Oy vey... Only a few short months ago, it seemed like Apple had conquered its chronic supply and forecasting problems of the past. Remember last November, when Steve Jobs unveiled the brand-spanking-new Power Mac G3, and announces immediate availability both from traditional vendors and from the newly-christened Apple Store? What a concept-- availability immediately after introduction, and a supply capable of meeting demand! Apple even overtly declared a new policy of "announce it when it's ready to ship." (Alright, buddy, who are you, and what have you done with the real Apple?)

Unfortunately, that lofty goal seems to have petered out over time. The first hint came when Apple announced the Apple Studio Display a month or so before it became available for purchase. Then there was the Great PowerBook Famine of 1998, which still continues to this day; some customers are still waiting for the PowerBook G3's they ordered last May. Then came the troubling whispers that the paradigm-breaking iMac (announced more than three full months before its expected release date, by the way), despite Apple's manufacturing facilities going great guns churning out the little suckers at an alarming rate, may in fact not be available in sufficient quantity on August 15th to fulfill what is expected to be record-breaking demand.

So what's the latest rumor of Apple's slide ever further back into the mire of its old bad habits? Look no further than CNET for the answer. Rumors have been flying that there are delays in the case design holding up the production of the new pro-level Power Mac G3's, expected to surface in early September. That wouldn't necessarily be a big deal, except Apple's already discontinued and halted production of several configurations of its existing G3 Power Mac. And with price cuts on the way, demand is expected to increase in early August. That all means that there's a chance of Apple selling all of its "old" G3 systems before the new ones become available. Whoops! No Macs to sell. See, now that's the Apple we remember. Well, with one huge exception: the new Apple is avoiding huge inventory stockpiles like the plague, and in fact it's because of that effort that they may get stuck with a Mac drought until the new systems arrive. Hey, we can live with a short Mac drought if it means we won't have to see bloated inventory numbers over the next couple of quarters.

Don Crabb has put his most recent Apple pet peeve-- no six-slot G3 Macs available, none planned-- on the back burner, it seems, and has a new crusade to fight, as outlined in his latest MacCentral article. This time, the Crabb is miffed that Apple doesn't have an operating system that works well in a corporate environment. By that, he means that the Mac OS is not capable of booting off a server via the local network, which is indeed a nifty feature that would reduce the hair-greying rate of countless Mac system administrators the world over. The benefits of such a capability are obvious: imagine you're the sysadmin at a medium-sized company with 100 Macs. Now imagine that you have to upgrade the version of FileMaker Pro on every single one of those machines. Sure, you can buy software like NetOctopus to make such a task a whole lot easier, but wouldn't it be great just to upgrade the application an a single server and have all 100 users ready to rock with their own preferences and templates?

Similarly, say one machine spontaneously combusts. With a cluster of net-booting Macs in place, the poor user with the singed eyebrows can simply move to another desk, boot into their own login environment, and continue working exactly as if he/she were still seated at his/her own desk. And getting the fried system replaced can be done in record time; just kick the charred one off the desk and plug a new one into its place. No restoring from backup, no swapping hard disks, none of that nonsense because everything's still on the server, safe and sound.

Yes, there are software packages that let you set up a Mac cluster with similar functionality, but it's just not the same as having a true net-booting Mac. But Don might have missed the rumors floatng around the 'net that the iMac, Apple's cuddly new consumer toy, is in fact the long-fabled Mac NC, with a few tweaks thrown in to make it more palatable as a stand-alone consumer unit. That coincides nicely with the rumor that the iMac is in fact already physically capable of booting off a Rhapsody (whoops, we mean Mac OS X Server) box. Which means that the iMac coupled with Mac OS X Server may in fact be one seriously tempting business combination. All we need to do is wait and see if Apple announces a bMac: make it an iMac without the modem and perhaps with a slightly more "businesslike" color scheme (though we certainly hope not). Keep your fingers crossed.

There's a disturbing and inexplicable new trend sweeping the Mac world, similar to the CompUSA Ladder Syndrome of yore. We refer, of course, to the bizarre phenomenon of large stocking ladders mysteriously appearing in the middle of the Apple stores-within-stores at CompUSA's nationwide, blocking the demo machines and Mac software, in what appeared to be a deliberate and coordinated attempt to short-circuit sales of Mac merchandise. When we first heard about this syndrome, we assumed that the few isolated sightings were mere coincidence-- but then the mail started pouring in. Dozens of reports from all over the country, from faithful AtAT viewers who had visited their local CompUSA's only to find the mysterious ladder invading the Apple area, blocking the merchandise, lurking like some kind of alien surveillance pylon. And thus was a story "too strange to be true" proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, with still no satisfactory explanation in sight.

So what's the new story? This one involves a recent rash of improperly-packaged PowerBook G3's just rattling around loose in the cardboard box when they arrive in the homes and offices of excited buyers. Inside the box along with the Incredible Bouncing PowerBook are two end-pieces of styrofoam which apparently have popped off of the computer at some point in its trip from the plant. And again, when we first heard about this happening a couple of times, we thought it was a simple coincidence, but O'Grady's PowerPage nukes this theory by compiling a vast collection of email messages from PowerBook G3 buyers all over the place, who report the exact the same contents of their own boxes: one PowerBook kicking around loose, and two detached pieces of styrofoam. Even more disconcerting, perhaps, is the fact that in the vast majority of cases in which this happens, the PowerBook itself is fine-- testifying to the nigh-invulnerability of Apple's new laptop design, even if the division who designed the styrofoam packaging should be dragged screaming into the Cupertino sunlight and slapped around like the rubber ball at the end of the elastic on a paddle game. Or better yet, send them over to Microsoft-- that brand of "design flair" is apparently welcomed over there.

What makes this story particularly irksome is that the original PowerBook G3 Series packaging was nothing short of brilliant; an ingenius network of inflatable plastic tubes was wrapped around the sleek PowerBook chassis, buffering it from all sides with a cushion of pressurized air. Apple's engineers were even thinking different about packaging. The original method produced less waste and provided better protection than traditional styrofoam-- and a lot more protection than styrofoam that's just rattling around in the box with an unprotected PowerBook.