We love the smell of commerce in the morning! The official commencement of the annual carnage known as the holiday shopping season is now just a week away, and Apple is busy suiting up for battle. Faithful viewer Johnny Asbury reports that, according to MacCentral, General Steve's Special Retail Forces division plans to have no fewer than three more stores open come the morning of S-Day, November 23rd. Those openings haven't been publicly announced by Apple, who still lists the Valley Fair, Fashion Valley, and The Falls stores (in Santa Clara, San Diego, and Miami, respectively) as "Coming Soon," but MacNN's recon also turned up the November 23rd date; furthermore, it lists the Miami and San Diego openings as "confirmed" and the Santa Clara one as "likely."

Now, those of you planning to attend these next grand openings may face a circumstance completely absent from previous Apple store openings: when you gather at the malls at 6 AM, this time you may not be alone. You may well see some crazed non-Mac-fiend holiday shoppers lining up to hit the other, lesser stores, since it's common for retail establishments to kick off the shopping season with early bird sales the day after Thanksgiving. If you do encounter civilians armed with credit cards and eager to max them out on non-Apple goods and services, you might be tempted to steer them into the Apple store for the good of our beloved platform, the short-term economic outlook, and the taste quotient of the general public.

That's a noble strategy, to be sure, since getting eager-to-spend shoppers in front of Apple's wares may well cause them to incur some nice, healthy debt right there and then. However, we must stress the importance of avoiding the use of physical force to channel traffic into the Apple stores; do not bodily drag frightened shoppers in front of an iMac, as this tends to confuse them and suppress the spending reflex, and it may also attract the unwanted attention of mall security. Instead, we recommend guile and subterfuge as a more effective (and less actionable) course of action. Most U.S. consumers out at that early hour are likely to be sleep-deprived and still coming down off the turkey coma, so they're going to be easily fooled Tell shoppers that Apple's selling half-price Xboxes in the back, and count how many come out lugging an iMac instead. Heck, it's worth a shot.

Alternatively, of course, you can simply ignore the other shoppers and concentrate on maximizing your own accumulation of debt by purchasing tons of Apple gear for friends, family, and maybe even those blessed souls who work hard to entertain you day in and day out, year after year. On a completely unrelated note, we sure do think those Cinema Displays look pretty. Happy shopping!

Oooooo, we hate it when our hopes get built up by a juicy headline, only to be deflated by the content of the article itself. When faithful viewer Jeremy tipped us off to a Reuters story with the tantalizing title of "Motorola spins off chip unit," we instantly had visions of the PowerPC breaking free of its Motorolan chains and finally getting the room it needs to grow. Unfortunately, despite that tantalizing headline, it turns out that this article isn't about a spinoff of Motorola's overall semiconductor unit, but rather the creation of Motorola's new "Thoughtbeam" subsidiary, which is focusing entirely on licensing its gallium arsenide chipmaking technology. Man, we haven't been this disappointed since we rented Kramer vs. Kramer only to discover it was a moving depiction of a man fighting for custody of his son, and not a recent summer blockbuster featuring the wacky hijinks of cloned Seinfeld characters.

As we've mentioned in the past, Motorola's gallium arsenide breakthrough is a major coup that will lead to some seriously eye-melting chip speeds (35 to 40 times faster than the ones out now), but apparently it's not a technology that's really suited to processors like the PowerPC-- it's more for chips that go in mobile phones, DVD players, and stuff like that. So, unfortunately, the creation of Thoughtbeam isn't likely to affect Mac speeds in any direct way, at least not for the next couple of years. But on the plus side, at least we'll all have cell phones that run really, really fast. Pinch us, we're dreaming.

However, since Thoughtbeam is a wholly-owned subsidiary, that means Motorola stands to rake in some serious moolah if this whole Valium-Arsenio chip thingy catches on in the biz. Thoughtbeam's raison d'être is to "commercialize" the technology and then license it to other chipmakers who want in on the secret recipe. The company has already hacked out a deal with a British semiconductor firm called IQE, so that may bode well for Thoughtbeam-- and therefore for Motorola. Here's hoping that some of those licensing fees get funneled into Motorola's "Let's Ship A 1 GHz PowerPC Before The Olsen Twins Die Of Old Age" fund.

So, accepting the premise that what's good for Motorola is potentially good for PowerPC development, we wish Thoughtbeam the best of luck and mountains of success. We think it'll do well; nifty technology aside, everyone knows that it helps to have a leader with a kickin' name, and seeing as Thoughtbeam is headed up by a woman with the zesty appellation of "Padmasree Warrior," the company clearly has a head start on the road to victory.

Quick, what's the best way to score a Lifetime Achievement Award from PC Magazine for your contribution to the computer industry? Well, evidently your best bet is to crank out cheap and boring systems-as-commodities and avoid original product innovation like the plague, because as faithful viewer Bill Moore points out, that dubious honor has just been awarded to none other than Captain Beige himself, Michael Dell. (Gee, and when we loaded the page, we get a Dell banner ad at the top. Quelle surprise.)

Indeed, if you want to experience a serious Twilight Zone moment, just check out the AnchorDesk article that faithful viewer Keith Isley dug up, which sings the praises of Mike Dell's exceptional ability to create products as drab and boring as pocket lint. Yes, the author waxes rhapsodic about how boring computers are a "good thing" because business purchasers equate "cool" with "risk," so boring equals safety. We're not saying he's wrong, because the enterprise computer purchasers we've encountered, at least, would paint themselves beige if they thought it would make fewer people notice them. They can be a skittish lot, to be sure-- and Mike Dell is right there to sell them build-to-order boxes as aesthetically vacant as possible. He's truly the king of bland, and apparently that's the secret of his success.

In fact, when told that one of his company's new laptops was "snazzy enough to be a Mac," Mike reportedly "recoiled a bit and said something to the effect of, 'Well, I guess that's a compliment.'" Sure, it comes off as avoidance and petty jealousy, but we really think the poor guy meant it. After all, Dell's genius (or, perhaps, his sickness) consists of ripping off Apple innovations as quickly as possible and then repackaging them into the dullest guises imaginable, so you just have to assume that once the interview was over, Mr. Dell sent that "snazzy" laptop back down to the Anti-Design department with orders that it be desnazzified at least four full style points.

We're starting to think that the fruits of his psychosis come from a deep-seated need to take Apple's beautiful creations and recreate them as stylistic negatives, devoid of any aesthetic appeal whatsoever. (It just so happens that Big Business loves that sort of junk-- hence, Dell's accidental success.) Or we could be reading too much into it, and the guy's just a yutz with no sense of taste and a head for snapping together cheap components. But hey, we're just naturally charitable over here...