Let's all face facts-- Apple's story is one of the most incredible series of blunders and bad decisions in business history. Until Steve Jobs retook the helm and started making some tough choices, the ship looked very likely to sink, which is why for a good solid two years or more, to the press there was no "Apple." Instead, there was only "troubled Apple," "beleaguered Apple," "struggling Apple," and the like. And the opinion of the press is one of the toughest things to turn around.

So while we at AtAT are as pleased as anyone about the great new products, the three consecutive street-beating profitable quarters, the slowly growing market share numbers, the projections of imminent year-over-year revenue growth, the nearly-tripled-since-December stock price, etc., we've got to think that Apple won't really have turned the corner until they get themselves a new set of adjectives in the press. When will we see reports of the "shiny new Apple?" Or the "triumphant Apple?" That's the real measure of present and near-term future success, no?

It's starting to turn around, though. For instance, take this recent Boston Globe article, which describes Apple as "once-troubled." That's a definite step in the right direction. We're guessing that the transformation will be complete when the press simply has no rational complaints left-- say, when Apple's revenues and market share really begin growing again. Here's hoping.

Sigh... the last holdout among the rumormongers who claimed that Apple was quietly working on six-slot G3 models has recanted. Mac the Knife, who continued to whisper about six-slot Macs as late as Friday, now reports that those rumors are incorrect and jumps on the "four slots, one very fast" bandwagon. Which means that it's incredibly unlikely that Apple's going to pull a six-slot machine out of its sleeve anytime soon.

Speculation varies wildly on the nature of the "high-speed" fourth slot, with most people claiming that it's simply a 64-bit PCI slot that will have sufficient speed and bandwidth to allow the connection of a PCI expansion chassis, for those pros who need more slots (and have the bank balances and desk space to accommodate such a beast). However, Mac OS Rumors has recently posed the intriguing possibility that the fourth slot is actually AGP, Intel's Advanced Graphics Port system that's all the rage on the Wintel side of the fence. And the Knife maintains that the fourth slot is actually meant to hold Apple's own personality cards, which add various and sundry capabilities not found soldered to the motherboard. Regardless, four slots ain't six (at least, not without embarking on a drinking binge of epic proportions or overinhaling fumes from common household cleansers).

Then again, Apple revealed the iMac back in May without so much as a blip on the radar screen. (You could almost hear the collective question on May 6th, as Apple-watchers the world over all simultaneously exclaimed, "What the hell is that?!") Is there still a chance, however small, that Apple will surprise us all again by whipping out a sparkling six-slot pro model with nary a warning? Those of you who believe in fairy-tale endings can keep the dream alive...

A bunch of you were wondering just what the heck we were talking about when we recently referred to the iMac as being faster than a Power Macintosh G3 266. Most just assumed we'd made a mistake, but we can assure you, it wasn't an error. While we haven't seen any formal benchmarks to prove the fact, we can say from personal experience that the pre-production iMacs at MacWorld Expo a couple of weeks ago did in fact feel faster than some of the other G3-based systems we've used.

At the time, we shook our heads and just assumed that, since we hadn't used that 266 MHz G3 minitower for a couple of months, we'd simply forgotten just how fast a G3 processor can be. But Mac OS Rumors also makes reference to this fact, explaining the performance discrepancy by stating that the iMac has no hardware ROM. As it turns out, the ROM in all existing Macs (including the current Power Mac G3's), which contains a portion of the Mac OS, is a relatively slow subsystem and acts as a performance bottleneck. We weren't aware that the iMac was a ROMless model, but if that's true, it certainly makes sense that it would outperform other Macs with faster chips because data wouldn't have to pass through a slow ROM. That's also why CHRP-based systems, like the never-released Motorola StarMax 6000, produced benchmark scores higher than anything Apple's released to date-- and did it almost a full year ago.

Now, assuming that all this is true, it's not surprising that Apple's quietly discontinued the lower-end 233 MHz Power Macintosh G3 to be replaced with faster models. And it's also not surprising that, while Apple's been comparing the speed of the iMac to the Wintels (which it simply crushes in certain applications), it hasn't been telling the Mac-using world that the little blue rocket is actually faster than its own more expensive G3's running faster processors. Presumably they don't want Mac buyers to stop buying while waiting for the iMac's release. Remember, the iMac is definitely not for everyone, but if you were concerned about performance, you shouldn't be. The thing absolutely blazes.