How frustrating! We at AtAT had heard from a couple of shadowy sources that Apple was going to unveil a value-added reseller version of the Apple Store, in addition to the education one, at last Wednesday's big shindig. In real life, you see, we would love to be able to order custom-configured Powerbooks through our regular reseller instead of going through the Apple Store; but when the event ended on Wednesday, there was no hint of a VAR version of build-to-order. So what happened?

For days we were content to write off the original rumors as simply false, though Mac the Knife seems to think otherwise. According to everyone's favorite loose-lipped utensil, the covers were indeed supposed to be taken off the shiny new VAR Apple Store last week, but for some reason things didn't quite go as planned. Even the Knife isn't privy to what held up the announcement, but it all just illustrates how things often go wrong at the last possible minute.

One AtAT source now places the opening of the VAR Apple Store at or about May 23rd, though of course there's no way to be sure of these things. We're keeping our fingers crossed, though-- both for the sakes of the resellers, who could really benefit from the build-to-order phenomenon, and for our real-life selves who would really like to order those Powerbooks soon.

Color us slightly disappointed-- we misread the headline in this Wired article as "Apple gets set for new chief." We quickly loaded the article expecting to read about a formal announcement of a new Apple CEO, and instead, read about how Steve Jobs has hired a chef from his favorite restaurant to cook for Apple's in-house cafe. Not quite the same caliber of gossip, but hey, we make do with what we have.

The article is incredibly terse, but given that it describes Jobs as a "vegetarian fiend," we'll draw the conclusion that the chef hired away from the Il Fornaio restaurant in Palo Alto specializes in vegetarian cuisine. We don't know if this implies that the food in Caffe Mac will be exclusively vegetarian, but we wouldn't put such a move past Jobs-- though we'd certainly hope that he would respect the dietary choices of his employees. (As the AtAT staff shares the dietary choices of Mr. Jobs, we're quite envious of the Apple employees who will have the option of buying vegan food without leaving the building, but we acknowledge that we're squarely in the minority on this one.)

As for the Apple employees in the know describing the food as "bland," well, it's not clear from the report if they're referring to the current food, or the food coming from the new replacement chef. We'd assume it describes the existing food, as we're not sure how Apple employees would know what the chef's cooking is like if he hasn't actually started yet. But if the chef's cooking is indeed bland, the AtAT staff would like to extend an open invitation to Mr. Jobs to join us on a whirlwind multi-day tour of Boston's best-- and least bland-- vegan food, to see how it's done right. Perhaps we'd start with the fast-food Indian grub at the Burlington Mall, then move onto some yummy Ethiopian at Asmara in Central Square, then hit the all-you-can-eat brunch at the Country Life, and finish up with our personal favorite-- the hundreds of vegan Vietnamese and Chinese dishes at Buddha's Delight. Seriously, Steve, our treat. (Darn it, now we're hungry...)

And now for something completely different... While I was up late last night fighting a bout of insomnia, I was flipping through the channels when, lo and behold, the image of Steve Jobs appeared before my bleary eyes. C-SPAN was showing Steve's speech during some sort of broadcasters' meeting that took place at the end of March, where he discussed Pixar's upcoming feature film, "A Bug's Life," and talked about Pixar's plans for the future. (For those of you who are so focused on the Apple soap opera that you tune out the rest of the world, Pixar is Steve Jobs' animation company, best known for its blockbuster smash "Toy Story;" Pixar is also the primary reason that Steve is still only Apple's "interim" CEO instead of the permanent head honcho.)

Overall, it was an interesting presentation, and I was happy to hear Steve's encapsulation of the plot of "A Bug's Life," and even happier to see a clip from the upcoming film. I'm not sure it'll do as well as "Toy Story," but it certainly looks like it'll be a blast nonetheless. Apparently Pixar spends three hours rendering each frame of these movies. At 24 frames a second, and perhaps ninety minutes per movie, that adds up to about 44 years' worth of solid computing (broken up across multiple computers, obviously-- Steve presumably didn't start work on "Toy Story" in the early 50's). According to Steve, Pixar actually spends four years on each movie, though they're going to be releasing one movie a year. Interesting stuff.

Because Steve had, for the moment, completely defined himself solely as the head of Pixar, it was surprisingly easy to forget about his other little job as interim CEO of Apple. Occasionally during the Q&A session at the end of the presentation I was reminded of that fact, however, as several audience members asked questions about Apple that had nothing to do with Pixar. Steve held his ground, and made it clear that he wasn't there to talk about Apple. And in response to a question about whether Pixar would be using Apple computers for their "render farms," he stated in no uncertain terms that Pixar is hardware agnostic-- they'll use whatever gets the job done, which, for the moment, appears to be several thousand Sun processors. All in all, I was very impressed to see that Steve Jobs appears to be doing an admirable job of running both Apple and Pixar, and of keeping those two roles separate and distinct. Not an easy task, by any means-- we suspect the man sleeps even less than we do.