Faithful viewer David Kingsbury pointed out the fact that President Clinton is spending this weekend at Steve Jobs' estate in Woodside, California, as mentioned in this UPI article. Now, most reasonable people would see nothing particularly noteworthy about President Clinton staying at Jobs' place for the weekend, as he winds his way down the fundraising trail. Thank heaven we're not reasonable people.

No, we're the ones who would much rather read a lot more into that seemingly harmless fact than "reasonable people" would consider savory. (And no, this has nothing to do with Clinton's alleged indiscretions with Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, or anyone else.) In fact, AtAT's sources report that Steve is secretly still actively searching for a permanent Apple CEO, though the official party line is that the search is on the "back burner." And just because the news services are claiming that Steve will not be joining the Clintons as they stay at his estate, that doesn't mean that he won't enter via the secret underground tunnels in order to keep his appointment with the commander-in-chief and family. See, Steve has decided that what Apple needs most these days is young blood. Very young blood.

Two words: Chelsea Clinton. You heard it here first. We expect the formal announcement of her CEO-ship won't come until she finishes up her freshman year at Stanford, but that still leaves plenty of time before she stars as the special guest at MacWorld Expo in July. The truth is out there.

Still more rumors about the alleged entry-level Mac are emanating from the high priest of osfuscation, Mac the Knife. Reportedly, the ADB bus and the serial ports are being left out on the upcoming low-cost motherboard, while the Universal Serial Bus (USB) replaces both of them. That could be a risky move, given the relative newness of USB and the dearth of USB peripherals, but it also might pay off by putting Apple ahead of the curve.

Most of you are probably aware that the now-legendary Windows 98 crash at Comdex occurred when Bill Gates tried to add a USB scanner to the demo PC. That indicates that Microsoft's USB support probably needs a bit of work; Apple could conceivably get in on the USB ground floor if they do things right. If we can assume that peripheral availability wouldn't be a problem, USB could solve the age-old "I don't have enough serial ports" conundrum, since USB is daisy-chainable like ADB. Still, if Apple is serious about completely replacing both ADB and serial ports with USB, folks like us with a significant investment in ADB and serial peripherals (Connectix Quickcams, CH Flightstick, Wacom ArtPad, LocalTalk adapters, etc.) may get screwed. Mind you, if Apple somehow comes up with a way to use existing ADB and serial devices via USB ports, the point is moot, but we're not convinced of the feasibility of such a move.

As for the chip in the new consumer machines, the Knife now claims that Apple will use the PPC 740, a cacheless variant of the 750 used in existing Powermac G3's. While the performance hit of using the 740 could be severe, it's worth noting that the upcoming low-end Main Street Powerbook uses a cacheless 233 MHz G3 processor, and still MacBenches over 400; in fact, it's almost as fast as our PowerTower Pro, which runs a 200 MHz 604e with 1 MB of L2 cache. If Apple can really produce a machine of at least that speed and keep the cost to consumers in the $500-$700 range (as has been reported), there may just be a market share revolution brewing.

It seems that we get a lot of mail from viewers wondering what's up with Rhapsody, Apple's next-generation operating system for servers and power users. Well, we're not following it as closely as we probably should be, primarily because none of us is a registered Apple developer, so we don't have access to the first developer release, which has been out for about six months now. In addition, the first developer release is primarily a technology build for programmers to use as a tool to begin porting their applications from the Mac OS; the Mac user interface and further amenities aren't due until the first customer release.

Still, it's nice to hear what's up as Rhapsody improves, especially since all indications are that, as early as next year, the Mac OS will be Rhapsody, with a friendlier interface and without the server tools. That's why we've been waiting to see what refinements make it into Rhapsody's second developer release, which is expected at the Worldwide Developer Conference in a week or so. Luckily, we don't have to wait, thanks to the MacNN RhapNet First Look at DR2. The ePenguin provides a fairly detailed report based on his quick sneak peek of DR2, and describes it as "rockin'."

Among the improvements in DR2 are: an improved, more Mac-like installer; vastly improved boot-up speed; an improved dual-boot architecture; an integrated "startup assistant," similar to what you see when you boot a Mac OS 8 volume for the first time; a slightly improved Blue Box compatibility environment; an enhanced user interface; improved overall speed; and implementations of Quicktime 3, Stickies, and better Java support. Zounds!