Hey, have you been following the saga of the build-to-order moratorium at the Apple Store? Last month a notice appeared there stating that there was an early December deadline by which to place custom-built orders, though Apple would continue to sell pre-built systems through the end of the year. Then the notice changed recently, saying that the Apple Store would also cease taking orders for even pre-built systems after December 20th. The store will apparently close on that day, and won't reopen for business until January 5th. So if you've got any orders you've been meaning to place, hop to it, or you'll have to wait until next year.

Now, as for why the Apple Store's closing up shop, it's not to give Steve's elves a well-deserved holiday rest. Far from it, in fact; according to Don Crabb, while the rest of us are polishing off the last of the cookies and standing in lines to return sweater vests, every elf within a twenty-mile radius of Cupertino will probably be clocking some serious overtime. See, it's not just the Apple Store that's coming offline-- Apple as a whole is pretty much shutting down for the last week of the year. They need to close up shop in order to switch over to a new, state-of-the-art order-tracking and manufacturing system-- not a trivial task for any company, let alone a multi-billion-dollar one. It may not be pretty, but apparently it's worth a little bit of lost business (and a whole lot of holiday elbow grease) to get Apple up and running on SAP's R3 software, which will make the whole operation more responsive and effective. (At least, that's what the brochure said.)

All pretty mundane, right? Except for an interesting little tidbit that just surfaced over at Mac OS Rumors: what if the Apple Store downtime (which is longer at both ends from the overall Apple downtime) is due to plans for changing the infrastructure of the online ordering system? Remember, the Apple Store is a pretty solid piece of work, and it's a great demonstration of what can be done with Apple's WebObjects architecture; the only downside was that it's run on Sun UltraSPARCs instead of Macs. But Mac OS X Server is reportedly ready to ship, so what if Apple's using the company downtime as an opportunity to rehost the Apple Store on honest-to-goodness PowerMac G3's running their brand spankin' new Unix-based server OS? After all, what a great way to demonstrate the power of Mac OS X Server-- and the Apple Store's due to reopen just in time for Macworld Expo. Coincidence?