Anxious for Tiger? Well, don't fret-- it's so close you can practically smell it! No, seriously, take a nice, long whiff. It's like... like a quart container of leftover House Special Lo Mein that fell behind the fridge two nights ago.

Actually... wait here a minute.

[Insert "Girl From Ipanema" hold music here]

Okay, so it turns out that was a quart container of leftover House Special Lo Mein that fell behind the fridge two nights ago, but we can't reach it even with our Gopher Pick-Up and Reach Tool, so we're just going to wait a few months until it sprouts legs and walks out on its own. Mmmmm, funky. Regardless, though, the grapevine consensus seems to put Tiger's release well in advance of its June 30th deadline-- probably sometime in April, with Think Secret having reported the possibility of an official "It's Done" announcement coming as soon as this Friday (April Fools Day notwithstanding).

Our confidence in Apple throwing a "Release the Tiger!" media event this Friday is fading fast, however, since one would expect that Apple would want to invite, well, the media, and there's no word of any such shindig at MacMinute or CNET. Furthermore, AppleInsider reports that Apple has just seeded a new build of Tiger to developers, and while it's allegedly the first to be designated a "final candidate" build, there are still a couple of known glitches in there, and there's "no indication that Tiger build 8A425 will become gold master." So the odds of Apple wrapping up development in time to sweep a pack of journalists into Moscone for a Grand Unveiling before the week is up are, shall we say, a tad on the svelte side.

That said, if AppleInsider is right about the recently-released 8A425 seed officially being a final candidate build, then it certainly won't be much longer before we can finally waste all our time launching new Dashboard widgets just to watch the cool ripply effect. (Good thing, too-- we're just about bored with playing with Panther's Exposé window-dance and the Fast User Switching rotatey-cube thingy, and for a second there, we thought we might actually have to get productive or something. Talk about dodging a bullet.) After a few final candidate builds, one will eventually be declared gold master, at which point it'll be whisked off for super-ultra-crazy-fast duplication and Steve will regale the press with tales about how Tiger's imminent release will end world hunger, cure all known diseases, and patch things up between Brad and Jennifer.

So AppleInsider's latest estimate for when Tiger will actually be available on store shelves to bestow miracles upon the land is now "the third week in April," with the Apple Store likely accepting preorders a couple of weeks before. (Of course, you can already preorder copies at Amazon.com with a $35 rebate, as we've been pimping all week.) That's pretty good timing, what with tax day and all; if you're getting a refund, you can blow some of it on a copy of Tiger, and if you wind up having to write the government a check, instead, you can at least blow even more cash on a snazzy new operating system to help take the sting out of forking all your money over to the feds. Nothing soothes the soul like a little extra eye candy.

Ah, New York City; a teeming metropolis on the cutting edge of, well, just about everything. If you want to see what trends the rest of the world will be following six months from now, just go to New York and ask someone what they were doing three weeks ago, right? After all, it's the trendsettingest place on earth-- or so they'd have you believe. Startling new evidence reveals that NYC is not always at the forefront of style; trust us, we love New York as much as anybody, so we were shocked to discover that, rather than leading the pack trend-wise, the Big Apple is currently playing catch-up in a field that most people would consider to be one of the city's real fortes: urban crime.

Check it out: faithful viewer Justin Sevakis forwarded us an article from NY1 News which reports that there's been a "14 percent rise in subway felonies this year through mid-March" down there in the city, which, in and of itself, may well be a trendsetting increase in subterranean crime-- we don't know. What we do know, though, is that the reason why New York's subway crime is on the rise is because muggers are reportedly "increasingly targeting iPod owners" when scoping out marks to roll. And why not? If you see someone rocking out with white earbuds, you know he's carrying a small, expensive, and in-demand consumer electronic device that you can probably pawn for three figures easily (well, the iPod shuffle may throw that figure off slightly), and moreover, he won't hear you coming as you approach from behind while swinging a sock full of quarters. It's just good sense.

