What a difference two years can make. Remember the end of 1997? Steve was nearing the end of his first ninety days as "interim" CEO, and while the newly-unveiled Apple Store, the long-awaited Power Mac G3 (in classy beige!), and the first "Think Different" commercials were giving Apple a fighting chance at survival, the red ink was still flowing and the stock price was in the toilet. These days, of course, Steve's the permanent iCEO, the products pouring out of Cupertino are world-class winners, Apple's profitable and growing, and AAPL is generally keeping its head well over 100. But two years can't change everything; the vice president still hasn't switched back to using a Mac.

Yes, it was way back in November of 1997 that we first discussed Al Gore's defection to the Windows camp. Back then he had just traded in his desktop Macs and his trusty PowerBook Duo for a Compaq and a couple of IBM ThinkPads. (Why didn't he trade his last cow for a handful of magic beans while he was at it?) Yes, even Al Gore couldn't hold onto his Macs at work-- even though he believed the Mac was a "superior format," he claimed he was forced to switch because of software availability problems. And now here we are in February of 2000, and according to an Associated Press article, Gore's still using Windows.

After dashing the hopes of the nineteen-year-old, Apple-logo-pin-wearing, spinal-muscular-atrophy-suffering college freshman who wanted to get Gore back on the Mac, the world's most wooden individual since Allan Jones in A Night At The Opera threw the kid a bone by asking, "You know, Apple seems to be coming back with the iMac, don't you think?" Well, gee, Mr. Gore, Apple sure may be "coming back" with that new-fangled iMac contraption, but we won't know until it's been on the market for at least a few months. We'll get back to you in, say, December of 1998, okay?

Poor guy... see what happens when you stop using Macs? You lose all sense of perspective. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Gore likes Macs but (apparently) needs to run some Windows-only software. So will someone at Apple ship him a frickin' PowerBook with VirtualPC already? After all, the guy only invented the Internet, for crying out Pete's sake-- it'd be a real marketing coup for Apple if he started using a Mac again. (You know, as a backup plan just in case that iMac turns out to be a flop.) Oh yeah, there's also that little matter of him perhaps becoming President some day. C'mon, folks, make him an AppleMaster before he's irretrievably assimilated into the Wintel world.