just happened to notice that Karmazin and Jobs were talking. Of course, the flip side to that possibility is that Karmazin heard the rumors and then decided to give Steve a call to see if life might imitate art. The whole situation has sort of an intriguing "chicken or egg" dynamic to it.

Not that any of it means squat, of course, since what we do know for sure is that SIRIUS doesn't get to ride the iPod bullet train to victory through the smoldering ruins of the XM Empire-- at least, not yet. But if the iPod's competitors ever start to gain some serious ground (hey, it could happen), there's always a chance that Apple's "current thinking" will shift slightly and Jobs and Karmazin will repeat their recent conversation, only with a slightly different outcome. In the meantime, iPod users will have to content themselves with hearing exactly the commercial-free music they want to hear (instead of something close), and SIRIUS will have to hope that it can gain on XM with its recent signing of Howard Stern. As far as ultimate weapons are concerned, he's no iPod, but you make do with what you've got.

So why haven't we mentioned IBM's newly-announced Cell processor yet, you ask? Good question. Well, actually, no-- it's sort of a crappy question, to be honest, since the obvious answer would be that we're perennially about four days behind the rest of the world when it comes to not-quite-so-current events, so finally raising the topic of the Cell chip today is actually right in line with what we laughingly refer to as our current "production schedule." But actually, there really is another reason we haven't brought it up yet: talk of processor design bores the freakin' pants off us.

Consequently, we decided to sit on the topic until such time as enough was known about this spiffy new chip to determine whether we'd finally have to break down and use terms like "element interface bus" and "copper interconnect"; after all, if the Cell is destined to find its way into the Power Mac G6, we'd probably have to bite the bullet in the interest of topicality. But we've got some great news! While the Cell (or part of it, anyway) may indeed be based on a PowerPC-like design, Ars Technica notes that while the Cell's PPC core "does have a VMX unit," it'll probably be "comparable to the Altivec unit of the first G4"-- meaning, about a zillion times slower than Apple needs right now. The Cell is a totally stripped-down chip, and as such, Apple would reportedly need to do a ton of optimization to make its code run well on the thing, so if such a leap happens at all, it's probably years down the line.

More to the point, though, the Mercury News reports that the first Cell chips "will have 10 times the processing power of comparable Intel chips," "can independently work on 10 different programs simultaneously," contain "the equivalent of nine processors," "will be able to process 256 gigaflops," and "might cost $70 or $80 to make"-- and "eventually the technology could pack the power of a supercomputer in a handheld device." (AtAT sources further note that the Cell can also cure all types of cancer, smells like home-baked brownies, and is manufactured entirely out of pixie dust and love.) Let's see, here... small, cheap, and blazingly fast enough to grind Intel's offerings into a fine powder-- nope, Apple won't be going anywhere near this puppy. We're saved!

Oh, sure, the editor of the Microprocessor Report says that Apple "could use the new chips in future Macintosh computers," but clearly he's unfamiliar with Apple's modus operandi; remember when the Mac stalled out at 500 MHz for something like thirty years while Motorola performed an exhaustive comparative anatomical study in hopes of learning how to tell the difference between human buttocks and an elbow? Heck, even the G5 isn't all it was cracked up to be-- we're still 17 percent shy of that 3 GHz we were promised by last summer, and as MacInTouch reveals, a 1.8 GHz iMac G5 with stock settings actually performs surprisingly close to a 1.2 GHz eMac in many ways. (By the way, if you've been holding out for a PowerBook G5, you may want to take a look at those benchmarks; we suspect you'd be waiting a long time for only marginally more performance. But that's just us.) So if Apple does use the Cell, you can expect all of those massive performance claims to evaporate practically overnight.

Meanwhile, we get to ignore the Cell for the time being-- but if you're really itching for the geekspeak we're so relieved not to have to fake right now, you definitely want to head over to Ars Technica and revel in their in-depth technical analysis. "The actual architecture of the Cell SPE is a dual-issue, statically scheduled SIMD processor with a large local storage (LS) area"... yeah, whatever-- we'll be over here with a copy of Fox in Socks.