But longtime viewers will see where we're going with this. Way back in February of 2004, we told you about the latest trend in robbery to have emerged over in London: thugs zeroing in on oblivious music-lovers with white earbuds. Yes, newspapers reported that the muggers of London had clued into the wisdom of targeting iPod-owners well over a year before the trend has now become apparent in New York. Oh, sure, you might be able to make a case for NYC having put a fresh, new spin on London's original innovation by moving the iPod-swiping onto a subterranean public transit system, but that doesn't sound like enough to make it leading instead of following. Unless we hear about a new rash of iPod thefts on the London Underground six months down the line, this time it sure looks to us like New York has shown up late to the party while sporting last season's haircut.

It's possible that someone has alerted Mayor Bloomberg to this embarrassing faux pas, because the city appears to be taking steps to eliminating a style of crime that's "so last year": according to NY1, New York's Finest are cracking down on subway iPod theft by placing "'impact teams' of eight officers and a sergeant at stations where robberies are most common." If you yourself happen to ride the trains in NYC, though, you may want to lend them a hand: consider replacing your iPod's trademark white earbuds with a set of less iPod-specific 'phones. Like, say, a pair of $4000 Stax SR-007 Omega IIs; sure, they'll still get you jacked something fierce, but at least it won't be because you were listening to an iPod, and therefore you won't be contributing to your city's collective embarrassment. It's practically your civic duty.

You know that old sci-fi saw where there's an alien who's crash-landed on earth and he tells the locals he needs two gallons of an incredibly rare substance called "water" to power his ship, but all he has to pay for it is a hold full of worthless diamonds and gold? You catch our drift; it's the whole "value is relative and you may not know it" spiel. And of course similar stuff happens in real life all the time-- usually sans alien life forms, we assume, but you get tourists massively overtipping people because they can't do the exchange rates in their heads, mothers tossing out "ratty old comic books" worth thousands of dollars, that sort of thing. Case in point: someone showing up in a Mac users' forum and saying that he's got "a number of Apple prototypes in clear plastic cases" and "a prototype of a product which [has] never seen the light of day out of Apple," and then asking what it "might be worth to people who collect Apple stuff."

Because we strongly suspect that the correct answer is probably "a crapload." Yes, that's the technical term.

Check it out: faithful viewer ProcrasT8 tipped us off to the MacRumors forum thread in question, where this gentleman claims to own a clear Macintosh SE, a clear Mac LC, and a clear PowerBook Duo complete with a clear Duo Dock. There's even photos of the clear Duo 270 (with a regulation grey battery, keyboard, and trackball). Since none of these products ever shipped with a clear plastic case, either someone went to a lot of trouble to retrofit them with custom plastics, or the guy's telling the truth and these are genuine Apple prototypes. In which case, of course, several foaming-at-the-mouth Apple fans would gladly trade both kneecaps to own them.

But wait-- what about this alleged prototype of an unreleased product? Well, he's got photos of that, too, and it's apparently a tablet-based Mac that's more or less a Duo-- less in the sense that it utterly lacks the Duo's built-in keyboard, trackball, and hinging screen, and more because the fixed screen that sits where the keyboard and trackball would be is touch-sensitive and there's a stylus included for cursor control and improved Newton-based handwriting input. So there you go, Mac Tablet fanatics: Apple built one roughly a decade ago, but it never got past the prototype stage. Of course, at some point you can probably buy this fella's working prototype, though you might have to trade both your kneecaps and your right arm and tens of thousands of dollars to snag it.

Anyway, this isn't quite the same situation as the alien begging to trade diamonds for water, because the guy who owns all this stuff worked for Apple (which is how he wound up with it in the first place), so at least he knows it's worth something to collectors-- which is why we won't be surprised if it all shows up on eBay sometime soon and fetches ridiculous wads of cash. For those of you who don't have ridiculous wads of cash, well, think of it this way: at least you got to see some pretty pictures, you learned details of a scrapped Apple product that was years ahead of its time, and none of it cost you squat. Now that's a pretty good deal to any life form.